Higher Education Is Destroying Our Future

According to a recent report from Georgetown University, there will be over 3 million jobs without qualified candidates in 2018. "Qualified" in this case means having a college degree in the appropriate field. I smell a rat.

Over 80% of last year's college graduates did not have a job when they graduated. That's a million unemployed recent college graduates for a single year. Granted the degrees they have are not in the growth areas, but they are nonetheless degree holders. So let's take a look at the fields that are projecting shortfalls in the next few years.

The highest shortfall is in the health care field. Nurses are and will continue to be in short supply. I have a problem with this. Once upon a time, there was a job called nurse's aide. These were the people who changed the sheets, helped people get out of bed, and brought you your bedpan if you couldn't get up. They even checked blood pressure. These were low paying jobs, and I speak from experience, as I worked in both a hospital and a nursing home when I was younger. I was still in high school, so having a degree in nursing was not an option. For the last decade at least, I have not seen a nurse's aide in a hospital, I have seen nurses doing those jobs. At an average current salary of over $47,000 to start. Is it any wonder we have the highest health care costs of any civilized nation when we pay almost $50,000 to a person who changes bedpans? I made minimum wage, which would be a little over $15,000 a year in today's wages. Where I worked we had six aides per nurse, so you could save over $350,000 per ward just by going back to the old system, and have 6 times the number of nurses available for actual nursing positions.  The surplus nurses could fill the technician slots that need to be filled, using an in house training program.

The next biggest shortfall is in education. I can understand why no one wants to teach anymore, given the fact that an elementary school teacher starts out at an average of under $30,000 a year. The average college graduate has about $23,000 in loans at graduation, which equates to about $64 a week in loan payments. After taxes, a first year teacher makes just over $400 a week, and most of the jobs available are in the metro areas, where the cost of living is higher. A waiter in a decent restaurant has more disposable income than a beginning teacher does, and better working conditions as well. No wonder so many teachers moonlight. Still, we can solve this problem with an older model as well, but we would have to break the teacher's unions nationwide to implement it. Stop requiring a four year degree for teachers. Teaching certificates used to be a two year program. In fact, teaching used to require less than that, in the 1800's. Many will scream that this is an oversimplification, which it is. But I would also like to point out that our educational system is not working currently, and we spend $10,792 per student currently, one of the highest costs per student in the world. I doubt my idea could do a worse job, and it could improve things. The government suffers from the paralysis of analysis, and won't act until they figure out all the ramifications of change, which could take decades. We can't wait that long. We need to do something different right away, not someday.

The third and final field I will examine is science and engineering. This problem is harder to solve, because these fields pay well, often already have streamlined educational programs, and don't appeal to most students. In order for our country to compete globally, we have to find a way to encourage more students to want to be geeks. Smart is not cool, and unless we find a way to make research more glam we will fail.

None of this addresses the root of the problem, which is the cost of higher education. Even a public four year school costs over $7000 a year for tuition and fees for in state residents. This does not include room and board, which averages about $8,000 per school year. High school graduates aged 18-24 have a median income of below $20,000 before taxes. College students are usually single, with no dependents and no other deductions, so the get taxed about 25%, leaving them less than the cost of college even if they work full time year round.

Tuition and fees have increased at a rate that is simply outrageous. I realize colleges do incur per student costs, but consider this : Since 1978 the cost of living has gone up roughly 250%, health care has gone up 600%, and tuition and fees have risen almost 1000%. The only major added benefit I could find is internet access, which wasn't available in 1978. How is this increase justified? When I graduated high school, a student was able to save enough working full time during the summer to afford tuition, and by working part time during the school year afford a cheap apartment. Now that model is no longer viable. In fact, it is becoming nearly impossible to merely survive on the wages an 18 - 24 year old earns.

Fortunately, our friendly college advisers have an answer for this. All a student has to do is take out loans, and have a family that is willing to contribute. In fact, until a student reaches the age of 24 they are considered to be their parent's dependent. The government expects the student's family to contribute, and even has a special program called the PLUS loan for parents. You read that right - a legal adult who is under the age of 24 must submit their parents' earnings in order to be considered for financial aid.

Not every parent can afford to send their child to college. This does not matter. Some families can, so all must submit their financial records. What about those who can afford to contribute but choose not to? Again, that does not matter. If you are under the age of 24 and want to go to college, what your parents earn will affect your financial aid package. How long will it be before some lawmaker decides that those who can afford to contribute are required to do so?

Let's not forget that once a student is in college, they have to fulfill their general education requirements. What does that mean? In my case, I took a bowling class in college. This means I was required to pay tuition and fees, in order to learn a skill I have used perhaps a half dozen times in thirty years. I also took a poetry class - not reading, but writing. I was in a technical curriculum, but learning how to write poetry was something I paid hard earned dollars for, in order to have a "well rounded" education. In my opinion, many, if not most, of the general education classes are designed with one goal in mind. Transfer as many dollars from the student to the college as possible. Because a degree is unobtainable without attending college, and every college has a number of these requirements that are unrelated to the actual field of study, students are forced to continue to pay.

Another area where students are forced to pay is textbooks. Hundreds of dollars per semester, in fact. These books are updated regularly, so often the book from the year before is obsolete, forcing a student to purchase the new book instead of a used book. I understand that as knowledge changes, books do become dated. I also know that math does not change radically annually, and yet math books are frequently changed. I'm sure academicians would have a logical explanation for this, but from the outside it looks like one more swindle pulled on a captive market. In this day and age many, if not most, students would benefit from ebooks which could be updated frequently and for very little cost. The college that uses that model would win my kudos, but I will not hold my breath as it would kill a cash cow so I don't expect to see it happen.

As costs rise, higher education becomes less accessible, but in order to earn a living wage it is becoming essential. Most college graduates will earn a million dollars more in their lifetimes than those who do not have degrees. I think that may be why there has not been a boycott of the education industry. Consumers would have demanded government intervention if gasoline cost $10 a gallon, yet have passively allowed education costs to reach a level that is comparable to paying just that. Who benefits from these higher costs? That is the big question. Perhaps it is the banks that underwrite the loans. Perhaps it is the government itself, as many colleges and universities are state run. Perhaps both of these, and someone else as well. I do not know. All I know for certain is that unless the trend reverses itself, the middle class will continue to shrink, the lower class will grow, and the upper class will hold an even higher percentage of this country's assets than it already does. So I guess higher education is not really destroying our future, just the future of the middle class.