Wanted: Blue-Collar Workers
Across the heartland, even in high-unemployment areas, one hears the same concern: a shortage of skilled workers capable of running increasingly sophisticated, globally competitive factories
The shortage of industrial skills points to a wide gap between the American education system and the demands of the world economy. For decades, Americans have been told that the future lies in high-end services, such as law, and “creative” professions, such as software-writing and systems design. This has led many pundits to think that the only real way to improve opportunities for the country’s middle class is to increase its access to higher education.
That attitude is a relic of the post–World War II era, a time when a college education almost guaranteed you a good job. These days, the returns on higher education, particularly on higher education gained outside the elite schools, are declining, as they have been for about a decade. Earnings for holders of four-year degrees have actually dropped over the past decade, according to the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, which also predicts that the pattern will persist for the foreseeable future. In 2008, more than one-third of college graduates worked at occupations such as waiting tables and manning cash registers, traditionally held by non–college graduates.
The reason for the low rewards is that many of the skills learned in college are now in oversupply. Through 2016, EMSI estimates, the number of new graduates in the information field will be three times the number of job openings.
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Really interesting article. This has been a problem for a long time given that so many jobs have been shipped out of the US so the finance boys who have been given preference for the past 30 years could squeeze a few more bucks into their own pockets.
But it's good to see Industry also is finally getting the message: if you're not willing to provide the tax support for the schools, you're going to have to train the new workers yourself:
Funded by industry sources, the Houston Independent School District’s Academy for Petroleum Exploration and Production Technology trains working-class, mostly minority high school students in the skills they’ll need to perform high-wage industrial jobs. Tennessee—like Texas, a growth-oriented state—has developed 27 publicly funded “technical centers” that teach skills in just months and carry a far lower price tag than a conventional college does.
Two-year colleges will be crucial to the effort to train skilled workers. One of these schools, Central Ohio Technical College, has recently expanded by 70 welding students and 50 aspiring machinists per year. Many of the college’s certificate programs are designed and partly funded by companies, which figure that they’re making a wise investment. “You have a lot of people sitting in the city doing nothing. They did not succeed in college. But this way, they can find a way up,” says Kelly Wallace, who runs the college’s Career and Technology Education Center.
Such shorter educational alternatives will become ever more important as industrial workers retire. The average skilled worker in the industries supplying the gas boom is in his mid-fifties. “At our plant, you have lots of people with 20 to 30 years’ experience,” says Kirk, who has three high-skill openings that he can’t fill. “But there’s no apprenticeship program—no way to fill the future growth. We are simply running out of people.”
That last paragraph in the above quote raises another issue: we're going to probably need something like 35 million new immigrants just to keep the infrastructure going as the baby boom ages and retires, and those immigrants going to have be trained too. What's that -- the dummies in Washington are trying to restrict immigration?