Isn’t it great, Summer is finally here. School is out and everyone is heading for the beach. In spite of the season, I can’t help but think about all the new graduates.
How many young people you know graduated from college with huge debt? Do you believe what’s happening there?
At a time when society seems to be telling young people that they can’t make it in life without a college education, so many of those kids are leaving college with unbelievable debt and very questionable employment prospects. You have to wonder what kind of education they got if they were gullible enough to indebt themselves for life to pay for it.
My dad was a child of the depression so just going to college was still a privilege. After WWII, going to work was a high priority and getting a better education was desirable but not necessary. When my generation of baby boomers came along in the sixties, a college education was more attainable and employment opportunities seemed endless.
My dad always said that if we worked hard and saved our money we could go to college and be anything we wanted to be. I have two brothers and a sister so with a big family, he told us early on that he would help us go to college but he wouldn’t carry the biggest burden. Growing up, he was determined that I be prepared when college came so I worked from the time I was ten years old making money to pay for college. He made me save half of each “pay check”.
When I was a freshman at UW in the late sixties, going to college cost a lot less money and seemed to take less time. We were expected to complete our fifteen credits per quarter and graduate in four years. It seems to me that tuition at the University of Washington was about $450 per quarter in 1968. If you add in the books for another $100 per quarter, rent off campus was $80/month and then there’s food and other miscellaneous expenses, the number is still much less than a thousand per quarter.
I remember that I quit a union sawmill job that paid $2.895 per hour to go to school in the fall of 1968.
So here we are in the 21st Century and in-state tuition cost has gone up almost ten-fold to $4200 per quarter while housing costs have risen about 800% and food is ten times as much in some areas. I remember eating a lot of Chef Boyardi Spaghetti in a can. It cost a quarter a can at the Safeway on Brooklyn.
Looking back, college was a steal when I was a kid compared to the screwing kids take today.
Nostalgia is great, but if we’re trying to figure out how we drove off into the ditch, we have to peel back the onion a little.
I’m sure that before kids go to college today they sit down with their guidance counselors to talk about career paths with corresponding job prospects offering decent entry level pay and opportunities for advancement so when college is done there’s a logical next step.
If you told your counselor that you wanted to be a physical therapist, there was an educational track to get you there in four years. If you said you wanted to be an electrical engineer, a software engineer, a mechanical or aeronautical engineer, there were tracks for you too.
When I went to college in 1968, being there served two purposes; to get an education and to keep you from being drafted into the View Nam War. A lot of us knew we needed an education but we really didn’t know what we wanted to be so we didn’t declare a major at the start. That made the job of setting up a 4 year plan more difficult but it kept us out of the war.
At some point you have to look at education as a tool to get you to a better life. But the tool has to have a purpose. If you have a tool that doesn’t have a productive job to do, it’s not much of a tool. Generally speaking we go to college to prepare us to get a white collar job that can provide a comfortable living but there are some who go for the pleasure of learning without an economic component.
I appreciate the fact that a music major may provide a person with superior skills or knowledge of music, either performing or theory and the endless pleasure of playing an instrument, but there aren’t many jobs for musicians.
The fact that many businesses required all applicants to have a college education but not one related to the work they did suggested to students that a history degree might be useful in some capacity. Many liberal arts graduates became salesmen/people for the guys who got engineering or business degrees.
Currently we are cranking out thousands of college graduates per year who have undergraduate degrees in programs so obscure there is only one job they are qualified for and that is a volunteer at a homeless shelter.
I know that’s not altogether true, but this whole Wall Street protest controversy is driven by young people who paid exorbitant amounts of money for an education knowing full well there were no jobs when they were done. You don’t have to have a degree in rocket science to know better. The counter person at McDonalds or Burger King ends up being a college graduate feeling underappreciated and betrayed.
I only have so much sympathy for them.
I have been a lifelong learner. I take classes in subjects that interest me for the pleasure of knowing the material. I know going in that it’s not about a job. For others like me, we have no illusions about who is entitled and who is going to pay.
Nobody is entitled and we are going to pay. If I borrow the money so I don’t have to work while I am going to school, then that’s a bargain I have to deal with. It’s a choice I willingly make.
An education is an investment we make in ourselves. We are not entitled to a free college education. You can work for it early like I did and pay as you go or you can borrow the money and get stuck with the debt.
It’s a choice you get to make. But whatever choice you make, it’s yours.
No Loss for Words 
CHINA: Ally or Adversary?
by Steve DanaWatching the drama of Hong Kong unfolding, it makes you wonder how they got into that predicament. The agreement China made with the UK was for fifty years after which China would have full control over Hong Kong. We’re only twenty years into the agreement and China is already cheating. Makes you wonder if China can be trusted to fulfill any agreement they sign. The basic answer is that China will say what it needs to say to get what they want in the long term. If it requires that they cheat on an agreement, they don’t have a problem with that.
When China was allowed into the WTO it was with the understanding that they were good citizens. Over the past 25 years, China has revealed its true character (if you didn’t already know it, they are not).
Tienanmen Square was an indication of how China deals with a population objecting to the boot on their neck. A heavier boot on their neck. China of today is as brutal a dictatorship as it was during Mao’s years in control. They dress it up on the surface for Western sensibilities. They learned to make nice with western countries only for the purposes of exploiting the West with their ridiculously cheap labor. They learned from westerners how to go back to China to turn what they learned against their teachers.
China realized after Mao that being like North Korea wouldn’t serve them in the long term. The billion people in China are a resource that can be put to work for the benefit of the state, so China became a place for cheap labor.
Later, they learned that by giving the people the chance to be capitalist on a small scale, their productivity skyrocketed. Socio/Economic policy in China has evolved into a capitalistic dictatorship. The people can have their own businesses in partnership with the government. That opportunity gives the people at least a chance to improve their own standard of living. They can drive a Mercedes car but have no voice in their government or say in how other aspects of their lives are managed.
American manufacturers were led to believe that China would be a great partner because they had a billion people available to work and a government that greased the skids to facilitate production. Did any of the companies that dumped their American workforce ever look at the human rights conditions in China before they moved? Not likely! In the effort to produce cheap crap cheaper, American manufacturers screwed American workers while forming partnerships with the devil to satisfy corporate demand for better margins. The American government allowed strategic industries to collapse in the US in favor of suppliers in China. Did anyone wonder if there was a confrontation with China, would they continue to supply steel or other strategic goods to a rival?
America is at a crossroads in our relationship with China.
Our challenge is to decide whether doing business with a country that abuses the population like China does, that wages war against trading partners with their cyber tactics, that dumps surpluses of manufactured goods on the market to weaken competitors, that regularly steals intellectual property from trading partners, that manipulates their currency to create a competitive advantage, or that charges tariffs for goods coming into China to prevent competition for Chinese companies? Do we want to be business partners with a country whose military is aggressively harassing neighbors while doing little to assist in efforts to rein in North Korea? In my view, China is a bad actor and yet we’ve intertwined our economy with theirs. Why?
The government of China should be considered hostile. Trade with China should be considered in that light. Let’s see how well China will fare without US markets.
In typical government fashion, it will be determined that trade with governments that want to defeat us is okay. China is not the only culprit in this discussion. Our neighbor to the south, Mexico is in the same boat.
The big question is, “Should the United States of America be a trading partner with a country committed to undermining our national security?” We cannot commit to trading with a country like China, then think about their human rights record or their treatment of their neighbors. Most of us as citizens think about the reputation of a vendor before we hire them to work for us. Why wouldn’t our government do the same before promoting China as a preferred trading partner?
The elected leaders in our country were seduced by China with cheap labor to produce cheap consumer goods. At the expense of our national security. Our country has no obligation to develop labor markets for companies without allegiance to the United States. Companies with only an obligation to the bottom line will do business with anyone. Aren’t we better than that?
What kind of idiots run our country?
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