"GET YOUR EDUCATION" IS NOT A JOBS PLAN

From the New York Times' resident Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman:

Degrees and Dollars

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

More here.

Yeah, this has driven me crazy for years now. I mean, Krugman's point is absolutely correct in this current era when large numbers of even good white collar jobs are being outsourced to other nations or lost permanently to technology, but the notion that everybody going and getting a college degree is going to get us all good jobs has always been fucking stupid.

Sure, for you, the individual, getting a college degree is probably going to improve your job prospects to some extent, although, as Krugman observes in his essay, this is becoming less and less so as the years go by. But trying to get Americans to go to college en masse has been essentially all that Washington has had to offer in the face of the continual massive layoffs we've been suffering for three or four decades now, which have shattered the middle class: "Well, your blue collar manufacturing jobs with good pay and benefits are gone forever, but if you would just get a college degree all your problems are over." Like I said, that may help you, but it's just a joke to suggest that's going to help everybody, or even large numbers of workers, which is the implicit notion stinking up all these calls for everybody to go to college.

I mean, think about it for, like, two seconds. For starters, most people just can't go to college. If you have kids, you're too busy working to keep food on the table. And going to school while holding down a full time job, or two, is also extraordinarily difficult. Sure, a few, with the right support, and more than a little luck, can pull it off. Most can't. And then there's tuition. Books. Random student fees. No, not impossible, but with so many road blocks in the way, it is really, really, really unreasonable to even entertain the notion that millions of the underemployed and unemployed are going to try to do this.

But dig a little deeper and you can see just how retarded it is to say "get a degree" rather than coming up with some good ideas about how to create good jobs. Thought experiment: imagine everybody getting college degrees. With the labor market flooded by workers with bachelor's degrees, the value of your piece of paper plummets, and you're still stocking groceries at Safeway. The bottom line is that there have never been enough white collar jobs in our economy to accommodate a labor pool overflowing with college degrees.

That is, "go to college" is not, and has never been, an actual jobs plan. And it's just getting worse: the possibility that a college degree will help you, the individual, is, like I said, becoming ever less a possibility. So if "go to college" is ultimately a fool's errand in terms of rebuilding our once thriving middle class, what can we do?

When Krugman talks about "collective bargaining" he means "unions." The middle class we once had in this country wasn't built by a bunch of college boys demanding what they were worth in the so-called labor market: the mass middle class came into existence because labor unions, by raising their own wages and benefits, raised overall expectations for wages and benefits within the overall culture, among both workers and capitalists, unionized or not. And there is nothing but television, video games, and air conditioning stopping us from making that happen again.

That is, if all the economy has for us is shit-jobs, then we, the people, are going to have to insist that those shit-jobs pay livable wages. Fuck the "labor market." We're people, not products or commodities.

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