Cryogenic Propellant Management Engineer

According to the Los Angeles Times, it’s one of the 1800 job openings going begging at Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp., a defense contractor and aerospace engineering firm. Banners touting “Northrop Grumman is hiring” hauled over local beaches and even college sporting events failed to draw enough qualified applicants. It’s the story of what levels of manufacturing skills are required to support American salary levels, particularly in expensive urban environments, and how we are failing as a nation to meet those goals.

We see small towns prospering when Toyota opens a down-and-dirty assembly-line manufacturing plant in a community with a relatively small population, but when people want jobs to support lifestyles in variety-rich major cities, where the cost of renting or owning a home is a much bigger slice of a bigger paycheck, and insurance and taxes make urban living too pricey for many, it just comes back down to an educational system where the average American over 34 is better educated than the average adult under 34, where the cost of college education has increased three times the average increase in family income since 1982, where 42% of Americans read at or below a 4^th grade level and where about 50% of the public high school students of the 10 largest cities in the U.S. drop out.

An awful lot of those subprime homebuyers were buying houses in American bedroom communities in or near pricey cities where their skill-sets and educations were insufficient to produce compensation on a verifiable economic basis to purchase a home. They bought anyway, because they could. This disconnect between the amenities of urban living (major league sporting events, restaurants, night life, concerts, culture, shopping, access to meeting people, etc.) and the cost of living in such coveted places creates a tension that only increasingly higher levels of training and education can fill. Most young singles generally do not prefer the limited dating and activity choices of the same small towns that they might prefer later in life when they “settle down.”

The “big tease” – featured on television, online and in magazines – shows people enjoying the good life without explaining exactly where the money to enjoy the good life comes from. We seem to be a nation looking for short-cuts: “win a televised contest and move instantly to the top of your profession” seems to be the most successful format for “reality” television these days. Where’s the lifetime of hard work game show? When you add the socially acceptable component of “borrowing to get there is the American way,” as seems to have been the theme of credit card commercials and mortgage lenders over the past few years, the path to ruin seems almost inevitable.

Paying those financial executives ridiculous bonuses, not based on real profits, got the accelerator pedal stuck to the floor, even as that brick wall got closer. Impact occurred. So now we are a society that has to figure out how to increase our effective educational system (most states and school districts are doing the opposite in this meltdown) to produce a future while trying out how to employ enough people now to sustain the present. That’s the mission, and if we think otherwise, we are betraying our children and grandchildren (even yet unborn) in a sea of sinking lifestyles and collapsing expectations. Is that how you would like the folks from the future to remember you? But are you prepared for the sacrifice that having a real future really requires? It may not come down to a choice.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.