It All Adds Up

Maybe you’ve seen the TV adds telling us that the United States has fallen from first to seventeenth place on standardized science tests and to twenty-fifth on math tests. The hidden message is that our deep budget cuts to education budgets, from public primary and secondary school all the way through the highest levels of university graduation education maybe be more destructive to America’s future than a multiple series of attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2011. Effectively, in my mind, do we let the terrorists lose a few battles but win the war… their goal of permanently and materially debilitating the United States for all time?

The money we have spent in the losing struggle to replace anti-American regimes in Iraq (the new government is now squarely in our enemy Iran’s camp) and Afghanistan (where the Taliban are making fools of us) has hurt us and hurt us deeply. Imagine what the trillions we have spent in such failed and failing efforts would have done for our economy and our future if they had been focused on education, infrastructure and non-military research. I have no issue with military retaliation when we are attacked, but this obsession to effect regime change and put American boots on the ground – which hasn’t worked since WWII – still puzzles me.

For those old enough to remember the Eisenhower administration’s to the October 4, 1957 Soviet satellite launch (Sputnik), the result was renewed effort to upgrade education and research that ultimately led to our lunar landing in 1969. That little effort charged America with science and math expertise that would fire the gigantic American economic engine to heights unimaginable to those living in those times. “A wider world of competition now confronts college graduates. A front-page article in The Wall Street Journal … cited data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to note: ‘Thirty years ago, the U.S. led the world in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with the equivalent of at least a two-year degree; only Canada and Israel were close. As of 2009, the U.S. lagged behind 14 other developed countries.’” New York Times, April 28^th. We need to recharge America, not hobble the very job-creating systems that have worked so well for so long under the seeming noble phrase of austerity in the name of financial responsibility.

Indeed our impairment of our own economy, letting an unregulated Wall Street impact trillions of dollars of damage without redress… even bailing out the miscreants who irresponsibly fomented this destructive economy tsunami… exacerbated by know-nothing Congress people who believe military spending is sacrosanct… leaves us with a path of betrayal to our own children. And our children are entering college and pursuing majors for which there is no job path, borrowing money to pay the highest levels of tuition in history, still rising way beyond the general cost of living.

Notwithstanding that the jobless rate for college grads is half that of those with lesser educations, Frank Bruni, writing for the April 28^th New York Times, notes: “It doesn’t capture the grim reality for recent college graduates, whose leg up on their less educated counterparts isn’t such a sturdy, comely leg at the moment. According to an Associated Press analysis of data from 2011, 53.6 percent of college graduates under the age of 25 were unemployed or, if they were lucky, merely underemployed, which means they were in jobs for which their degrees weren’t necessary. Philosophy majors mull questions no more existential than the proper billowiness of the foamed milk atop a customer’s cappuccino. Anthropology majors contemplate the tribal behavior of the youngsters who shop at the Zara where they peddle skinny jeans.

“I single out philosophy and anthropology because those are two fields — along with zoology, art history and humanities — whose majors are least likely to find jobs reflective of their education level, according to government projections quoted by the Associated Press. But how many college students are fully aware of that? How many reroute themselves into, say, teaching, accounting, nursing or computer science, where degree-relevant jobs are easier to find? Not nearly enough, judging from the angry, dispossessed troops of Occupy Wall Street.”

America must re-energize, reinvent itself, not cut its own knees out from under us. Bruni continues: “The thing is, today’s graduates aren’t just entering an especially brutal economy. They’re entering it in many cases with the wrong portfolios. To wit: as a country we routinely grant special visas to highly educated workers from countries like China and India. They possess scientific and technical skills that American companies need but that not enough American students are acquiring.

“‘That’s why there are all these kinds of initiatives to make math and science fun,’ Stephen J. Rose, a senior economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, reminded me last week. He was referring to elementary and high school attempts to prime more American students for college majors in those areas and for sectors of the job market where positions are more plentiful and lucrative. The center issued a report last year that noted that ‘not all bachelor’s degrees are the same’ and that ‘while going to college is undoubtedly a wise decision, what you take while you’re there matters a lot, too.’” Our primary and secondary schools are so mediocre in the teaching of science and math that students simply opt out of those majors by the time they get to college. We need to fix this system and fix it now!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time to wake up to make sure we will still have roses to smell!