Lowered Expectations

In many societies, mere literacy is a key to advancement and social mobility. I remember once on an African trip, local villagers inserted plastic pocket protectors visibly in their pockets with a gleaming pen seeming inserted comfortably where it needed to be. When I asked to borrow a pen, I learned that it was really only a pen top and that it was carried for status reasons. The owners couldn’t read. When I got one of my earliest jobs as summer relief clerk at one of Texaco’s regional petroleum centers, most the clerical accountants and event the senior salesmen handling millions of dollars of product were mere high school grads… but the company was in a transition migrating all those jobs to college grads.

In times of declining opportunity, falling incomes, significant layoffs and continuing after-effects of a lingering recession, with the exception of the super-skilled or heavy income producers, it is an employers’ market. Folks without a high school diploma or worse, a felony conviction, are lucky to get any kind of work. What work is available is generally menial, unskilled, monotonous, often extremely physically taxing, poorly-paying with less-than-certain tenure, but often there is no one at all willing to employ these less-educated cadres who are frequently left to social welfare, part-time and unsteady work, living with relatives or turning to a life of crime on the streets.

But even with a high school degree, the opportunities are less than stellar. Bottom-end clerical or secretarial jobs (including the euphemistic “assistants”), once relegated to high school grads or young people with short stints at “secretarial school,” now often require at least some college education and even a full bachelors as a precondition to employment. Having the discipline to get that degree is considered evidence that the applicant is serious about a career path and work. With so many desperate applicants and too many unemployed college grads, it just too easy for prospective employers to raise the standards and willow the massive applicant pools they often face.

“Economists have referred to this phenomenon as ‘degree inflation,’ and it has been steadily infiltrating America’s job market. Across industries and geographic areas, many other jobs that didn’t used to require a diploma — positions like dental hygienists, cargo agents, clerks and claims adjusters — are increasingly requiring one, according to Burning Glass, a company that analyzes job ads from more than 20,000 online sources, including major job boards and small- to midsize-employer sites.

“This up-credentialing is pushing the less educated even further down the food chain, and it helps explain why the unemployment rate for workers with no more than a high school diploma is more than twice that for workers with a bachelor’s degree: 8.1 percent versus 3.7 percent... Some jobs, like those in supply chain management and logistics, have become more technical, and so require more advanced skills today than they did in the past. But more broadly, because so many people are going to college now, those who do not graduate are often assumed to be unambitious or less capable.” New York Times, February 19^th.

But in our increasingly polarized nation, affording college tuition and associated costs requires family support, loans and part-time work to pay for an education the cost of which has increased by a multiple over the increases in the cost of living over the past few decades. As my January 30^th blog, The Lost Decade, points out, as tuition has been rising, the real buying power for average Americans has been falling for over a decade. What’s worse, these lower-paying gigs that require a college education generally don’t produce enough income to pay for the higher cost of commodities and servicing that student loan debt. Thus, those families with lower economic abilities cannot afford to send their kids through this expensive higher-educational system to earn that essential degree. Catch 22. Kids often drop out of college not because they are incapable... but because they just cannot afford the costs.

So polarization amplifies, expectations plummet, anger and blame mount... and politicians slide in like palm oil salesmen, promising golden results if we “cut taxes for the rich to incent job creation and reduce government spending to deregulate the market into more jobs” or “increase government spending to create more jobs in the process.” The sad truth is that there are no silver bullets anymore. We are now full participants in a global economy, where competition can shift once “safe” jobs and career paths to other countries where pay is a fraction of American rates at any level and where educational standards are rising as ours fall.

If education is truly going to produce more economic value in this country, it must be through an increase in high-level technical, mathematical and scientific skills, not just expensive degrees processed through the thousands of degree mills we call colleges and universities. We must make education relevant and affordable... or we can kiss the middle class... and the United States as a viable nation... goodbye.

I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly how do declare a red alert that people will actually take seriously?