As discussed in several previous threads there is in progress a relative hollowing out of the middle in America. This thread is specifically NOT addressing the dramatic concentration of wealth by the top 0.1 or even top 0.01%. It is a real issue and an issue of significance, but this thread is intended to address a different subject. This thread also notes that both of the following are true: up to now all income quintiles have moved up in real dollar terms over the past few decades, even after a major recession; and the lower three quintiles have moved up much less than the upper two.
Middle class jobs for those with no more than a High School education are pretty much gone. Since 1990, in real dollars, the real median household income has steadily gone down not just for those with no HS degree but for High School graduates as well. It’s been flat for those with college degrees and gone up slightly for those with Masters and Doctorates. The median income overall has gone up because more are in higher education groups: there are fewer with no High School degree and more with college and or post-graduate degrees.
Last establishing economic point - currently new jobs being created are most often either lower skill and lower pay service industry jobs or higher pay higher skill level jobs (including computer systems design, information services, management and technical consulting, healthcare, so on). The jobs that there are in manufacturing increasingly need a technical skill set that basic high school and liberal arts college education does not provide. And there are only so many of those jobs.
In Germany the educational approach is to track more than half of all students from High School entry on into vocational high schools and apprenticeships. Some of the students who finish those programs go onto 3 year programs heavily funded by German industry called called Fachschulen, which train students in industry-specific skills. That has allowed Germany to become the economic and industrial powerhouse of the EU … but Germany too has a shrinking middle class as they also adapt to a service oriented economy. There are just fewer of those industry-specific skilled workers needed in highly automated factories.
TL;DNR?
What is the best educational system to preserve America’s middle class in the emerging high automation globally connected world economy? More college education? More early training in technical skills? Or? Why?
(Again, best income redistribution system is not the subject of this thread.)
I’d go with early technical training. It’s the same kind of thing in going on in technical schools offering certificates and associate degrees now, but it ought to start at the high school level before we lose students by keeping them on the high school track which ends up useless for them later. I don’t think this has to be about tracking students into a particular field early on either, it’s about giving them the central skills involved in any field so they can move either horizontally or vertically after graduating from a high school level. Much of what’s missing from our current educational system both in the high school level and college is experience in actually working at jobs, basic communication skills and organizational skills, learning to read, comprehend and utilize documentation, adapting technical skills to new uses, social skills in the workplace, participation in new development. Some of these things have advanced at both the high school and college level through the use of internships, but it appears to be a haphazard informal approach often now, with utility somewhat limited by the students own motivations without a focus on acquiring general the general skills mentioned above instead of simply experience in a very specific field.
Germany also has a significant internship system. But unlike our non-technical one, it pays. Technical internships in Silicon Valley pay well but are scarce, and it seems ones in publishing and the like don’t. Call it internship, call it apprenticeship, it might be a way for those with high school or BS degrees to get a cheap foot in the door, learn some real stuff, and have a path to employment. And if companies pay, they can get real work out of the interns legally.
These two posts say important things and are in some ways saying the same thing
this is an important observation as in the other thread there is the automatic presumption that the technical - I mean this in my european sense, not the american “vocational learn to use a specific machine” - education can not include the teaching of the “soft skills” …
This is also the observation I have of my schooling systems. It is good I have my son in a school that is focusing on the project learning.
The German system is very German and as all things German, it is very rigid and prescriptive. I see no reason it can not be more flexible. National program to support and subsidize the internship with the SME is perhaps something worth national policy for - as it can be helpful also for the SME to get the better talent that typically wants to go to the big company (or the sexy start-up backed by the VC).
I haven’t seen the other threads referenced in the OP, but I’d like to point out that California’s governor and legislature have recently taken on this exact question in a very serious way, laying out funding and long-term plans to address the very same employment problem with which the OP is concerned. The initial state legislation (actually several bills), in combination with federal workforce legistation–WIOA (the new iteration of WIA)–started in 2012, and it’s still in the formative stages, but the funding is there. They’re approaching this thing very carefully, and have built in bottom-up, regional decision-making (because employment trends are very regional). The goal has been from the start to make sure the concerns of all stakeholders are integrated into whatever develops. It includes the California Community College system (the largest in the country, and the largest public education system in the world) , one-stop employment providers, other agencies of adult education (primarily K-12 districts), and, of course, employers themselves.
This is an unprecedented effort in education, and is only just starting to be implemented. Look up SB1456, AB86 (or AEBG), SSSP (Student Success Act, and subsequent related legislation), and the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office to see current developments. Most of it will be playing out by way of regional planning and consortia, so you can’t just do a single Google search and get a real sense of what’s happening. (I myself am involved with this, but I couldn’t give you one link which would suffice to do that–one example site might be this.) In most areas it’s still formative, but locally, examples of what we’re probably going to see is much more emphasis on internships, stackable credentials, and other ways to address the lack of workers with mid-level skills, (as opposed to four-year degrees), and how to get them employed quickly, as a pathway toward middle-class incomes.
The educational system should have made accounting mandatory decades ago. The objective should not be JOBS. The objective should be WEALTH.
But we have had an economic systembasedon Planned Obsolescence that creates jobs but just keeps the so called Middle Class running on a treadmill. What have American consumers lost on the depreciation of automobiles every year for the last 50 years.
I know. My son-in-law. who was going through some family problems when they made the cut between an academic and vocational future, got assigned the vocational track. He fought his way up to graduate school in international business over the next ten years and finally got a job in a consulting company. But it was tough.
There used to be a lot more low level starter jobs in the US. But with the expense of college these days, it would be hard for people to live on them and repay their loans.
We haven’t had planned obsolescence since the '70s when the Japanese kicked Detroit’s butt. I remember when odometers had five figures because hardly any car made it to 100K miles. I can look up how long the average car lasts, but I think it is pushing 10 years these days.
Please show us some evidence of shoddy construction of middle class kind of products.
I went through the quality revolution in electronics. It is real.
Now, if there is a treadmill it is from the introduction of new and better products which marketers want us to buy. But that’s a lot different. New cars in the 1950s were very little different from those they replaced except in the size of their tailfins.
The OP lists jobs in healthcare as being “above” middle class. In a lot of the developed world, those jobs are middle class; some higher than others, but middle class. My sister in law, a doctor, gets the same salary as any other government employee whose job requires a college degree (there may be different bonuses). She gets the same salary as the nurses and the physical therapists and the people working at the Treasury and the city architect.
Maybe one of the things that need to be defined is “what and who is middle class”.
Also, this may have changed, as what I’m going to talk about was 20 years ago, but I found that my American students didn’t know how to “self-assemble”; the more “standard American” they were, the worst this was (the only exceptions with American nationality were one who had grown up in Spain and a second-generation Chinese-American). All of their work and play (and my friends confirmed, all of theirs also) had been either on their own or directed by adults, so they didn’t know how to organize, divide and reassemble work by themselves.
And I think the curves system is crap. Both versions: both the version where a given % of the class gets a given letter regardless of absolute performance and those where there is more leeway. The constant obsession with rankings again leads to students not knowing how to collaborate; often, someone who is good in a particular subject is viewed as “the enemy” by everybody else (people complaining “he’s lowering our grades!” is not just a trope, it actually happens). In my own absolutes-based-grades system, that would have been the person you asked for help.
The vast majority of medical jobs are middle class. Some portion of them are at the upper end of middle class (or could be considered upper class depending on your definition) such as doctors in profitable medical groups and the highly overpaid and useless hospital administrators. For each of those there are at least 10 jobs that are just slightly above the middle of the middle. Many of those do not require a 4 year degree.
This is right on the money. In this country a college degree is something you purchase, or frequently your parents purchase for you. Failure is always someone else’s fault. Then when you get your degree you are entitled to a high paying job because you paid for that with your tuition.
In this thread we discussed a Pew study that defines it as having between two-thirds and double the median household income, adjusted* for household size. Before taxes and transfers. And not counting non-wage benefits. It’s arbitrary, but I’ll propose it as a working definition for this thread just so we have something for comparison.
Though you have to be cautious - you can’t push people into jobs and expect them to be good at them because they pay well. Not everyone makes a good software engineer. And the supply demand curve is there as well - too many nurses and unemployed nurses don’t work (nurses without 4 year RNs around here have a hard time finding work at all - employers want a 4 year RN or a much cheaper CNA.)
Agreed. And I think OP is specifically asking about jobs that don’t require college. Although maybe additional non-college schooling fits, e.g. cosmetology.
I’d think the hard part would be identifying what the middle class jobs will be in the near term. It seems pretty clear to me that most of them require a minimum of a community college education or advanced trade school education. Just graduating high school is not sufficient- that’s almost the bare minimum to get a working class job these days.
Beyond that, middle class jobs seem to have shifted from manufacturing and trade to a combination of skilled trades and lower-mid level white collar jobs. And since some of those jobs like say… nursing are pretty well paid, it’s shifting the median wage up, and more importantly shifting the wages of the “middle class” up quite a bit.
They say that a household making 50k a year is middle class, but by the same token, it’s kind of hard to find very many white-collar college educated people who DON’T make that much, at least a few years out of school these days.
I think the assumption that one ought to make is that in the future, you’re either going to be in the white collar, educated middle-class/upper-class or you’re going to be doing some kind of job that’s pretty routinized and/or unskilled, i.e. something rather blue-collar.
The only gray areas are in the skilled trades like say… being a cabinetmaker, or a plumber, or something like that. And even there, there’s already a sort of dichotomy, in that around here the contractors/foremen/management types are middle-class white guys, while the workers are all low-paid Hispanic guys. So even there, the middle class jobs are somewhat limited.
Explaining to you why that lawsuit is totally stupid would be a major hijack. And I’m not an Apple fanboy. I use no Apple products at all, never have. If you’re interested we can start a new thread.
Even the best products depreciate. There are physical reasons why nothing lasts forever, and economic reasons to not increase the cost of a product by making it more reliable than the market demands. I’ve done these calculations for work.
As for education, I think teaching accounting in high school would be a bit much. When I was in junior high both boys and girls took home economics, which was mostly cooking. If home economics taught real economics - budgeting, how to compute the costs of interest, unit pricing, then we’d be getting somewhere.