. . . a sentiment to which I can (generally) agree, despite being, I think, on a very different position on the political spectrum than magellan01.
If all other labor laws are being adhered to, a business should not be expected to pay more than the minimum to secure the sort of work force it wants.
What happens though, when there are many more people with a skill than there are jobs to fill? The value of that job goes down, because there is probably some man or woman who wants to be working in the field and is willing to do it for a bit less. This isn’t unfair to the previous, higher-paid employee, it’s a natural consequence of being a little less special as the world floods with other people who wish they could be doing your job.
But, I think this is a real problem, because Whack-a-Mole is right. It becomes a race to the bottom (whatever that bottom is for a particular skill-set), while costs of training for jobs continues to rise. So, you have industries in which thousands of people who spent 4+ years on expensive educations are competing for hundreds of jobs, and the comparable “worth” of those jobs decreases, as the number of unemployed-yet-skilled pile up in line.
How do we solve this problem? Is it a problem?
On the one hand, it seems like a self-correcting issue, albeit one that leaves a lot of people in the lurch. On the other hand, I think we could do a much better job of identifying what skills are likely to be needed in any given 4-10 year period, and of being upfront with the students of today about what to expect from different educational choices/expenditures.
It’s a problem alright, but one that won’t be easily solved because it has complex factors involved in its creation. The education system is only one factor. We made a huge mistake when we made a cultural shift to snubbing trades and insisting on higher education for everyone. To be frank, not everyone is college material, and our institutions should be scaled way back in admission numbers AND way up in standards. At the same time, we should be making investments into trade education that is efficient and reasonably low-cost.
However, that is only addressing one area of contribution to the problem you were concentrating on in the OP. A second step would be to insist upon a basic living wage as a federal minimum. Lastly, the unions badly need reform so that they are doing their job of protecting worker’s wages and benefits and not merely strong-arming business and buying politicians.
The more educated your work force, the larger your pool of engineers, business people, and other skilled professionals who will think of new businesses to create or ways to grow existing business, creating more jobs.
Or, maybe we will have a growing glut of highly educated waitors, bartenders and retail clerks who will become increasingly dissatisfied at their inability to find highly paid jobs in law, finance and corporate middle management.
An assumption you’re making here is that the problem is that a lot of people aren’t good enough for college but are being put into it (“not college material”) when they should be put into trades. But I see no evidence colleges are being overwhelmed with morons. Getting a four year degree isn’t that hard.
The problem is simply that the education system doesn’t put SMART people into the trades. Trades are not easy jobs that any idiot can learn, and a lot of people I know with 4-year degrees couldn’t handle being a genuinely good machinist or welder. You need smart people funneled into those trades, or the capability to do them falls apart, because it’s from the pool of welders, machinists, and millwrights that you’re going to get your supervisors, your welding inpsectors, your managers, and, eventually, the entrepreneurs.
I’m quite familiar with many companies who simply cannot find capable tradespeople. They don’t want dull-minded tradespeople. Those never work out. They want smart ones. And they’re jut not to be found.
It’s only a “problem” because college is so expensive and people who graduate from college have developed an overblown sense of entitlement that a high paying job should be handed to them.
But it should be hard. If having a pulse and a loan are all that it takes to get a degree, then it has no actual value. Having a degree is currently an expensive check box on the from of most job applications.
I agree that trades should not be looked at as a fall back for those unable to cut it in college. Aptitude and ability should be taken into account. No matter how smart you are, some people are going to be better (and/or happier) at building things than designing them and vice versa. But as long as the social status all goes to one instead of the other, it will push the people who are most capable into that one.
I have a number of friends who are tradespeople. They are very smart people. They went into trades because they are “not college material”. They would tell you that themselves. They did not like school and/or did not want to work in an office.
Many people fail college, or barely make it through, or (these days) only graduate because standards have fallen. It has nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with aptitudes and interests.
The “college for everyone” system was a mistake. It has hurt both higher education and vocational education. We need to stop stigmatizing vocational/trades education and stop glorifying higher education - both are good and necessary, neither is sufficient.
What you call a race to the bottom is how supply and demand works. People do not become lawyers because they love the law, the do it because it pays well and is prestigious. This is true for almost every profession. If too many people become lawyers then the pay will go down until smart people stop wanting to become lawyers. This is bad for newly trained lawyers but good for people who need legal work. The fact that people are trained for jobs that do not pay as much as they thought is not fair, but the world is not fair. On the scale of unfairness young americans with a bachelors degree who can’t make as much as they think they should is pretty far down the scale.
Supply and demand creating a market clearing wage is not a problem to be solved it is just the way the world works.
You are confusing “the world” with laissez-faire capitalism. There have been, and could be other ways to organize an economy, and some of them might be better for, you know, people. Perhaps we might be allowed to think about how things might be done better.
The problem isn’t related to being overly educated. The problem is that in most cases when you are negotiating your salary, you are negotiating against the overwhelming power of owners and managers, while they are just negotiating with some guy, usually easily replaceable by some other guy. Organized labor solves this problem, by allowing workers to negotiate from a position of their actual worth to the company.
You can organize society around this, but you can not change it. For example, the most common way is to use government to artificially restrict supply. This is done by creating certifications such as the bar exam or other licensing exams. This would raise the wages of the people in the profession at the expense of the people who would like to be in the profession and those who employ the services of the profession. It can also be done by mandating unions be recognized by employers. the problem with this is that the law of supply and demand still applies. By raising the price of labor you lower the amount of demand at that price, creating unemployment.
Since the problem in the OP was unemployment, it hardly makes sense to create more unemployed people in order to artificially help the already employed.
Um, because they are my friends of many years? Are you unable to tell “very smart” people from “not smart” people, even when you know them well? Or is it just the differentiation between “smart” and “very smart” that troubles you?
In this case, as I already explained, it means exactly what it says. Someone who is not interested in higher education and/or is interested in a career path for which higher education is unsuited. Do you need examples or a picture?
Because after a few years all the quality people would join the trades, in order to make more money. Unions raise wages, safety and quality for everyone.
The businesses who wanted to hire the people who had left to join the skilled trades would have to raise salaries to attract quality people to work for them. Then the trades would have to raise salaries, and before you know it there is a race to the top and everyone is a millionaire.
Then why go at all? An ephemeral promise that “one day” you “might,” just maybe work your way. eventually, into a position where you earn a living wage that allows you to support yourself and your family? You’ve got that just by picking some job and sticking with it. At pretty much ANY large corp you can make it into the lower end of middle management just by hanging out longer, and taking more garbage then your co-workers. College is supposed to be a way around that slog of entry level “experience”. You go to school and pay to receive higher, specialized training that should be preparing you for admission into higher levels of the workforce. That is the entire POINT of college. It’s just like officer training school in the military. You wouldn’t go through all that just to go back to being grunt.
Standards should be far higher, admissions should be far fewer, and we should be admitting more talented, intelligent people into the trades at a level that allows them to support themselves. If you have a machinist certificate, then you shouldn’t have to take a job sweeping the floor at a machine shop, but neither should you be running one. You should be doing machine work.
What we’ve created though is a glut of (technically) over-educated, heavily indebted young people who have been sold the college experience and are finding that the economy is failing to deliver on its end of the deal. Most people I know, (exceptions being in big cities) would be fine with simply being able to find a job that pays in the mid 30’s. They can’t even find THAT because the companies are requiring a degree PLUS experience for even those higher entry-level positions. They find they have to compete with everyone else, degree or no degree.
I’ve noticed that for many top tier Silicon Valley companies a college degree isn’t enough - the degree must come from the right college and have the right GPA. And they do pay more for this.
I wonder what kinds of jobs we’re talking about here. If the job is to do it the way they’ve always done it and just shut up, hiring smart people is a waste. If the job allows people to figure out better ways of doing it, paying the minimum is going to lead to disaster.