As unemployment stays stubbornly high, stories of new and not-so-new college graduates unable to find jobs in their fields grab headlines.
These are attention-getting tales because it was only a few years ago that a college degree was a job ticket. But the real tragedy the recession is revealing is that the unemployment rate among the young without a college education is 40 percent and higher and isn’t showing signs of declining.
The right college degree — in nursing, for example — still guarantees employment at a good wage with good pros-pects. And employment in other fields is increasing for the college-trained as the economy staggers forward.
But the picture grows dimmer for those who quit when they graduate from high school and is as black as night for dropouts.
Not much can be done by society to increase job pros-pects for those who decided to take degrees in liberal arts but didn’t want to teach. But society can and should remove some of the barriers that lie before high school graduates who found that they couldn’t afford higher education.
A recent survey taken by the Associated Press and Viacom showed that three-fourths of those who bypassed college said cost was the major reason.
Most of those say their high schools did a fair to poor job of preparing them for work; 40 percent of them now depend in part on their parents or other relatives for support and most feel that their family’s financial situation has held them back.
They still believe in the power of higher education to get them better jobs and a majority say they plan to go back to school when they are able.
IT WOULD BE a good investment to make a higher education possible for millions of these young men and women. Many of their grandparents got that opportunity through the GI Bill of Rights after World War II. Social historians agree that paying for those educations for those millions with tax money played a very important role in the nation’s post-war economic growth.
It also may be true that the very high cost of a university education today — and over the past two decades — is part of the reason the U.S. economy is lagging today.
Today’s world economy is knowledge-based, which means that it is education-based, which should mean that society should invest heavily in lifting as many youngsters as possible through the university — not because the kids “deserve” it, but because a highly educated work force has become a national requirement.
Look at it this way: we don’t bat an eye when told that we must spend hundreds of billions every year for “national defense.” But the truth is that a surer way to make our future more secure would be to ensure a college education for all-comers as we did for the 11 million or more World War II veterans.
A bachelor’s degree is the new normal for those who succeed in today’s world. It’s way past time for our national policies to adjust to this fact.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
