Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
The school/job conundrum gets more complicated the more you pull at that string. Back in “the day”, say when I graduated high school in the summer of love, you could follow either of basically three career paths:
1) Simply get a job. No guarantees, but factories and machine shops were in full swing and generally unionized and, if they weren’t unionized, you could possibly learn a trade and move on “up the line” to a management job if you showed the right stuff.
2) Continue on to college and perhaps grad school, learn a profession. At that time a BS degree actually meant something. This was also great in that you could avoid the draft while in school
3) Get an apprenticeship and learn a trade such as electrician, plumber, mason, builder and related trades. If you were good, these could set you up for life.
Today, the first option is pretty dead. Factories are closing left and right and what’s not closed is being outsourced to other countries.
With the second option, you can pretty much count on going for a Masters if you want to be taken seriously and, even then, a lot has to do with what field of study you chose, and what you started in may not be as in demand when you get it. IMNSHO, the medical profession seems to be the best. I used to think teaching was a good shot but, from what I’m hearing, it may not be all it used to be, at least here in Jersey.
The third option is still valid but, due to the downturn in the housing market, not quite as lucrative as they once were, but they will be again. As usual, doing a good job and getting a license is pretty much a guarantee you’ll always be able to put food on the table somehow.
Traditionally schools prepared kids for these and they could look forward to these if they wanted to.
Nowadays, with option one gone and option two too expensive, and too much of a commitment for most, a lot of kid bypass this.
This leaves the trades. This looks like a lot of hard work (it is) but since the schools don’t really instill a work ethic by implementing “social promotion”, many don’t want to bother with it.
Here in the big cities of Joisey, the kids can look out their windows and see drop-outs who are affiliated with the major gangs selling drugs and, until they wind up in jail, making more money in a few weeks than many people make in a year. And, when they DO get caught, juveniles get a slap on the wrist and are out doing it again in a matter of days or weeks. And, even as adults, the “justice” system doesn’t really “rehabilitate” them so much as send them to school to share tricks with other practitioners of the trade. This cycle gets repeated ad infinitum until the perp gets shot or dies of old age, generally wreaking violence in between the times they get caught.
Until real opportunities exist for kids, they will be attracted to those “easy” jobs they see. And, until the “easy” jobs they see on the street are made unattractive to the young, they really have no incentive to go to school.
If this guy running the country really, really wants to make a difference, he'll somehow find a way to open up some "real" job opportunities (not just pushing fries) for our citizens, both young and old, that offer a living wage. Outsourcing manufacturing jobs and call center, programming, help desk, and other jobs that lend themselves well to T1 lines and VOIP systems while letting illegals and soliciting
H1-B workers is not the answer.
Maybe, just maybe, seeing that going to school might really pay off for the average guy who is willing to give it a shot might be incentive for them to actually learn somethng. After all, it's hard to really condemn them if they see that, for many, there's really no place to go when they get out.
So, which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
