Parents tell their children: “You can be anything you want to be.”
It’s a lie. A lie with good intentions to motivate and encourage children, but still, a lie.
The need for skilled workers is great, especially in high-tech fields and the fast-growing health-care sector. But opportunities for education and training are extremely limited.
My niece has been accepted into a respected master’s degree program for physicians’ assistants at St. Francis University in nearby Pennsylvania.
The program is rigorous. The physicians’ assistants begin training in June, and the work is intense. I understand there were 10 students selected for the program out of about 600 applications. What are the other 590 going to do?
Physicians’ assistant: Six-hundred applicants for 10 openings. Tuition and expenses, about $30,00 a year. Starting salary upon graduation, about $70,000. Demand for qualified physicians’ assistants: unlimited.
My nephew is applying for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers apprenticeship program. Beginning apprentices assist the master electricians. Starting pay is low, but excellent classroom training is provided by the union. The pay scale increases as apprentices advance through the five-year program.
I understand there are about 2,000 candidates for 200 openings. After completing the apprenticeship, skilled electricians can make $70,000 and up, depending on how much overtime work they want. Licensed electricians can open their own service business, if they wish.
Electrician apprenticeships: 2,000 applications for 200 openings. What are the other 1,800 going to do?
The truth is, you can’t be anything you want to be. It’s a highly competitive world. Jobs are limited. Classroom space is limited. In the new flat world, the global economy, New York Times columnist and author Tom Friedman says that every worker is competing with every other worker in the world.
If you’re poor or a minority in America, chances are you’re eliminated from the education and jobs lottery early on. Many public schools are failing or mediocre. After high school, it’s a tough world. Good colleges and universities are highly selective. If you get in and hang on to get a degree, your BS probably isn’t worth the debt you owe on it. A bachelor’s degree isn’t the ticket to a job anymore. You need advanced training, a master’s degree, or even a PhD, to qualify for good jobs.
Some more examples: Nurses are in demand everywhere. They work hard, but they earn a decent paycheck. Applications for nursing schools far exceed the capacity of the schools. A major limiting factor: shortage of nursing faculty. Highly trained nurses can make more in supervisory positions than they can as professors.
And hey, why go to the expense of training nurses in America, when we can just steal well-trained nurses from less prosperous parts of the world, like the Philippines? (Oops, I mean recruit.) Who cares if the Philippine people have any nurses left to take care of them.
American medical schools have always been competitive, limiting the supply of doctors. We’ve been importing physicians from Third-World countries for a long time. The people in those countries probably don’t need doctors, like Americans do.
So here’s a question: Does America have the will to educate its children? The voters and the politicians can answer the question. Or maybe they already have.
Where are your children going to learn a skill or a profession? Where are your children going to work? – Bernie Hayden
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1 Comment
June 28, 2008 at 2:53 pm
the better paying jobs have always been reverved for those applicants that are smarter than average, more ambitious than average, or luckier than average –(i.e. wealthier than average with more resources at thier disposal). the quality and effectiveness of thier education depend on these, and other, variables. where will those applicants not making the cut work? — where they always have, in jobs that pay less than above average. you seem to be implying that this is a new phenomenon, but this has always been the case. a child born in this country — any child — still has a potential future that is the envy of the majority of the worlds children.