Get The "Good Jobs"

In one of his campaign speeches, that is to say one of his campaign speeches that was not masquerading as a State Of The Union Address, Obama made one of his typical statements about how if you wanted to get a "good job" you needed to be able to go to college. He went on to say that meant that colleges need to keep their prices down and that if they don't then he's going to cut the money that the federal government gives them. That's another of his threats that he can't carry out, but it sounds good and gets lots of cheers, which is what Obama is all about for the next ten months, so I need to get used to that.

Anyway, you need to get a job because driving a truck to haul supplies to feed and clothe the people who live in your nation is not a "good job." He is touting his success at saving millions of jobs in the auto industry buildling cars and trucks, but since none of those jobs required a college degree and are therefor not "good jobs," why is he so proud of having saved them? What, he's the president who saved a bunch of crappy jobs?

When I grew up jobs that did not require a college degree were "good jobs." When I got out of the Navy I went to work as a maintenance electrician for a company in Milwaukee in a factory building that was over a mile long. There were literally thousands of people working in that plant every day building transformers for the Tennessee Valley Authority, each transformer the size of an apartment building. Not one of those workers was college educated, and every one of those jobs was a "good job," not just because of the pay scale, which was excellent, but because of the satisfaction it provided. We were doing something that mattered. We were building something that would change the way people lived.

Various reasons are given for the rising cost of higher education; overpaid educators, sports programs, cutbacks in public funding, etc. I would suggest that supply and demand is a large player in that issue. When a commodity is in greater demand than it is able to supply then the price rises. Look to braying jackasses like Obama who sell college as nothing more than a ticket to a "good job." "Getting a good job" is the worst reason to go to college. It is an institution of higher learning, not a damned job training mill. Colleges today are filled with young people who don't even have a clue what they want to learn, who actually have no interest in learning anything, they're just there to "get a better job."

The presence of these deadbeats, and from an educational standpoint they are deadbeats because they are not there for what that educational institution is designed to offer them, drives up the cost of operating these institutions in precisely the same way that unproductive workers drive up the costs for a manufacturer. This whole idea of college as a "pathway to a better job" is destructive. We need to make our jobs better because they're better, not because they have "smarter" people in them.