Is Capitalism Succeeding and Public Education Failing

Unless you are super rich, you most likely are going to have to work for a living. So as a citizen of a country, what do I expect out of the economy. Perhaps more than any single thing, I want an economy with enough good jobs, that with a bit of effort and training, I can land one and earn a decent living.

Well under that criteria our largely capitalistic system is knocking the cover off the ball. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) we not only have record low unemployment for all groups except I think white males (we are near record numbers but not at record numbers) but we have more unfilled jobs than people looking for jobs. In addition, wages among the lowest paid are rising faster than inflation and faster than the top 50% of wage earners.

There is also a fair amount of job mobility. According to the BLS, besides the net increase of 2.4 million people working, in total 69.8 million were hired in the last year and 67.4 million left their jobs for various reasons. Capitalism in this country is delivering the goods (and jobs).

So if the economy is succeeding, then why are some politicians complaining about it. Could it be our education system is failing our citizens. I mean even after all of the legal immigration and illegal immigration, we still have 7.3 million job openings, that the education system in America has failed to produce the needed workers to fill. Many of these jobs pay very well.

If the job of capitalism from the perspective of most citizens of this country is to produce jobs, then the job of our public education system from the perspective of society should be to produce “qualified workers”.

Yet with record spending on education and record levels of college debt, our education system is not meeting the challenge of producing workers to fill all the job openings. Instead people of all educational attainment levels from post graduate, to college graduate, to associate degrees, high school graduates and even drop out students are in some instances finding their education and skills simply do not line up with the jobs available.

The vast majority of public education even at the college and vocational school level is funded by government. So rather than Presidential candidates running on how they will make higher education cheaper by forgiving debt, how about them coming up with ideas on how to educate young people for skills the economy needs. Do we really need to forgive debt educating people for lousy paying jobs? If the jobs pay well, then shouldn’t people be able to payoff their own debt?

I think the problem began when public education forgot their job. The American Dream was about growing up in America, studying hard in school, and then graduating and entering the work force with the necessary skills to earn a decent living. But somewhere along the line, things broke down. The economy continued to crank out new jobs over time, but the education changed their mission from producing workers to something else.

Education became the place where you discovered who you were, rather than where you learned how to earn a decent living. Young people were persuaded to pursue their own unique version of the American Dream, even if no jobs existed for them at the end of the rainbow and instead of a “pot of gold” they had a mountain of debt.

The education system convinced America to just keep throwing more and more money at the educational experience. The educational experience replaced the original purpose of producing workers (which is what the German and most European systems still focus on). It almost feels like the education system in America was complicit in supporting a false narrative with regard to the purpose of education to insure that enough students pursued education in fields without jobs, so teachers could have jobs educating people in those fields (maybe that is to hypocritical).

So let’s demand more of our educational system. Let’s develop real “guidance” departments staffed with people qualified to help students select careers for which they have a good chance of getting a good paying job in the future. Let’s make education “pay off” in job compensation. Let’s stop loaning government money to over produce trained workers in fields with inadequate job opportunity.

Let’s also reduce the educational demands for “degrees” around the specific skills needed for a job. I have no problem with “electives”, but let’s make them electives not requirements in order to earn the total hours needed for a degree.

Let’s get our citizens educated for good jobs that are out there and for which they have the natural and acquired skills to perform. Let’s stop blaming capitalism for the flaws in our educational system.