On Education

From what I've seen, there's been a shift in our national opinion about education. It used to be that some kids didn't graduate High School, some did, some got Associates Degrees, others went to trade school or technical school, some graduated college, some got a Master's Degree and a few got Doctorates. All of them had a place in the workforce. Now, it seems that graduating college (that is, earning a four-year degree) holds the same merit as graduating High School did one or two generations ago. No college means no job security (not in all cases, but more than before to be sure).

Why the shift? Education has been subsidized more by government to raise our national level of education that we might compete more on an international scale. In order to stay on top, we need to be smarter. One problem is that as education becomes more available, its value diminishes (as stated earlier). Another problem that we assume education will make us smarter.

My dad is from the "old school." One of the terms he uses with increasing frequency is "educated idiot." What he means is that even though college students are becoming more cosmopolitan reading Wollstonecraft and Marx, they have no idea of the practical implications of such work. They can ace a test, but they're not smart enough to keep a budget and live within (or God forbid, under) their means. In short, college students don't learn common sense.

As our education level rises, the number of manual labor jobs done by Americans decreases (hence the argument about "jobs Americans just won't do"). As education becomes more available, it comes closer to becoming a "right" and is viewed less and less as the privilege that it is. Finally, the motivation to self-educate is diminished when someone can just "take a class." The result is a state-run education system that holds the keys to knowledge and taxes the people more and more as the burden to educate increases. Because education will have become an official right rather than a privilege, it will be a program that the government cannot cut when economic times go lean. Because [nearly] everyone will be educated, either the country will rely on foreign production (again, "jobs Americans just won't do") or else the head janitor at the university will have to have at least a Master's degree to hold the position.

Hyperbole aside, this is a possibility we face: as education becomes more available, its value diminishes. That means students will spend more time in school to be competitive in the job market. The more time a student spends in school, the less time he or she spends working and accumulating wealth. Less time at work and less wealth accumulation means a lower GDP and lower tax revenues. A lower GDP means being less competitive in the "global market," and lower tax revenues means either cutting programs (yeah, right), or increasing state and national debt. As state and national debt increase, taxes go up. As taxes increase, wealth accumulation decreases further until one generation can't afford to educate the next. What's left is an uneducated generation that has to either leave the country to find work, lower their standards for quality of life and quality of work, or rebuild the system from the ground up.

At some point, the system either changes or collapses.