I actually have hopes for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Now, before you dismiss me, let me explain.
I hope that one of the things we’re seeing down at Zuccotti Park is the first rustlings of what will eventually (though maybe not in our lifetime, comrades) become a full fledged revolution — not against capitalism but against what Rush Limbaugh likes to call Big Education and Michael Medved calls the Educational-Industrial Complex.
This is really what most of these kids are angry about, isn’t it? Most of them — except for the usual complement of old lefties and sundry off-their-meds street people — are, as many reporters have noted, college grads. One fellow interviewed last night on the Michael Medved radio show, for instance, was even a J.D. (Tellingly, he was not working in law — a symptom of the lawyer glut.)
They’re mad that they “can’t get jobs.” As Herman Cain points out, surely they can get some kind of job right now — just not in a trendy place like New York, Boston, or Seattle (cities where the Occupy movements have sprung up). In that time-honored Grapes of Wrath–esqe tradition, they could put Ma in the flatbed and set off cross-country to look for work. The job will probably be a low-paying one, and conservatives would do well not to sugarcoat this fact. Wages for entry-level and semi-skilled workers have barely budged in ten years. I credit this to employer’s wariness about hiring anyone at all. Hiring people (and all the litigation risks they present) is simply too risky unless that hire is obviously going to enhance the bottom line. Risks on the young and the untested are simply unacceptable in a tight economy tied down with regulation.
In short, if an Occupy Wall Street kid is ever inclined to look for work, the job he finds is not likely to be the groovy one he and his beleaguered parents envisioned when that $200,000 was shelled out for a four-year degree in poli-sci or women’s studies.
So, Occupy Wall Street kids, you’re right — there are some sleazy characters out there! But I wish you’d turn that laser of your rage on the educrats hiding behind their ivy-covered walls; the ones hawking the notion that without a four-year college degree, you’ll end up the gutter; the ones exploiting fear to sell a product that grows more expensive, and more shoddy, every year.
We haven’t had a bad enough economy to test this proposition in a while — an economy that forces employers to hire only the most essential workers — but what we are seeing these days is that a four-year liberal-arts degree is completely non-essential. The only twentysomethings I know who are gainfully employed and living like men, with their own apartments, cars, and girlfriends, are in the building trades. My upstairs neighbor has more work than he can handle designing and installing sound systems in large places like auditoriums and shopping malls.
If there’s going to be a revolution in this country, I would like one part of it to look like this: Vocational schools would be opened again (and celebrated, not marginalized) and parents would tell junior that a four-year degree is off the table unless he knows exactly how he can use it.
I second that! And shame on the politicians on all sides who tell all of us that the only way to get ahead is to get a college degree.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"The only twentysomethings I know who are gainfully employed and living like men, with their own apartments, cars, and girlfriends, are in the building trades."
Not just building trades but *any* trade. The company I work for is on a hiring binge for repair technicians of all kinds.
I also agree that more vocational schools should be opened. There can be only a handful of Steve Jobs; we need an army of Davids that will be able to repair the goods those minds come up with.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think you're positing a false choice-- these protesting college kids weren't ever going to be Steve Jobs (college dropout... how could he and Bill Gates ever succeed without a four year degree??).
More kids should go into the trades, not just because it's good business, but because they're more likely to find themselves in hard work than in what they're doing now. You'll likely get more geniuses like Jobs out of the trades than out of the top hundred graduates of the top hundred schools in the country.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's not a false choice at all. No one knows who is going to be the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Sergei Brin or whatever. But the chances that there will be many Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Sergei Brins are slim. That means that everyone else will be a Joe Six-Pack that specializes in a trade, or is a support staff for the aforementioned group of men.
Geniuses come in all stripes and need not be in a trade or a Harvard school. The fact of the matter is when we force everyone to go to school and increase barriers to entrepreneurship we decrease the likelihood that even a person as marginally talented as a Steve Jobs will come up.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMy son's 22, recent college grad, in his third job sice May, now safely ensconced as an apprentice at a (non-bailed out) NYC financial firm. Has his own apartment in Brooklyn, girlfriend, car. I bought him two suits in July but otherwise he pays his was.
Conversation with him four nights ago, over lasagna at a little Italian place in Manhattan:
"Hey Dad, my friend Pat called and asked if I would go with him to occupy Wall Street"
"what did you tell him?"
"I told him that I already occupied a desk and 42 square feet on the third floor"
Ya gotta love your kids...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseStop talking about these clowns as a "movement" that just "sprung up." This a carefully planned Astroturf operation. Van Jones was talking about this for months and it is clear that the media and Dems (but I repeat myself) have coordinated their talking points.
Let's not cooperate with their fraud by treating these buffoons as a spontaneous, grass roots "movement."
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusebpbatista is correct. This is the unrest that Obama warned about a few weeks. It's unbelievable to me that we've elected an honest to goodness dictator type...who actually engages in tactics that dictators do (contrary to the accusations of dictatorial activity that the leftists say...this guy actually thinks and does it).
We're on a 'one way ticket to...' - a banana republic.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI chuckle, since I have degrees in music and linguistics, yet I earn FAR more now working as a blue collar air conditioning installer/technician. The running joke is that I am the only Phi Beta Kappa a/c guy anyone has ever heard of. And I am ok with that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEven with my math degree and experience in computer programming I spent much of the aughts wishing I'd used my Navy time to get a/c apprentice hours. Each rating allows you to accumulate apprentice hours and as a machinist mate I could have gotten most if not all my HVAC hours done the 9 years I was in.
But, like too many kids today I was blinded by college (which I'd dropped out of once already).
Now I have found the kind of career path I thought college would provide, in my mid-40s and 13 years after graduation. How much better would my life have been in many dimensions if I'd looked at the trades more honestly?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI wish commentators would stop getting their jollies over this. These people are job seeking and will get jobs -- eventually. They will be high-paying government jobs with lots of power. These people will be your masters in a future one-party state now coming into being. Everyone of them? No, of course not, but a good many. The people reading this and associated conservatives sites? Not so much I'm afraid. And, yes, you will do what they tell you to do. I hope it works out.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNo, they won't. They'll eventually exhaust themselves with their mindless rage against the machine, then happily suck from the socialist teat, and in rare moments of clarity, laugh at us who will be supporting them through our own hard work. Until such time as the system collapses, at which point they'll all merely starve to death, incapable of acting any more, having succumbed to the nanny state pablum pushers they each aspire to be.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRe: "Wages for entry-level and semi-skilled workers have barely budged in ten years. I credit this to employer’s wariness about hiring anyone at all."
Well no, you can credit that to the glut of immigration both illegal and legal. And that is part and parcel of the Crony Capitalist labor model, cheap, compliant immigrant labor.
And wages for professional workers have hardly budged either. While the Political Elites encourage more math and science study, the Crony Capitalist Elites lobby for more H-1B Visa slots so that they can replace native born American technologists with Asian foreign nationals.
Why should an American student bust his hump in a rigorous science or engineering academic program when he knows he'll be competing with H-1B's who are willing to work as indentured servants for a Green Card? BTW, 95% of those H-1B's are nothing special. They are recruited out of body shops in Chindia.
It's easy for somebody like Gutmann to be a mouthpiece for the Cronies when NRO and the other political portals don't outsource content generation to Asia.
Young Americans at least vaguely know that they are hosed regardless of which direction they take. The only hope in escaping the hyper-corrupt Crony-Politico apparatus in the U.S. is to emigrate.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSteve actually believes that if he restricts high tech immigration, that those immigrants will go back to pulling weeds in a rice patty somewhere.
The reality is that labor is an international commodity. It doesn't matter where they are, they still compete with a depress US wages.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBy that twisted logic, (standard fare from MarkW) the U.S. should throw open its borders totally in a Darwinian race to the bottom.
BTW, I'm waiting for Rich Lowry to outsource his columnists content to Bangalore...
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNothing twisted about the logic. Not that you know the first thing about logic.
I doubt you have any familiarity with Darwin either.
Is it even possible for you to make a rational argument?
Would I throw the door open for high tech immigrants? Heck yes.
Better have them working here creating profit for American companies rather than working elsewhere creating profit for foreign companies.
Whether that programmer works here or in India, he is still competing with American workers. Fact of life and no amount of liberal doggeral is going to change that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMs Gutmann, we were better off dismissing you before reading that explanation and I can well understand your supplementary support for the left-leaning silliness of the protestors.
whatever vocational school you end up attending has our best wishes and hopes for success in helping you regain your balance.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAs noted above, if these kids really wanted to change the corporatist world, they'd quit their expensive colleges and take up protesting illegal immigration.
Also, they'd move to South Dakota and prosper there. Can't get sushi, but you can still get Starbucks.
Besides, there *are* plenty of cities other than NYC, Boston, Seattle and L.A. America's a big place.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseUmm, actually we DO have sushi in South Dakota. I guess that means we "have it all" now =|;0)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI don't quite know what you folks are talking about relative to the trades. The building industry has collapsed in this country. Without new houses going up, there isn't much need for nail pounders. I represented a carpentry sub-k that had 500+ workers at its peak. It's now down to 28.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCome to Texas. You can't hear yourself think for all the hammering, nailing and other loud noises associated with building projects. Mind you, the hammers and nail guns are wielded almost exclusively by veterans of the illegal invasion across our southern border. Nevertheless, thanks to the Yankee invasion crossing our northern border, building in our neck of the woods continues apace.
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