Needed now and next decade: Electricians, roofers, plumbers

[Igel]

32. This is known and quantified.

We graduate too many 4-year degrees. Many of them take jobs that 2-year certificate holders could do as well. In other words, many workers are overqualified, whatever their official job requirements are. They're the 4-year-degree holders that suffer from fairly flat wages and a problem with unemployment when recessions end.

We graduate far too few 2-year-certificate holders. Even when you see a nifty new community college program it's most often not for plumbing or welding but for something sexy and high-tech, animation or CAD or automated assembly lines.

Too many Americans stop with high school. Those 2-year-certificate skills and jobs are needed, but with just a high-school degree you don't qualify. Those with just high-school degrees have a huge unemployment rate, their net wages are the ones that have declined over time. That "wages haven't increased in 20 years" is an average of an increase for some and a decrease for others.

Then there are all the drop outs, as high as 50% in some urban areas. They self-screw on a regular basis, because they have a very high unemployment rate and lowest wage increase over time. For many, it's not just a lack of education and skills but also behavior.

People have put numbers to the excess 4-year-degrees, the short-fall in 2-year degrees, and the maximum number of just-high-school grads that the economy's been able to accept for various years.

Politicians cannot tell parents that their kids, given their track record, should go to trade school, for a lot of reasons. And few have the guts to tell high-school drop-outs that mostly they screwed themselves--some have failed homes or other problems, but most just give teachers hell and make their schools failing until they drop out because, well, they just hate school--either learning, not seeing how it'll help them, or being "grown up" or "independent" by refusing to comply with orders. For some, resistance to everything is how they get their self-respect; they, of course, are fools.