a free market university system fails when it is heavily subsidized by the government. with 1.5 trillion in student debt and 40K average per borrower, truck driving school is like 5 grand but very hard for trainees to get federal subsidy.
Works in Europe... They go all the way to doctorate too. Where's red crackpot and his BeMoreLiekURup hashtag?
germany has much harder entrance requirements. you can either pay in full and only admit people who will complete their degree, or give everyone a chance and put truck drivers in philosophy courses. I don't think americans will be OK with stopping a few million people from going to university tho
I think it is probably a tragedy of the commons. The labor pool is a shared resource. No company wants to make investments to improve a worker's skills only to have that worker go to a competitor. I do think the competitive market should be able to solve that problem themselves though, so I don't understand why they haven't. Companies can make tuition deals with workers to keep them captive until the investment in their training pays off. Companies could jointly seed trade associations or unions to provide worker training and then it wouldn't matter which competitor the worker ended up at.
So change the subsidies then.... There are private university systems that compete: University of Phoenix.
they still get government subsidies. being private is moot. public universities spend hundreds of millions of dollars to attract all the students then can because the government guarantees their tuition this incentive's via trillions of dollars for people to go to universities, no dollars for truck driving school and then we wonder why we don't have welders and drivers. If all subsidies stopped people would make better decisions and the cost of tuition would drop like a rock
No arguments here. I did not have an issue with the way it used to be. I think the drivers are more than capable of self regulating. Trust me, this new system has caused me a lot of grief up to this point. I am the QA/Supply Chain Manager for my site. The supply chain part has been a pain in the rear trying to focus my team to accurately forecast raw material needs way ahead of production which can be a moving target. The QA (Quality Assurance) part of that title has me answering every single customer complaint due to a late shipments which greatly increased before we adjusted.
So subsidize training for welders, truck drivers, etc.... Again, there’s nothing stopping trade groups from getting together and starting schools to train workers in their respective industries. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat. All subsidies stopping isn’t a viable idea.
I like Germany's trade apprenticeship program. You don't need a 4 yr degree to fix cars or drive automation to assemble them. The cultural difference is that there's a polite amount of respect given and received for a person's craft, whether it be a professional waiter or garbageman. That likely fits into the American mindset of "trade school" vs "4-5 yr degree".
I agree with all this. But what would also happen is a big reduction in social mobility and an increase in wealth disparity. Education will be less attainable for people with few resources, and their poverty will perpetuate down to future generations. I'd like a system where government wasn't distorting markets and incentivizing bloat, but not if economic disparity is the cost. I think the culprit in education as well as healthcare is not just government intrusion and not just market forces, but the hybrid of the two. If all college education was free from government assistance, the market would keep costs down; if college education was all public with no profit motive, costs wouldn't climb. But, the government trying to create economic parity with market incentives has introduced a huge principal-agent problem, which you've identified, that's killing us. My preferred solution, I think, is for the state schools to reverse the trend of making colleges market competitive and instead approach education as a public service. Meanwhile, pull out all the government intervention with private schools. Smart people can still go to Harvard on scholarship, rich people can still pay their way to go to Harvard, but most people will be going for free to state university systems. It'd look a lot more like K-12 education, which has its own problems. We need to change our attitude (especially in Texas) about how important it is to us to pay taxes so that other people get educated.
Not sure how this is your conclusion. A welder with a rig can make 40 dollars an hour and not graduate high school. Send that same guy to community college and then a crap university to fail out of and he has 20K in student loans and no skills. The problem with higher education is more and more it is not career training and just debt accumulation.
As if if today, your statement holds true. What about 50 years from now when current manufacturing technology is capable of this: Obviously we still need welders for custom fab jobs but how long do you think that will last?
As long as pipelines move oil, LNG, etc around our country. Changes are typically slow and if you work in an industry you typically learn new skills along the way. It isn't like they taught matlab in the 1980's.
If you work in an industry as a welder, I doubt you will be exposed to mathmatics and physics and learn to use them in a design process. Wleding is a specefic skillset. Trade school to teach welding teaches a specific skill. There will be a time when welding as a proffesion will be obsolete.
Will that be when we have Star Trek transporter technology? I doubt a 19 y/o guy working for 14 dollars an hour as a welders helper and planning to buy his own rig soon cares about sort of long term.
