How to Save $634 billion a Year and solve our labor shortage problem
I read in the WSJ that 45% of college graduates in this country are working in jobs that don’t require a degree. If my college math still applies, that means that we don’t need almost half the colleges that we have. So, to save the victims of attaining unneeded degrees from themselves, at great expense, we should just close them down.
We don’t even need to pass a law to do this. Just stop guaranteeing the loans to students at the bottom 45% of colleges. Barrons, US News, and other publications can be used to work out which are the worst colleges. Or we can look to see which colleges have the least percentage of their grads working in jobs requiring a degree. And cut off loan guarantees. Or both. Note the government has already done this to the for profit educational industry, so there is precedent here.
We can trim the waste in other ways. For example, the WSJ article specifies which majors have the least percentage of grads in appropriate degreed jobs. Unsurprisingly, Humanities and Cultural Studies, Psych, Communications and Journalism, and “Other” degreed grads lead the county in having gotten degrees that they did not need. And since no one actually does journalism anymore, we don’t need ANY of them.
If you read the WSJ article, you will find that examples of students who got a degree but are working jobs where a degree was a waste of their time and money, you will find that they went to Northern Kentucky U or have a degree in “interdisciplinary” studies. Just a few examples of where to look to cut waste and help the people who got duped.
The degrees with most demand in the job market, also not surprisingly, business (quantitative), engineering, math and stats, computer science. Almost all of grads with degrees in these majors, needed the degree. For the most part, they are getting their money’s worth.
So if we cut off the colleges that are churning out shelf stockers and buristas, and the degrees producing same, we can collectively save the kids billions. And produce billions to the economy and the national debt reduction.
I hereby present a (decidedly) back of the envelope analysis indicating the degree of educational waste producing a drain on our economy. About 18 million total students are paying real money to get an college degree, 11 million full time and 7 million part time. Three million are grad students.
Estimating the waste involved
Note, this amounts to about 3% of our economy. Think of the impact of freeing 8.1 millions young people from the societal mandate to get a degree, turning them from weed addled marxists into productive citizens. According to our Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 9 million open positions in the US today. Voila, we have solved the labor shortage, saved impressionable young people $313K each, and unleashed untold productivity gains.
We can add several hundreds of thousands of college professors, DEI bureaucrats, currently wasting our youth’s money and time to the workers sent out to complete actual productive work.
By the way, I highly recommend that we turn our high schools into part college prep, the rest into vocational training. About 37% of the US high school grads have a college degree. So maybe we have 45% of high schoolers in the prep program, having Chaucer and environmental science crammed into their heads. The rest should be directed to a vocational pursuit of their choice.
The model for all for all of this, of course, is the way that the rest of the rational world handles undergrad education. You take a test, an educational sorting hat. Those that pass can go to college. The rest take vocational training.
We can save further billions by helping employers get trained employees, rather than untrained college grads who think productive work is beneath them. I bet the businesses would provide the training materials for free.
In the process, we get rid of the kids who cause trouble in school because they don’t want to be there. Saving many a teachers’ sanity, although notably there will be many fewer of them needed.
In summary, we are allowing the disreputable college educational industrial complex to exploit impressionable and underage young people for their own gain. We are harming our economy. To boot, we have allowed the educational establishment to stifle debate, advocate for radical social and economic policies, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. Plus they don’t pay real estate taxes.
So who agrees with me here? Close up Broward State, Dixie State, Lake Sumter State, etc. and any private/high tuition college who accepts most or all of their of applicants. You guys in?
My sources
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm
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