GELFAND ON … POLITICS- For two generations, politicians running for office have promised to make education more available so today's youth can get good jobs. By now, even the politicians must understand how little sense this makes.
We ought to start by agreeing that educating people for jobs that don't exist and will never exist is a travesty. We can point out that the worldwide population explosion has created hundreds of millions of people who work for very little, putting an end to many of our own manufacturing jobs. The computer and the internet have made their own contributions to job losses.
At a third level, we have the implosion of whole economic sectors, which is a story in its own right. However you put it, the politicians have been misleading the American public because they themselves are without answers.
The problem has even impacted a profession that you might think would be bullet proof. A few years ago, a law professor started to expose the developing scandal in legal education, which is that there are way too many law school graduates and way too few good jobs for them. Loss of jobs in the legal industry is just the latest in declining American industries. It's unlike the decline of American steelmaking, where overseas competition caused domestic business to fall. With that fall, the number of jobs in steel plummeted. In the legal sector, we didn't need foreign competition to damage a whole generation of American students.
One other contrast: Jobs in the steel mills and the auto plants did not depend on having tens of thousands of Americans earning postgraduate degrees. The jobs depended on a continuing domestic and foreign demand for American made products, and that depended on American manufactured goods being competitive in price and quality. Higher education had very little to do with the rise of American manufacturing power, and very little to do with its decline.
We watched that whole economic structure self-implode, as the automotive, electronics, heavy machinery, and other sectors moved overseas more and more. The word outsourcing has become the lifeline for American capital and the death knell to the American middle class.
Faced with an unsolvable quandary, the political classes grabbed for their own lifeline. For several decades, it has been that magic word education. That this is mostly a fantasy has been demonstrated well enough by experience. It has been a tragedy for the last two generations of America's youth and has resulted in enormous government expenditures that are not well suited to our real problems.
At one level, government expenditures have actually added to the problem, as can be demonstrated by the case of legal education. The law school scandal is just one example among many, but it is illustrative in several ways. We have Prof. Paul Campos to thank for exposing the problem.
It seems to have taken three or four years for the story to become widely accepted, but blogs like Inside the Law School Scam have started to have an effect. What Campos and his colleagues exposed, in the face of enormous academic resistance, was that there were way too many law school graduates. At the peak of the recent recession, there were about twice as many law school graduates as there were decent jobs for them.
On top of that, the price of going to law school has been rising to the point that law school grads often enter the world of employment with student loan balances upwards of $150,000.
A major part of the problem stems from federal loan guarantees that cover tuition -- costs that often exceed $40,000 per year. Students coming out of college and entering law school get locked into a system which is sort of like welfare dependency. They amass these huge debts, but very few of them now get the kind of highly paid jobs that would allow them to pay those debts off in less than a couple of decades. As a result, they are locked into a debt spiral that may last for many years, and under the law, these student loan debts cannot be discharged by bankruptcy.
As undergraduates in America's colleges gradually have become aware of the facts, they have reacted as we might expect. Law school applications are down, enrollments are down, and the number of law schools that are either losing money or laying off faculty are also up. You can sort through the Campos blog if you need to be convinced.
By the way, Campos currently blogs at Lawyers, Guns & Money where you can read how the lower tier law schools are trying to survive.
The Law School Scam blog covers most of the usual journalistic inquiry -- the who, what, when, and where. But figuring out the why is a different matter.
Some of the answer is a bit controversial, which is to say that the academic establishment wants us to believe that the situation will eventually improve. They want to sell the idea that law school graduates will someday once again have a good shot at moving into well paying positions.
But the explanation which fits the current data is that job availability in well paying, established law firms is not growing, or at least not growing at a rate that would solve the employment problem. In fact, quite a few firms have had to figure out how to reduce their own costs because their clients, even the rich corporations that hire them, have learned that they can ask for more work but pay less. The clients have figured out that they shouldn't have to pay full fare for work that could be done by a law student or a paralegal.
In other words, the ownership class has figured out how to squeeze the last ounce of work out of everyone, starting at Walmart and now extending to law firms. Some of this began in the recent recession circa 2008, but it continues.
And yes, even some legal work can be outsourced, because it is basically button pushing. None of this is to say that there won't be well paying jobs for Harvard graduates, or that elite lawyers won't continue to make millions of dollars. They do and they will continue to do so.
But the idea that an average American college graduate of a major university -- that is to say, a pretty good student by any standard -- can routinely expect to have a comfortable, middle class career in the law is no longer the case. The legal industry has joined the manufacturers of radios and television sets as an iffy prospect for the American student.
Here's another example.
A generation ago, American students were encouraged to study computer science and information technology, since that was a growing field. Funny thing though, the biggest companies involved in the field used their political clout to push for something called the H-1B visa. This is a system that allows a large number of foreigners to come to the United States to work in the tech field. In 2012, the U.S. granted 135,000 H-1B visas.
Now think about the students at Cal State Long Beach or the University of Nevada, people who have been sold the idea that getting a technical education in a major growth industry is the path to a middle class existence. Then look at how they are getting nudged out of the job market through a system that is widely recognized to be a way of providing cheap labor to companies in the tech sector.
The same politicians who were making all those pious pronouncements about education being the path to prosperity were the ones who kept extending the law that created the H-1B system.
We have an economic system which doesn't create enough secure, well paid jobs, and the lack of jobs is pretty much unlinked to the number of college students getting a Bachelor of Arts degree. There are not nearly enough science jobs to provide comfortable careers to the mass of Ph.D's, and we all know the jokes about newly minted graduates with non-technical degrees having to take jobs in the fast food industry.
A century ago, the United States built a commercial empire on cheap oil and underpaid immigrant factory workers. It was also a time when a substantial fraction of the work force found jobs in agriculture. All of these conditions have changed. In the face of unrelenting foreign competition, the American manufacturing sector has had to adapt or die. It has adapted to some extent by replacing humans with machines. It's true that the humans who operate the new machines require a higher level of understanding than the workers who arrived off the boat a century ago, but there are far fewer jobs to fill.
There aren't a lot of simple solutions to these problems, but we might start by telling the truth to our students about what they will be facing. The competition they will be facing for gaining and holding onto middle class status is not likely to be getting any easier, and waving a magic wand by talking about education in the abstract is not really going to help things. Figuring out a pathway towards a resurgent American export sector is the important thing. If we can do that, then the educational requirements will solve themselves.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch and can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 12
Pub: Feb 11, 2014
