Nobody should be left behind

After a few years of blogging, I deleted all the posts in one stroke.  All gone. 

A few months later, I re-started the blog in 2008. 

In one of the earliest posts in this re-invented blog space, on September 19, 2008, I wrote about one of my commentaries that was published in The Register Guard on August 27, 2007.

In that commentary in 2007, I wrote:

Of course, university education is not merely about economic productivity. It is also to develop a culture of learning and an appreciation of various aspects of life. Personally, I am immensely thankful for the opportunity that I have to pursue learning as my vocation. But at a huge cost to the youth, are we incorrectly advocating that college education is the only avenue for individuals to be economically productive?

I recall that my opinion did not go well with some in higher education.  Of course it won't when, as Upton Sinclair phased it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

For years, even in my California days, I have been arguing for higher education and career/technical education (CTE.)  I have been appalled at how much we have been systematically marginalizing CTE, even taking a condescending attitude towards it, and pushing college for all. 

And, oh, meanwhile Reagan's politics have taken a firm hold on the public and college has been severely under-funded by taxpayers, which makes those from lower-income backgrounds take on huge debts to go to college.

The result has been a shitstorm.

Angus Deaton, a recent recipient of the economics prize in Nobel's memory, and his colleague and wife, Anne Case, looked into the opioid crisis deaths and their study resulted in the much talked about Deaths of Despair.  They find that the undergraduate degree is one hell of a marker of tragedies.

[The] extraordinary thing for us was just how much power that bachelor’s cutoff had—in morbidity and mortality, marriage, out of wedlock childbearing, and churchgoing—everything you could think of.  We have a real problem in this country. We valorize this bachelor’s degree in a ridiculous way that’s not pinned to anything that people can actually do. It’s this one goal which leaves behind the two thirds of the people in this country who are not going to get it.

One would think that democratic politics, which depend on votes, would seize the opportunity to address the two-thirds, right?

Wrong!  Here is Deaton:

But the politics of not having a bachelor’s are really bad too. The Democrats largely decided to abandon the working class and build a coalition of educated elites and minorities (including working-class minorities), and the Republicans basically followed business and religious organizations.

tRump spoke to the whites in this two-thirds and won a couple of key states by thin margins.  It appears that they are yet to wake up to the reality that he merely wanted their votes and that he has been screwing them even more than what real Republicans used to do.

Deaton has more to say about college and occupations:

I do think it would be better if everybody who’s capable of and wants to get a college degree could get a college degree, and the high cost of state universities is working against that.... Nothing I want to say would want to detract from that, but our education system, which is geared from kindergarten to send people to college, only graduates a third of its students from college. It is a disgrace, because the other two thirds are in this vulnerable group. ... I think we’ve got to change our educational system so that it offers multiple things. You’ve got to find other things for people to do, and a much greater multiplicity of valorization of occupations.

Warren Buffett, whom I have quoted a lot in this blog, also had a lot to say about how we--as a society--are not taking care of everybody.  In responding to a question at the virtual shareholder meeting, Buffett emphasized that “Nobody should be left behind."

Buffett, who’s been a cheerleader for America, added that the wealthiest country in the world should “try to create a society that under normal conditions with more than $60,000 of GDP per capita, that anybody that worked 40 hours a week can have a decent life without a second job and with a couple of kids.”

Unfortunately, nothing has changed much in higher education in all these years since my column was published in 2007.

Maybe we have reached a point where we will be compelled to initiate reforms that should have begun more than two decades ago!  But, radical transformations will have tragic consequences for many.  Only time will tell!