RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are many reasons that the liberal meme about the unfairness of income inequality is misleading. Still, there is income inequality, and one of the largest causes of income inequality is the difference in rewards to those trained in technologies and those not. See this graphic of the difference in pay among those in hi-tech jobs and those in service jobs. Those with technical skills, also, go on to build successful businesses of their own and get wealthier. As the CBO report on income inequality points out, an increased proportion of the wealthier are those applying skills rather than clipping coupons or withdrawals from trust funds.

Our 4-year (yeah, I know, for many it’s 5 or 6 years) colleges do not produce enough graduates in the sciences, nor for that matter do they offer much training in the supporting tech vocational skills. As a result, we import immigrants with hi-tech skills and innovate to transfer more work to machines. Both of these do add to the nation’s productivity and wealth, to some extent benefiting the poor through funding government welfare programs and to some extent benefiting the non-tech middle class through added comforts and medical breakthroughs. But, still left behind are the earnings of those without hi-tech skills.
Our colleges serve their faculty with jobs for those in the humanities. Our colleges serve students with perhaps interesting courses, and delayed adult responsibilities, who do not acquire marketable skills. The opportunity costs are enormous of college enclaves buffered from the laws of supply and demand.
Community (2-year) colleges have many vocational and certificate programs of value to businesses, many allied with local businesses, and offer many entry-level courses for matriculation into 4-year colleges and at lesser tuition. But, they also offer wide-panoplies of fun courses for the young and for adults, courses that detour spending away from vocational curriculums and away from hiring higher-paid, more competent faculty. Private technical schools and vocational colleges do partly fill the gaps in training, the well-motivated with adaptive attitudes and sufficient intelligence getting better paid and more secure jobs. However, most of the brightest are blindly steered into conventional colleges’ humanities degrees (including various “diversity” degrees) where they do not acquire marketable skills. One could argue that most of them, however, lack the interest and application to be successful in technical degree programs anyway. The country-club environment of most traditional colleges is a lure as well. Many of the attendees in the private technical schools and vocational degree programs are either ripped-off by shoddy operations or are not up to meeting the challenges. One could argue that many of these at least are trying to fit into the job market and many, although not the top-caliber to fill the best technical jobs, will at least find better jobs than otherwise.
The biggest barrier to reforming traditional colleges toward more emphasis on marketable skills is the opposition of their humanities faculty exerted within and outside academia via alliances with liberal politicians and with parents whose children are voluntarily misplaced in delayed adulthood. The largest costs in traditional colleges are faculty and the fixed and operating costs of elaborate campuses. Funds are better spent on science facilities than on stadiums or lush lawns or humanities buildings and theaters. The latter are nice to have, but must be self-supporting to the college and benefit the job prospects of graduates.
The economic weight on most parents and students of a college education is a counter that is leading to more online coursework and other potential economies. However, these teaching economies only scratch the surface. Market pressures also work to pay technical professors more than those in the humanities, and commercializing technical professors’ research discoveries further compensates them. There is income inequality within academia for largely the same reason as outside, demand for technical skills. However, we still have too few graduates with technical degrees, partly made up for by importing bright, ambitious students from abroad, who if they stay do contribute greatly to our national wealth, some of which trickles down in jobs and innovations.
The main prop to continuing this dysfunctional college course, pushing and subsidizing loans, is facing its crisis. Neither students without marketable degrees nor taxpayers with other more pressing demands on income nor governments with forced reductions in spending can afford the scale or dispersion of today’s college loans. Even President Obama’s unaffordably (what else is new?!) fiddling with paybacks of loans cannot push back this tide. This reality will impel, will speed, the reform of our traditional colleges toward more technical steering of students into added technical and vocational coursework.
Reforms of traditional colleges are inevitable. The prices paid for following the laws of supply and demand coupled with the end of distorting props to delaying facing the rule of the market will see to that. Not everyone can be a hi-tech worker, but neither can so many be English or gender or history majors. The sooner the imbalance is shifted, the better off will be students, parents, the benefiting middle and poorer quintiles, and society generally.