Morris Goodman, a Dearborn attorney, past president of the Dearborn Democratic Club, a longtime political activist and observer and regular reader of Deepsaidwhat.com now adds “education snob” to his list.
Goodman says education issues should take center stage in the 2012 Presidential election.
“ . . . it is mind boggling to realize that just at the time that the nation is coming to grips with the importance of an educated workforce in a global economy, we are cutting funding at the national, state, and local levels for publicly supported K-12 and higher education. This is even more pronounced in Michigan,” Goodman says.
“ Teacher salaries and benefits are going down and class sizes are going up. Moreover, public university tuition for those who want to teach is going up and aid to these students is going down. Also, the interest on federally insured student loans is now immediately payable, rather being deferred for some time as previously was the case, and these loans must be paid back sooner. Let’s see, our prospective teachers have to pay more to earn less. Hmmm. What’s wrong with this picture?”
His column begins below:
Morris Goodman
I am an education snob. Among my wife two sons, daughter-in-law, and me, there are 5 Masters degrees and one law degree (yup, that’s mine). It turns out that this snobbishness is also an important employment indicator. While this is not a surprising fact, the extent of the advantage a good education provides is. Presently there are radio ads for a local college touting the fact that a person with a college degree will earn on average $1.3 million over a lifetime more than someone with only a high school degree. Quite a difference.
At the beginning of December the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the United States added 120,000 new jobs in November and the unemployment rate fell to 8.6%, the lowest since March 2009. In the mass of data released at the same time by the BLS, several facts leaped out at me. First of all, the unemployment rate for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 4.4% and for those with only a high school degree the rate was 8.8% – precisely double. For those with no high school degree the rate was 13.2% or three times the rate for those with a college degree.
We all know that most new jobs being created in the U S today, even at the entry level, require more than a high school education. The auto industry used to employ just about anyone who could read and was willing to work. Recent articles about auto manufacturing jobs stress that almost all positions on the car assembly line or at parts plants require workers who have fairly sophisticated computer skills to operate the all pervasive robotic machines.
In our economic recovery, both nationally and particularly in Michigan, everything points to added employment in the next few years in auto related work. So clearly we, as a nation and state, need to put resources into preparing our student population for those kinds of jobs. Thus, it is mind boggling to realize that just at the time that the nation is coming to grips with the importance of an educated workforce in a global economy, we are cutting funding at the national, state, and local levels for publicly supported K-12 and higher education. This is even more pronounced in Michigan.
Teacher salaries and benefits are going down and class sizes are going up. Moreover, public university tuition for those who want to teach is going up and aid to these students is going down. Also, the interest on federally insured student loans is now immediately payable, rather being deferred for some time as previously was the case, and these loans must be paid back sooner. Let’s see, our prospective teachers have to pay more to earn less. Hmmm. What’s wrong with this picture?
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