Young adults today: No school, no job, living at home with mom and dad

Wow, you really have a low opinion of people, and your "govt solves everything" attitude shines through.

So people who complete secondary education are too ignorant to get a job and cannot perform complex chores but are capable of voting? That certainly fits in with the socialist "progressive" scheme off allowing as many ignorant and uneducated to vote as possible.

If people graduate from secondary schools and are incapable of performing complex chores and incapable of getting a job then they probably went to public school (govt school).

 

Pestiferous nonsense from the Rabid Right.

Only a tiny, tiny mind would come to that conclusion from the phrase highlighted above; typical of the Rabid-Right in America.

Whatever you know about "socialism" you've learned obviously from Fox News. For your edification, because apparently you need it, here is the definition of Socialism. Which exists nowhere on this planet meaningfully as a political force (except North Korea, and even there it's just a cover-up for familial dictatorship) ...

It's tiresome exchanging with you. So, on you go to "Ignore".

 

You ARE naive.

The above is simply not true and displays your ignorance of what "knowledge" is essentially.

Moving right along ...

 

Ask anyone who has taken such courses. They all agree that classwork is essential to understand the subject.

And evidently, you've never been in that condition ...

 

The assumption is that there will be the jobs for these higher-educated people, which I don't think is a safe assumption.

We are in the opening phases of the post-work society, where the economic contribution of humans is in consumption rather than in production.

The role of the state will become larger as a re-distributor of wealth from the producers back to consumers, rather than wages. This may operate through taxes, but more likely (at the moment) through endlessly-increasing government debt issues.

The redistribution will occur by the either the government being an "employer of last resort" or just flat-out welfare. State-funded education would also be a means to keep people busy and funnel wealth to them so they can maintain consumption.

 

Yes, indeed! So why is "personal money-management" therefore not a common subject in secondary-schooling?

The same tragic consequence is happening as regards Civic Duty. Our voting rates - for a large democracy such as ours - is pitiful when compared to other nations. See here the infographic from Pew Research: U.S. trails most developed countries in voter turnout

We ask often "Just what are they learning at high-school?" And the answers are always the essence of some very fevered discussions.

Moreover, the option-to-go-private is vastly overblown. All it does is worsen the class distinction between the "haves" and the "have-nots".

And that is the sort of social division that could explode in our face! Have we already forgot the Watts Riots? Do we need a repeat, perhaps in multiple states and all at the same time one very hot summer? (Remember that you saw that question first asked here.)

Should MLK ever return to witness the condition of "his people", he would cry himself a river!

And why? Because since Reckless Ronnie lowered upper-income taxation, the US has gone an binge of Wealth Accumulation - with most of it going topside to a highly select 1% of the population and nothing but misery shared at the bottom.

That's a damn fine societal-recipe for an explosion ...

 

Except what working for something really means

 

LOL, in other words you cannot refute my arguments.

 

I have a larger faith in the economy than you do.

What I know about Supply&Demand (since I teach the subject) is that if the right product/service is proposed at the right price, people will flock to it. But, it all depends upon what is the "right product/service".

And, to my mind, the answer to that question is free Tertiary Education that permits a high-schooler to obtain a decent job at decent pay - which otherwise s/he will never ever obtain without it!

And my reading of the data from the National Center for Education Statistics underlines that fact.

The good news (from the NCES, here):

And what about the other almost 20% of students who "dropped out". What became of them? Or are they feeding our unemployment statistics? That's more than 630K-students who have no high-school diploma every year.

These numbers look good, but the are selected (I think) to flatter the system. Moreover, the numbers do not take into account "vocational degrees" that whilst "postsecondary" are not included in the numbers.

My Point: No analysis is done of those who "do not obtain either a high-school diploma or post-secondary degree". I suspect personally that this bombshell is waiting to explode despite the fact that we have low unemployment presently and an economy that is "creating jobs".

Why? Because the Employment-to-population Ratio is a long way towards getting back up to where it was before the Great Depression in 2008.

See that fact demonstrated graphically here ...

 

What would you give as an example of a subject that one cannot learn by using free online sources?

 

Don't buy **** you can't afford, .........done!

 

Its off peak but not too bad historically and the trend is encouraging.....

 

That graph is not as good as it looks when you remember that the labor force participation rate for women used to be substantially lower than it is today.



Here, why don't we compare the difference between men and women:



Beginning around 40 to 50 years ago, more women started leaving the home to enter the workforce, setting a long-term trend. There were a few reasons for this. In the late 70s there began to be better career opportunities for women. However, by the mid 80s, housing prices were going up and it began to take a 2-income household to be able to afford a comfortable standard of living.

 

A few comments. I'm not going to bother quoting.

1. A college degree has very little value anymore. We are seeing more and more requiring advanced degrees to get off the ground level. Making college free would increase the cost for college while at the same time further devaluing those degrees.

2. Minimum wage wasn't meant to be the wages you strive for.

 

It is indeed, but what we went through during the Great Recession was seismic. Jobs were leaving manufacturing by the droves before 2008 (the onset of the GR). And in the come-back neither will manufacturing be a big bread-winner except for those who know how to implement robotic manufacturing systems.

And that takes higher level skills that I keep harping about. So, it is in the Services Industries where jobs must be created. That too requires obtaining advanced skills nowadays - and not just manipulating a smartphone.

I'm not harping about a Free Tertiary Education because it amuses me. After this last electoral debacle, it is evident that Americans either (1) don't know what is happening to their market-economy historically, or (2) they don't want to know. I suspect strongly the latter.

Most countries flounder because its peoples think the good-times should last forever just because they should last forever.

Highly myopic is that sentiment ...

 

That's not going to happen all by itself.

It is silly to think that parents should be responsible for the future of their kids. The statistics show that one whole helluva lotta kids are never going to have the credentials necessary in this Brave New World of the Information Age.

And manipulating a smartphone is just not enough. You gotta have real smarts to survive well in the future ...

 

This is the information age. The information necessary to acquire virtually any skill is available online for free to those who are willing to put in the time and effort.

 

And ironically, as that information becomes more accessible, it becomes worth less in the economy (or it commands a lower premium). Why should I pay you to get generalized expert information I can simply google?

 

That's a good point

 

Indeed, but as we are finding through the phenomenon of fake news, there is a skill to assessing the quality of information, and that skill has value.

So there are two key value determinants: the brand of the information source and the skills of the recipient. Companies do pay for access to quality news sources. A quality news source can be identified through the absence of advertising.

For those who can't afford to pay, an education is necessary in order to discern the value of data received.

 

Quite. What happened is the value of human labor decreased in comparison to the value of capital assets.
Lafayette believes education increases the comparative value of labor.
But the same phenomenon will (has?) occur(red) with graduate jobs as with women's participation, it just floods the pool. Wages won't go up because the demand for graduate-level work won't increase. There will just be more competition for the same work.

 

I agree except that I don't think the answer is to try to improve the labor force but to accept that humans are becoming a decreasingly important part of the value chain.

Its been happening for centuries. In the industrial revolution we stuck them all in the military, and then had wars. After WWII that we stuck them into extended education, firstly at high school and now that's worthless, now into tertiary until that's also worthless, then doctorates etc etc etc.

Yeah, put them into education. Its something to do to while away the time until we die. But lets stop pretending there's an economic benefit to them from it.

 

GROSS UNFAIRNESS

That comment depends upon what you mean by the "Value Chain". Please define it.

Because, unless I am misunderstanding you, what humans do (called a "market-economy") is Demand goods/services that humans Supply to other humans. And the Internet has shown that, in terms for instance of Retail Merchandizing, that it can be done better, faster and cheaper.

That factual innovation has put a lot of humans out of work! Those people were for the most part lower-paid because advanced skills/competencies were not a truly required necessity. The Internet also is changing the work-rules. A higher level of competence is necessary to run the very same merchandizing process.

I suspect that Amazon, for instance, has hired one helluva lot of college graduates to manage the Sales-Merchandizing System, and not so many lesser-qualified "pickers" for order.-fulfillment (per volume of sales).

However, prove me wrong - if you can ...

The Industrial Age started in the mid-19th century - and, yes, we've had quite a few wars since. The fact that we are able to kill more (of the "enemy") quicker is a direct attribute of industrial-age mechanization. I am not sure, however, if that is that in any great advance of mankind - though the US spends more than half of its Discretionary Budget showing the world how it can wreak havoc anywhere on this planet at a moment's notice.

You happen to live at the opposite end of the life-style spectrum of mankind on this planet. I suggest you take a trip to the darkest part of Africa to see the other end of the spectrum.

Education is what differentiates a market-economy in terms of Supply&Demand. Nothing differentiates it more. If one looks at the 20% of Americans who earn the most Income of all, they are mostly well-educated people. See here: Median weekly earnings by educational attainment in 2014. The correlation between the two (Education & Income) is irrefutable.

(Money isn't everything, you will say. And I will agree. But Education IS!)

Our particular problem is that we do not have an effective governance that assures that the disparity in living-standards (aka "Income") is managed by effective Upper-income Taxation (ever since Reckless Ronnie's administration. The Piketty analysis of Wealth (that is Net Income after Taxation) distribution that I put often enough shows clearly that the Top 0.1% of American families possess as much Wealth as the Bottom 90%.

And that sort of Gross Unfairness does not seem to move you in the least ...

 

What you call devaluing those degrees, I call educating the population - raising the standards so we can compete with China, for example, which has more Ph.D students than we have students.

A college degree has tremendous value. In many fields it is considered an entry-level requirement. But more STEM degrees are needed. Every time I hear a student say they are majoring in history or French literature, I want to pull out my eyeballs.

My degrees have paid off for decades. Time and time again they gave me the edge I needed to compete in a highly competitive technology market. And I don't mean perception. I mean the ability to do the job. There are a lot of crackpots out there and I have spent many years cleaning up their messes.

 

Starting with the printing press, innovation has been a disaster for humans