Said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce:
The industries [which need workers] that we're talking about are fairly broad-based, but the ones that are most striking are industries that have lots of what I would call 'orphan jobs.' Manufacturing, utilities, transportation, mining — a whole set of agricultural jobs.
All those industries, he said, 'are dying.' But because so many baby boomers will be retiring in the next decade, those industries will still produce 'huge numbers of job openings that we can't fill.'
In manufacturing alone, 'while the overall number of jobs will decline by a million jobs over the next decade, there will be 3 million job openings due to retirement.'
Lots of baby boomers retiring is not just bad news because they'll be milking Social Security and Medicare and bankrupting the federal treasury -- it's good news because they'll open up jobs for younger workers. But not enough younger workers are qualified. And this leads to another problem I've talked about for years: the lack of real, quality vocational training in the U.S.
Continued Carnevale [bold and italics mine]:
'If we decide that we're going to, especially in high school, begin to train people for vocations — especially vocations that ... don't require four year[s of] college — we'll quickly find that the kids who are available for that are black, Hispanic or low income. ... We'll end up 'tracking.' That makes it very difficult for political leadership and policy leadership to focus on this issue. It creates a moral dilemma where we can, if we want to, make people better off. But if we stick to the purity of our ideals, which is that everybody goes to college and gets a four-year degree, we're not going to be able to get there.'
Well, then our ideals are all screwed up! Only 51.5 percent of able-bodied black Americans is employed right now, the lowest number since 1984. And black unemployment (meaning those who are looking for work but can't find any) is about 16.1 percent, compared to 11.8 percent for Latinos and about 9 percent for whites. That's an economic depression for minorities, folks.
We've convinced ourselves that college is for everybody and it's not. Meanwhile, colleges are getting worse and worse, catering to the lowest common denominator, while raising everybody's tuition, making the whole higher ed. system a cynical, ineffective diploma factory.
So elementary and high schools, track away! Let vocational students earn decent middle-class manufacturing wages and then send their kids to college, if that's their ideal. After all, the American Dream is to better yourself and leave your kids better off than you by working hard and playing by the rules.
By Mark Memmott
June 15, 2011 | NPR
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