Figured It Out Yet?

Ah, the modernized, progressing world. We have become more intelligent, have more than any other generation ever dreamed, and yet we are found lacking. About fifty percent of Americans, have some kind of college degree, or higher than secondary level educations. While more and more graduates flood the market, wage suppression has increased. In numbers terms, with a ten percent increase in educated workers, the wages drop six percent. Why you ask, let’s unpack one reason.

First let me ask a simple economics question. If you had only one hundred apples for the population a year, what would happen, aside from a run on apples? I am asking specifically about the price of apples. You educated types, should find that easy math and economics. When you have only a few of anything, it costs more. It costs more to produce the limited quantities too.

On the other side of that coin, if you have a market flooded with apples, and they are abundant, what happens? Demand is relative in both cases here.

When the market supply is abundant or overly abundant, the price of the apple drops exponentially. Buyers of the apples, become more discriminating and selective too. A small and not very shiny apple, will be overlooked for one that is larger and more brilliant. This applies to education and jobs as well.

Educated individuals, have increased in record amount over the last fifty years. In the fifties, only about six percent, had degrees. Last year we sat at around thirty-eight to forty percent. That’s a lot of people flooding the market with a paper saying they are smarter than the average bear. The problem is, that now the other bears also have degrees, and are vying for the same jobs.

Looking at the apple example, more choice, makes employers more selective. When anyone exceeds the standard degree, they will get the job over the lesser degreed person. Simple, not rocket science.

But that supply has a caveat as well. When you have a hundred candidates, let’s assume equally educated and equally worthy of selection, who do you believe the employer will hire? Or what can the employer now do?

He can choose to hire the one that will take less, or he can offer less, because he knows there are plenty of apples in the barrel. I hope this is making sense to everyone.

Now let’s say everyone gets a degree. Then with more choices in the same realm and level of education, the employer with the needed job, can offer much lower wages. The arrogant person who is too good for the pay rate being offered, will remain unemployed, at the very least, a much longer time. It makes sense. If you have a choice between a large shiny apple and next one over looks the same in size and luster, are you going to pay one vendor the higher price tag or pay the vendor that has the lowest price. Math and economic class has now ended.

This is a simplification of the way it works, true, but a depiction of a simple truth, well , a couple truths.

I’m not going to get into the discussion of degreed individuals that come out of university as dumb as a box of rocks, you all can see that on your own. That is a depressing and a sad reflection of our culture. I will get into the fact that we have drilled into our kids generation after generation that they have to have a degree to make it in this world, that a degree is the only option to succeed.

That is not what is actually happening. What we are now seeing, are the trades and tradesmen making much higher wages than college grads. We are also seeing college grads that can’t find work. There are too many of them and too few jobs for them.

Tradesman, in extremely high demand, since our kids are going to college and not into a trade, are making bank. They are no less intelligent, than a degreed person, but chose to do something with their hands. They have chosen to fix, repair, create, build, or make things. They knew what they wanted and do it. Who’s the smart one in the scenario?

I am sure some of you have had to call a repairman for something you can’t fix. And if you are seeing what I am, you notice that they are charging an arm, leg, and firstborn for the service. If you need urgent assistance, or their aid on off hours (weekends, holidays, the middle of the night), you will pay a premium for their time. Be prepared to sign over your soul.

My son chose to go into a trade. He was always handy and enjoyed making and repairing things. So he made a decision to go after a trade. He was always an excellent student and had high grades. He is a brilliant man, intellectually, and he chose trades. He wanted to do something rewarding with his hands.

Some of you are shunning that decision, a trade, but let me add this, he is only twenty, and makes four times what I made in my thirties as a manger of a 40 physician practice. This year alone, he will come within spitting distance of his dad’s income. His choice of future is not inconsequential. His schoolmates are still in school, and many that have graduated with degrees, are in their parent’s basement, playing xbox.

Tradesmen will always be necessary. A toilet will always clog, a waterline break. a roof will always need repair, homes will need to be built. Natural disasters will always devastate and destroy lives and infrastructure, and it’s the tradesmen that are and will always be front and center. It will certainly not be the manager of a practice, the physical education teacher, or the trades and acquisitions broker.

As with most trades, when people don’t know how, or prefer not to get dirty, a man or woman in a trade will. And you will pay for them to do it.

So many kids graduate university with shiny degrees in something they hate. So many parents forced their kids to go to college, because they believe it has more value than a trade. But that is not the case any longer.

In our son’s case, his father and I always showed him the value of doing something yourself. We taught him how to look at a problem and fix it. We allowed him to get his hands dirty to figure things out. And he loved that. It energized him, launched his self esteem and self worth into the ozone. He learned on his own how to market his own skills, and at fourteen, was picking up discarded mowers, rebuilding them and selling them for hundreds of times more than he spent in their repairs.

We taught him those skills at home, because they were not offered to him in school, like they had been when my husband and I were growing up. Somewhere in those years, some kid, cut his finger, probably the same one that fell off the monkey bars and broke his leg, and the school and parents, in uproar, made the knee jerk decision to end shop classes and get rid of playground equipment, so kids would not get hurt.

Let me tell you something. Getting hurt is part of life. We all get hurt, be it physically or emotionally. When you try to stop a normal occurrence in life, all you leave behind are weak and fragile people with no life skills. If you think climbing a monkey bar gives you no skills, think astronauts, electrical tower lineman, roofers, high-rise construction workers. Those kinds of jobs are filled with monkey bar climbing risk loving kids that are now men, using that fearlessness. Those same kind of kids become seals, helicopter dangling lineman, and so on.

We removed shop from school, and have been putting out generation after generation of people that can’t change a lightbulb. Shop taught life skills, It gave boys and girls some real life experience with making things and fixing them. Some kids were and still aren’t into the academic thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Kids that excel at tinkering and doing physical things, should be encouraged. They are and will always be the backbone of society.

A body with no backbone (shutter), is a pile of mush, a blob.

Shop, and home economics, both discarded classes in school, are needed for life. You can go through life without a computer, can you do so, without electricity anymore? Can you go through life not knowing how to prepare even a simple meal? Home economics was fun for kids, they got to cook and eat their own creations. They experimented like mad little scientists in a lab, and they were proud of themselves.

Shop kids, were always considered the dumb kids in class, but in fact were brilliant inventors, waiting to spread their wings from the oppression of classes that did not interest them. When kids came out of that shop room with a lamp that worked, that they had made themselves, they beamed. Why did we rob them of those experiences.

I taught my son when he was four, how to scramble eggs and make himself breakfast. I naturally supervised each session, because the kitchen is fraught with danger. For the next year, he would wake me up and get me to the kitchen so he could cook. He made himself sick of eggs, from having them every day that year.

The experience wasn’t about the making of the egg or breakfast. It was about accomplishment and pride. I kept teaching him to cook and he often watched me when I did the cooking. Today, living on his own, he has no problem cooking for himself and creating new and imaginative recipes to eat. He gets exited when he takes one on my meals and makes it his own, better he says.

We know that’s not true, of course. Mom always knows and does it better.

I really think we need to bring back the basics. We need shop class. We need home economics. Heck, we need monkey bars and jungle gyms and even that merry go round that made us puke as kids. What is life without thrill and a little danger? Boring and vanilla.

Those kids in schools that struggle through classes, might just be the next inventors of something we can’t live without. Why not give them a class to test drive their skills and interests in making things.

That kid who is suffering through chemistry, may be geared to creating delicacies that others enjoy. One might be the next Gordon Ramsey. But how will they ever know, if they don’t even get the opportunity to give it a taste.

I see and continue to see kids getting ready for college, with no clue of what they like, what they want to do for thirty years of their life. Majors and minors say nothing and give them nothing in terms of understanding the work they will do day in and day out, the rest of their lives. So many get that expensive degree and find that they hate the field they are now stuck in.

Give them a break. Let them have options. Bring back the classes that give kids hands on skills. Let them see if that makes their boat float. And parents, no matter what your kid wants to do, or thinks he wants to do, encourage them to take the chance, to try, to explore. In the end, they are the ones that will have to live out those choices, not you. Let them do what they love, and they will never “work” a day in their lives.

#life #trades #education #parenting #economics #skills