The Public University Systems Failures

The public University system in America is clownishly out of step with what the actual economy needs. If you think I am picking on Colleges you’re right. Our society needs the Universities to produce gobs of nurses, physicians, accountants and engineers and yet when you enroll your kids you find all the valuable classes in job producing majors are so impacted; only seniors can attend freshman level required classes. If you want to take 4 years of garbage political science, or social re-engineering classes they have wagon loads of those available. To add injury to insult you have to pay dearly for this obsolete educational offering.
Imagine you are a manufacturer who has 20 years of standing orders for product A, but refuses to produce it in favor of product X which no one wants. This company would be out of business, broke and deservedly so. The warehouse full of useless product would be hauled to the dump. This same scenario exists in our University system today yet the defenders of doom protect the decayed Universities as if they are exempt from the laws supply and demand.
I am ready to wash my hands of the University level public education system after being a lifelong supporter of it. The socialists who run the teachers unions and the curriculum have made our public Universities into a useless joke of a system. Third world students have more useful skills after graduating from a 2 year school in Pakistan that our kids get from the California University system. That’s why employers hire the foreigners and tell our kids to go get a real education before applying to their company again.
We have been told if you get a college degree the world is your oyster. Turns out the average degree is more than likely the surest path to a minimum wage job. Give me more welders, sheet rockers, painters, plumbers, electricians and less liberal arts graduates. I had a friend of mine asking if I knew anyone who wanted to take a job as a beginner steelworker. The job started at $65k a year, located in Oakland. Pay increases came with added skills and yet they had a hard time finding young folks to even apply.
The economy needs technical specialists, engineers, and medical professionals who think out of the box, speak English well, and want to work long hours. The Universities churn out boatloads of unqualified graduates who expect high pay, and short easy hours. These new “workers” have been taught that the businesses they seek a paycheck from are evil, and that they should grab everything they can get from these greedy business owners.
I wish I could play the diatribe against America and business my daughter recorded at San Jose State University the other day. Even the most ardent liberal would cringe at the hatred of America this lowlife “professor” spewed to a class full of cowering students afraid to speak, or defend their country, fearing they would be flunked by this anti-champion of free speech. I have had to inoculate my kids against these Hate America leftist professors by teaching them to regard them as pathetic hoaxes and to mock them at every turn. Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? Welcome to the new counter culture.
Not to say there is no new money for schools in our stimulus package. But it comes in the form of rewards for the same goofs who have driven our schools to ruin in the first place. I asked a pal of mine who is a conservative professor turned business owner why the system is so upside down. He said it was a combination of leftist ideologues that run the education establishment and a desire to get students through the system at the very lowest cost. A lecture hall with 250 kids listening to useless drivel is very cheap to produce. An anatomy laboratory with a cadaver for nursing students is more pricey. Cut the latter, more of the former. This same scenario plays out every day at our Universities in all sorts of majors.
Mr. President, if you want to make a change that will help the average family, take a huge sharp knife and a pair of brass knuckles to the Education establishment. Bring in the business community to help design a curriculum that produces graduates they long to hire right out of school. Invest in 2 year trade schools that teach our kids a set of construction skills that they can make a living at for 40 years. Pay the teachers who over produce more than the average and fire the under producers. The world needs minimum wage workers too, but rather than having our bright kids who just graduated from College do that work let the teachers who cannot teach flip the burgers.