<p>curmudgeon, lol</p>
<p>DS, I knew you described the current system. That is why we should acknowledge it does not work, and if it ever did that the good ol’ days won’t come back. </p>
<p>While I understand the point of comparing the chasm between a CEO’s pay and the average worker, debating that issue won’t yield much. We would better served to figure out why workers with a high school degree --if that much-- commanded salaries as high as 6 figures in Michigan … and still complain.</p>
<p>Putting aside the Charles Murray stuff, which is a bunch of intellectual claptrap, it is very difficult to get a bead on all of this stuff.</p>
<p>According to the Department of Labor, 88% of the jobs where employers require a 4-year college degree don’t require a single skill acquired while in college. So, it would seem to me, the two major purposes of college (as they used to be of high school) are two-fold: 1) to keep people consuming, and out of the job market as long as possible; and 2) to provide a handy tool to maintain social and economic stratification, and, through a program of cultural and educational hegemony, cause folks at the bottom of the heap to feel like they are getting what they deserve. Ten years ago it used to be: “Failing 10th grade math? You don’t deserve access to health care.” Now, the same is true, but it is getting closer to being true for those without a four-year degree.</p>
<p>I’m all for there being as many options as possible for folks to get the training THEY WANT to get on the world. And, as noted, I think a fairly substantial portion of 18-22 year olds with high IQs and attending prestige colleges have no business being there, but there really is, for most, no other place to go (or so they think). </p>
<p>The neat trick is that the taxpayers still pay for the “stratification sieve” at the high school level; now, through the requirement for degrees, that cost is being piled on to those who can least afford it, and has become a major profit center for banks and lending institutions, and new “for profit” educational ones. </p>
<p>I do quantitative analysis in my work. I haven’t seen a logarithm run across any of my pages in a very long time. I am very, very grateful for the education I received, though I use very, very little of it in my daily work. But I would be deeply offended if someone suggested that college was “wasted” on me because of that.</p>
<p>I’m with dstark on this one. We have created an economy in which the divide between the wealthy and the average (and below average) continues to widen. It didn’t “just happen.” It is the result of an ideological framework which has been implemented with innumerable laws, regulations, and repeated social myths. And the ideology is jealously protected. Simply observing that things have failed to improve, and have actually gotten worse for the working class over the past 30 years will trigger an attack of sneering righties accusing anyone of commenting on the nudity of the emperor of being a “socialist”, a “whiner”, etc.</p>
<p>I can remember the 60’s and 70’s, when a diligent blue collar worker - without any particular entrepreneurial bent - could realistically expect to support a family and have an economically secure life, with necessities assured and some frills available and affordable - on one parent’s income. Now both parents work and are a layoff or serious illness away from eviction. At the other end of the spectrum the wealth is so great that it’s almost impossible for the children of the wealthy to screw up badly enough to fail to live in luxury for life. And the situation continues to trend even further in that direction.</p>
<p>Xiggi - plucking isolated examples out of the huge American economy is a way to avoid addressing the overall problem. The chasm between CEO salaries and workers salaries actually is the problem, and we’re not “better served” by ignoring it and chasing after anecdotal “welfare queens” - although you will be fed a steady diet of those stories by the same sources which have created and nurtured the current situation.</p>
<p>My brother has had a very successful career doing a job for which he absolutely had all the skills necessary when he graduated from high school, if not before. But he never could have gotten hired by his firm without his MBA. And they would have been right. When he graduated from high school, he had all the skills he needed to succeed, but he didn’t have focus or maturity. (He still barely has maturity – but he has enough to show up at the office most days.) His college and graduate degrees really did little but to certify that he had the patience and perseverence to complete those programs, and that was an essential job qualification as far as his then-employers were concerned.</p>
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Kluge, I don’t understand your point. What you are describing is the change in our economy which resulted from the Information Age. Manufacturing – steel mills, auto factories etc. – has been either automated or farmed out to countries with cheap labor. Computer programming is now typically done in India, while the design and engineering are still handled in this country. The kinds of work which could be performed with a HS education have been largely eliminated – what’s left is the knowledge-based work which usually DOES require a college degree and/or higher IQ. I see this as the major problem – there are few factory jobs of the type you describe.</p>
<p>This is all about branding. A person needs the brand to increase his chances of doing well in this society, and the brand is a college diploma.</p>
<p>College Confidential is all about getting the brand and which brand is better.</p>
<p>P***** like Murray want to restrict the brand to “his ****” so “others” don’t even get to play.</p>
<p>“what’s left is the knowledge-based work which usually DOES require a college degree and/or higher IQ.”</p>
<p>Not according to the U.S. Department of Labor.</p>
<p>The three fastest-growing large employers (in numbers) in the United States are Wal-Mart (clerks), McDonald’s (flippers), and Burger King (flippers). There is a huge pent-up demand for CNAs. Georgia is now experimenting with teaching “para-professionals” (under the supervision of a “master teacher”) without four-year degrees. Nurses with two-year degrees are in extremely high demand.</p>
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<p>Kluge, how can that be THE problem. Again, I understand the point behind questioning CEO salaries. I am all in favor of looking into the pay packages of Lee Raymond and Bob Nardelli and make a comparison between their salaries and say what happens at Costco. However, I doubt that making positive changes in the disparity IS the solution. At best, it would be of microspcopic magnitude. </p>
<p>In the grand scheme of things, there are many examples that are more egregious and more obscene. Should we talk compensation levels of stevedores in Long Beach or, closer to home, of the adminstrators of our public education? </p>
<p>Two wrongs do not make a right, but the “quantity” of abuse are much more significant at the lower levels.</p>
<p>FS…Cafe Provocateur…</p>
<p>Since when did education only deliver upper middle class wealth? Check out the old thread about what parents enjoyed about their educations. Can you recall a single person saying that the best thing about college was that it delivered them an upper middle class meal ticket? No, those despcriptions were all about the whole heady, intellectual, artistic, social experience.</p>
<p>University education is not only a meal ticket. It is also a means of substantially enriching one’s adult life. Four years of contemplative thought does wonders to enhance the next sixty years. </p>
<p>Everyone who has even the slightest interest in a larger, richer view of the world should get a chance to go to university. Even plumbers and automechanics and carpenters.</p>
<p>Yup (although I might have said “especially” rather than “even”. So many of the non-plumbers at the prestige colleges don’t really need it, or appreciate it when mom and dad provide it for them.)</p>
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<p>Cheers, I totally agree with you. However, a lot of people are going to college because they’ve been told it’s the only way to earn a decent income later in life, and that’s simply untrue. Moreover, it’s a mentality which has an adverse effect on college (and possibly society) in general.</p>
<p>SJMom, there are certainly global factors which have contributed, but as Mini will tell you (and tell you, and tell you) those factors are also supported and enabled by the “greed is king” philosophy which has prevailed for the past 30 years. But the international issue isn’t the only one. As a lawyer, I have observed the tilt in the law away from individuals and in favor of the economically powerful for years, and in myriad ways. Today an individual injured or cheated by a more economically powerful entity has a very small chance of being compensated outside of a few specific types of events. The wealthy are insulated from responsibility for their actions; the “stuff” all flows downhill. Tax policy, land regulation policy, you name it - the tilt for thirty years has favored the wealthy. </p>
<p>You repeat the meme that the current economy “just happened” and is the natural result of events no one could effect - but it didn’t. If the “reward the strong” ideology did not prevail in our society there are innumerable ways that the widening of the wealth gap could have been prevented, the relative social and economic security of the majority could have been maintained, etc. But since a conscious decision to create those events is indefensible the end result is blamed on “stuff happens.” Well - this stuff was the result of conscious policy.</p>
<p>soozie
This is why I love you! Being judgemental isn’t usually helpful. Care to join me in the Hufflepuff common room?</p>
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<p>THANK YOU…</p>
<p>As the economy requires fewer and fewer knowledge-based workers, the colleges produce more and more of them. The effect of that is to depress wages and benefits, and now that the former students are indentured to the banks, they find themselves forced to accept them (and without any union protection of course).</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, Boeing had 70,000 aerospace engineers in Washington State. Now they have fewer than 4,000. Do they need more aerospace engineers? No, what they need is more delivery clerks. But they’ll have degrees in “supply chain management”. They like it that way!</p>
<p>Yes. Clive Crook had a recent article in Atlantic Monthly about this. (Nov., Dec. or Jan. - can’t remember.) In fact, he used the example of “hotel management” – something people with ambition and drive used to learn on-the-job but now need a 4 year degree for. Poppycock.</p>
<p>All a sham.</p>
<p>Keep in mind, though, that EDUCATION is a billion dollar industry in the U.S. in itself: many people are earning a decent wage at it albeit at the expense of others. Can we get by without it?</p>
<p>Cheers…can I say “cheers”? I agree wholeheartedly about the value of a liberal arts education…certainly makes life more interesting!!!</p>
<p>To Mr. Klug…I think lawyers get paid too much and I believe this from first hand experience. Come on…who should get paid $250.00 or $350.00 or $500.00 an hour for advising someone on the law. It’s obscene. And how about the fact that someone can win a significant judgment and the lawyers are the ones who take most of the cash. What a deal. Wage controls on lawyers seems to make a lot of sense.</p>
<p>What do you think?</p>
<p>Vox Dei, I think most people think people in other professions are overpaid because they don’t understand the complexities, costs, and downsides of those jobs. In my case, I was a licensed real estate broker for several years (a side effect of my legal work.) But when it came time to sell my house I hired a full time realtor and paid a full commission for the job, even though I was licensed to do it myself. I recognized that there was a body of knowledge which realtors had which I lacked when it came to residential sales, although it might not be evident to people not in that profession. If you think “from first hand experience” that lawyers are paid too much either you hired bad lawyers or you actually didn’t understand what was really going on - something which is at least as common with lawyers as realtors.</p>
<p>People deserve to be paid for their work, and most pay scales reflect a fairly rational approximation of the value of that work. There are exceptions, of course, but in any competitive economic environment (which legal services is) the cost of the service for a knowledgible consumer will usually be reasonable. </p>
<p>Wage controls on lawyers - and I assume you’re talking about contingent fee injury lawyers, based on your comments - would be another factor in increasing the disparity in wealth between the rich and poor, because it would mean that the “little guy” wouldn’t be able to mount the same strength in court as the “big guys.” In most cases that’s already true; injury law is a limited exception. I’m not an injury lawyer but I respect the work they do and recognize that for principled attorneys for every easy payday in a routine case there will be a long-fought struggle with small or no pay on behalf of a deserving client with a difficult to prove case. </p>
<p>Places where the market doesn’t work - where the relationship between the value of a service and the pay for it are skewed - are concentrated in areas where the “man on the street” isn’t directly involved. I’ve had cases which took me through the muck of the executive compensation process and it’s a straight-out scam - socialism for the rich. You want wage controls? Start with the executives of publicly-traded corporations. </p>
<p>P.S. My car mechanic charges $112 per hour.</p>
<p>While still on the topic of compensation, I think you folks may find this “beneficial”. </p>
<p>[Ten</a> most overpaid jobs in the U.S.](<a href=“http://www.mycoolcareer.com/news/news_122603.html]Ten”>http://www.mycoolcareer.com/news/news_122603.html)</p>
<p>Do you know the premier of Canada’s British Columbia was caught drunk driving while vacationing in the U.S…OMG, guess where he went to school!:D</p>