As college students, we came to Madison to further our education and take that critical step to join the workforce. The benefits of a college degree are irrefutable, and going to college is about as culturally ingrained as apple pie and baseball here in America.
However, college is simply not an option for many people, especially those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This doesn’t bode well with the almost obligatory nature of getting a bachelor’s degree in the hunt for a job. Those that slip through the cracks on their way to college wind up going to trade school, the military, or going from dead-end job to dead-end job.
I don’t see this as an acceptable distribution of economic opportunity. Both state and federal governments steer students fresh out of high school toward college with scholarships, grants and excellent loan rates. The military attracts recruits with offers of lifetime benefits in health care, pensions, vocational training and paying for a college education.
Whether it be my own privilege of never examining them as an option, or simply because they’re not marketed as heavily, vocational and trade schools don’t have the same levels of benefits associated with them in society. As a result, in the privileged circles of college, this blue-collar work exists in the shadows, despite our entire society being built on the back of this kind of work.
It doesn’t take sitting through an introductory economics class to know the United States is one of the most developed nations in the world. As a result, we are telling everyone the key to a high paying job comes from studying in a world class institution of higher education.
Unfortunately, by funneling people to higher education and not equally distributing them among technical and trade schools, a lot of people are missing out on the possibility of earning a degree in a field they’re much better suited for. I look toward history to change our current course, and channel the spirit of a president who was handed the worst economic downturn in American history—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR.
By giving our unemployed and underemployed peers an opportunity to work and incentivize it with benefits similar to those we offer our servicemen and women, we could be channeling Great Depression-era programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Civil Works Administration. If we accomplish this modern-era reform, we could potentially offer thousands of jobs and valuable training to those who never had the opportunity to attend college.
America’s blue-collar jobs currently have a gaping hole that is rapidly being filled by immigrant labor. If we subsidize rebuilding the basic industries and infrastructure America once relied on and is now lacking, we could lift America’s poverty-stricken citizens from the lower economic echelons of society and provide them with an opportunity to work for a living wage and an education. The effects of giving American citizens jobs that pay better than minimum wage and rewarding them for completing work would provide them and their children with an opportunity to join America’s middle and upper classes.
Higher wages, better benefits and a governing body to facilitate giving people jobs and training will put new life into the American economy and ultimately the global economy. It would require a large amount of spending up front, and it would require nothing short of a cultural revolution among the American people to accept federal assistance, the likes of which haven’t been seen in over 80 years.
However, I think it can be done. It has been implemented before during the Great Depression, and it is even the driving legislative program Frank Underwood from “House of Cards” attempts to push through during the series’ third season. Perhaps it is time for Americans to stand up to out-of-date and preconceived notions of minimum wage and blue-collar labor, and learn to accept the notion that some people don’t live the lifestyle because they want to and are capable of much more when you give them the chance to prove it.
I want people to view vocational labor as an acceptable and respected alternative to college because its the jobs that come from technical schools which America is desperately lacking.
Sergey is a freshman writer for The Daily Cardinal and majoring in economics and international studies. Do you agree with his argument to fix America’s unemployment and underemployment problem? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
