Vocational Schools Are Just As Important If Not More So Than Universities Offering Social Sciences

Okay so, you may not have considered this but I'm going to ask you to consider it today anyway. We know that the student loan bubble is a huge problem, and there is over $1 trillion in outstanding student debt currently in the United States. Each year we should expect that to grow, along with the tuition costs which have also been increasing at about 8% per year. In many regards this is a terrible tragedy for our society, especially at a time when our civilization is becoming more technologically advanced, and we need more people in the math and science fields. Okay so let's talk a little bit about vocational schools and their relevance to our economy and jobs in America.

You see, many employers are complaining that they have jobs available but no skilled labor. A cynic might say that these corporations merely want more corporate welfare in the form of employee training, and that might be part of their complaint, but the problem in this situation is real. We don't have enough skilled workers to take those specific jobs. This doesn't mean we don't have an unemployment problem? No, we surely do, and even if we could fill those jobs, it still wouldn't be enough to get America back to work in the percentages that we need currently, especially if we want to recover from this economy.

It is my contention that vocational schools are just as important as universities, if not more so, especially considering that many kids take out student loans and get a degree in the social sciences. That's nice and wonderful, but it's hard to get a job as a philosopher, and we already have too many psychologists. We are busy laying off social workers, so I'm not exactly sure where all these kids will be working in the future, that is if they do get that degree. If they don't get a job, they cannot pay off the student loans.

The vocational schools have come under fire, due to the student loans which have gone delinquent. It's not that loans from regular universities haven't gone delinquent also, but apparently our regulatory bureaucracy is busy trying to place the blame. There was an interesting editorial in the Wall Street Journal recently titled "The Regulatory Power to Destroy," published on July 20, 2012, which had an interesting quote; "The Department of Education and the unjustified ruin of for-profit college."

If we are really serious about putting people to work, and making sure these college graduates actually have a job waiting for them, and we should put more emphasis on vocational job training, and see that they get student loans as well, as they are much more likely to pay them back. Indeed, there have been times when industries have predicted there would be X number of jobs in the future in that given sector, and then four years later when all those kids graduate, the jobs aren't available.

I'm not sure that's the vocational schools fault, it may very well be the government's for predicting that those future jobs would be available in four or five years, something that they don't know for sure, but had put out in various reports. I'm not sure we should be blaming the vocational schools for that. Please consider all this and think on it.