Posted on 06/27/2017 4:37:38 AM PDT by Kaslin
America doesnt have an unemployment problem it has an education and skilled worker problem. Right now, there are millions of available jobs all around the country with top companies offering good pay and benefits. However, the problem for these potential employers is a lack of skilled or properly educated workers. This is a massive issue in America, which President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are working to address.
Recent figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show the number of potential jobs in America at an all-time high roughly six million available jobs - but new hire rates are dropping. Why? Officials in Atlanta say while the construction industry in their city is booming, many companies and individual contractors cannot get skilled workers to fill much-needed positions. In Nevada County, California, contractors describe the labor shortage as terrible, an enormous problem that has now reached a critical shortage. Detroit Chamber of Commerce officials say they are losing a half a billion dollars a year in potential economic growth due to a lack of skilled workers in many job sectors.
The President and Secretary DeVos are working to resolve the skilled worker shortage by reviewing, and potentially, rolling back several onerous regulations that will allow private colleges to again flourish. Many private colleges and universities in America offer degrees for specific jobs that lead to careers in engineering, computer networking, the broader technology industry, aircraft or automotive repair, law enforcement, nursing, healthcare administration, etc.
During the Obama Administration, progressive socialist education elites flooded into the Department of Education (ED) and engaged in aggressive campaigns to disparage private schools, their programs or their founders. Robert Shireman now with the Century Foundation, liberal activist David Halperin and others, made deliberately misleading accusations against many privately run schools. These dishonest allegations, coupled with bad policy regulations from the ED were orchestrated with the main goal of shutting down many private schools. During Obamas reign, hundreds of private college campuses closed and thousands of students, including veterans, active duty military, women, and diverse groups of minority students, were kicked to the curb. The liberal progressive left sincerely believed that unless the government was running education, as with healthcare, it had to be bad.
The President and Secretary DeVos have been under attack from this small but vocal band of education elitists since day one, but Sec. DeVos is already moving to strengthen private college education. She recently announced her intention to address one bad regulation known as the Borrower Defense to Repayment rule. This controversial rule allows students to stop paying their education loans if they think they have been defrauded in some way. And who pays the bill if a student walks away from his or her loan obligation the taxpayer. This rule also allows ED to arbitrarily condemn schools without any defined process for appeal. TV ads by law firms enticing students to claim fraud and walk away from their loans were already running when Secretary DeVos correctly announced that ED was putting the brakes on this regulation while under review.
Shortly after taking office, President Trump issued a directive to the ED and other agencies to create and launch task force reviews of all regulations imposed during the Obama years. The defense to repayment regulation is one identified by ED as in need of serious overhaul. Another regulation is the arbitrary, Gainful Employment rule, which sets unrealistic standards for schools regarding how long graduates can take to find a job in their related field. We expect to see the EDs recommendations regarding additional regulatory overhaul in just a few days.
The University Composite Score rating is another example of bad education policy that was deliberately crafted to attack private schools. The Composite Score is simply a formula designed by education bureaucrats with no experience in running a college to reveal the alleged financial health of a college. This is very similar to what financial institutions, especially small community banks, were experiencing with another dubious progressive leftist regulation by way of Dodd-Frank. A bad score of, not financially responsible not only jeopardizes a schools ability to attract students, it makes the school needlessly obtain a letter of credit and threatens the schools ability to receive Title IV funding.
America needs skilled workers who graduate from public and private colleges with degrees that lead to good paying jobs and successful careers. Privately run colleges and universities fill an important void by producing qualified workers who can apply for jobs with the specific training and instruction needed to be successful.
The Presidents plan to revive the job market and the economy along with Secretary DeVos leadership at ED are much needed first steps, but Congress needs to act as well. Once the EDs reform priorities are made public, Congress should move to pass new laws to strengthen private education and help fill our skilled worker void. With the help of Congress, private colleges and Universities can bring an end to a skilled worker shortage that is hampering our economic recovery and limiting our nations ability to compete in a global market.
The amount of damage done by the eight years of Barack Obama bureaucratic progressive socialist policies are like a metastasizing cancer. It spread throughout every aspect of our system of governance from our economy, healthcare, and national security. But nowhere are these insidious regulatory exploits more dangerous than with the education of future Americans.
wow, it’s just amazing how much damage Obama did.
Obama is a symptom, not a cause.
Where are these supposed jobs requiring educated workers? I have been looking, and they’re not here in Kentucky.
Don't underestimate the damage caused by Clinton from 1992 to 2000. And, GWB didn't seem to understand it well enough to make serious efforts at reversal. So, we've had 24 years of policy consisting of two 8-year terms of aggressive leftism sandwiching 8 years of passive acceptance.
That's a whole generation with no serious pushback.
Quick.. we need more immigrants from other countries because Americans just can’t do it.. Love... the tax dodging corporations of America. I call BS. They don’t want to pay Americans nor pay the taxes required to employ Americans. Same old democrat lettuce picker argument.
He was a Marxist, born and bred. Easily the worst president in American history.
I agree with some of what West is saying, but it’s not all about education and schooling. Trump is on the right track, companies need apprentice programs. Just look at the job postings looking for workers with 3 to 5 years experience and a list of qualifications as long as your arm for entry level jobs. They want someone else to train them and then pay them squat.
Obama is a symptom, not a cause.
too bad you didn’t double post this comment, as it needs to be said again...
I find this story very difficult to swallow. Funny how they don’t mention what kind of jobs, what skills are necessary, etc.
While what this article and many of you say here is true there is still a way to make it by yourself using Google and Youtube etc.
Bill Gates was a middle class guy going to college but he quit college to start his own company and he called it Microsoft . He’s still got 84 billion dollars after giving a lot of his money away.
Jeff Bezos quit a job on wall street to start his own company called Amazon. He was also a middle class guy . Now Jeff Bezos is on track to amass hundreds of billions of dollars.
Marck Zuckerberg started a web site called facebook when he was just a college guy.
The what’s app guy, twitter guy , sam walton , Henry Ford all started out poor but became billionaires . It’s about educating yourself and working hard not waiting for the government schools to educate you with the crap they call education
3 college kids couldn’t pay their rent and so they started a web site called airbnb . Now that’s worth 30 billion dollars and growing.
Obama wiped out ITT tech. Boom, gone.
Why are they blaming Obama for this?
‘Higher’ education has been doing this to itself since the 1960s.
The only thing I can see is that they had additional encouragement from White House during the Obama regime.
A significant part of this issue starts at the high school level. Kids in the “vo-tech” are treated like they are stupid. They frequently are bused to some central facility where they get less than a full day of instruction. What instruction they receive in general work and life skills subjects suffers due to time constraints.
I have spent some time at our local career center proctoring performance tests and while the students can pass the minimal test it seems as if they don’t get taught to the depth one needs to succeed in their chosen career. So they are not prepared to go on to college, yet don’t have the background needed to get a decent job.
Many moved on to private college. Unfortunately some students are just not employable for one reason or another - maybe they present poorly, are unmotivated, or never learned to work. Those failures were blamed on the college because NOTHING is anyone’s fault now, and the liberal education department jumped on the chance to “make it right”.
And it worked well....
No sane person can name one thing Obama didn’t do to hurt this country never trust the left.
Exactly! I noticed that the lack of skills/education was mentioned in only one field: construction! Sorry, I haven’t heard of a major in roofing being offered anywhere.
We have pushed “getting ahead” onto our kids so all they think of is getting a degree and working in offices. No one is left to learn how to frame or wire a house. Spanish-language dominated companies which have been told “Americans don’t want to work” are reluctant to hire Americans who don’t speak Spanish....
Yeah, there’s problem there, but I don’t think it’s colleges, and I don’t think West explained where the college problem he describes is causing a lack of potential hires.
exactly
Frankly a whole lot of jobs out there do NOT require a college degree.
What we need are better internship and apprenticeship programs. And to get hiring managers to pull their heads out of their rectums and realize that a Bachelors Degree should not be the basic entry ticket to the job market.
She had stints in the Portland Zoo marketing department, a kosher frozen yogurt company, and others, she was never paid. Her professors told her doing internships, for no pay, enables her to add these job experiences to her resume, once graduated. She was hired right after graduation, with a resume full of work experience.
Obama changed the apprenticeship program at most schools, he required paid apprentice ships. Not sure the details of his change, but when he did it , his first year, I thought, forcing the companies to pay an unskilled, in training neophyte is not an option for them. He ruined the volunteer apprenticeship programs across the nation.
A little bragging, my daughter Julia, 32 now makes a 6 figure income and has job offers in her inbox every month. She works in the analytic's department for an international PR firm.
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