Moratorium on College Tuition

[jtuck004]

I was reading the NY Times yesterday, and my face went pale (or so my wife said). There was a story about Applied Materials moving to Beijing, China from Silicon Valley. If you don't know them, (from the article) "it is the world’s biggest supplier of the equipment used to make semiconductors, solar panels and flat-panel displays".

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/business/global/18research.html?scp=2&sq=applied%20materials&st=cse

It's one thing to have a lot of manufacturing jobs moving offshore, since we need to retool a lot of factories and move to some newer technologies. But our future is highly likely to revolve around the things Applied Materials makes, like the chips in the computers that are in most things we use, or the solar panels that could have provided a new manufacturing base for the future. Losing Applied Materials is likely to negatively impact the manufacturing areas that have provided the only bright spots in our otherwise bleak economy. Will companies cripple themselves by trying to do business here when their competition has so many advantages? Some say China needs us to sell imports to. They have 1.3 billion people that could create an economy selling to themselves and others, so maybe they don't need us as badly as we would like to think. From the article: "The country is also the biggest market for desktop computers and has the most Internet users"

Our unemployment picture is much worse than I believe people understand.

From Mish's site: http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/02/for-15-million-unemployed-any-job-is.html

"•14.8 million unemployed
•3.8 million want a job but are not considered unemployed because they have not looked in the past four weeks
•8.3 million have a part-time job, but want a full time job

Total that up and you will see there are 26.9 million people who are unemployed or underemployed."

>That is out of a total of approximately 155 million people in the potential workforce, as near as I can tell.<

As an exercise, lets presume we could start adding net jobs at the average we saw during the 90's. What would it look like? Assuming we have a very smooth time..."no double dip recession, no second recession, high rates of job growth and falling participation rates all the way through 2020, and unemployment peaking at 11.6% not 13%, the best I can do is suggest the unemployment rate will be over 10% all the way through 2015 and never dip below 8% all the way out through the end of 2020"

In other words no real improvement for another 10 years, assuming oil doesn't rise and no new wars crop up. While our economy, and schools, and state governments, roads, parks...you name it, deteriorates. Is your state budget hurting? Imagine what it will be like in 10 years with no changes. And that is a best case scenario.

One of the reasons they are moving is that China, where they can hire engineers for $800 a month, where they only recently started charging for university education, is producing the kind of educated students they can use at a price they can afford. We put people through 4 years of college and leave them with a debt of $40,000 or $60,000 or more. That is not competitive today.

We have a lot of smart people, and we need to used them as a resource. Maybe it's time for us to invest in them.

Let's remove all college tuition for students, say a 20 year moratorium. Let the student loan folks loan money to the colleges (or states) to be paid back by bonds or taxes on property, just like we do public schools. Rewrite any student loans for people who are unemployed or underemployed so they are affordable or gone. Make online learning possible from at least one or two universities in every state, with labs at all the community colleges available for use 24x7, for anyone getting a degree in math, science, history, law, medicine, physiology, biochemistry, engineering, music, business (others?).

I can't help but think all this stuff about health care is distracting us from the idea that 30 to 50 million people, at least, won't be able to take advantage of it simply because they have low or no income. Not to mention food or housing.

[keep_it_real]

1. Who is responsible for this fall of America?

[jtuck004]

5. Most everyone - but that's irrelevant

Whether it is the people who thought they could just buy a home, work, and life would just go on while they didn't participate in anything harder than changing the remote, to the people in business who think that their only goal is profit, to politicians who have sold their souls and votes in a terribly transparent attempt to enrich themselves...

Too long a list.

Wasting time, pointing at people. Need to do things... ;)

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. Ronald Reagan

[Ishoutandscream2]

7. +100000

[FarCenter]

2. See Table 5 of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education:

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education: Background, Federal Policy, and Legislative Action
http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33434.pdf

It shows that in 2002, China awarded 929,598 first university degrees, of which 484,704 were in science, technology, engineering and math.

It also shows that in 2002, the United States awarded 1,305,730 first university degrees, of which 219,175 were in science, technology, engineering and math.

It seems logical that if you are running a high-tech company, you would want to open a branch in the country where the preponderance of qualified new graduates are being produced.

Note also that Japan produced 548,897 first degrees, of which 351,299 were STEM graduates.

In fact, in all other countries except Brazil, the percentage of STEM graduates is greater than it is in the US. The US's problem of not producing a very high ratio of STEM graduates is further compounded by the fact that many of those graduates will be employed by the military-industrial complex and not in commercial businesses.

[provis99]

3. science and math degrees are useless for getting any type of job.

If you tell any employer you've got a Bachelor's Degree in Physics or Chemistry, the likely response will be: So what? How does that help me sell hamburgers?

And America vastly overproduces engineering degrees; supply of new engineers far outstrips demand, and engineers have unemployment rates higher than the national average.

Education doesn't create jobs, and university degrees are unnecessary for the jobs being created.

[Confusious]

4. All the engineers I know have jobs

Just my experience.

3 mechanical
2 electrical
1 optical

[jtuck004]

9. Maybe we should set our sights beyond hamburgers?

"Education doesn't create jobs, and university degrees are unnecessary for the jobs being created."

Sure, I agree, we don't need those if we want to employ everyone as a Walmart greeter and live with 10-12% unemployment, or worse.

And education doesn't create jobs (well, maybe a few in the business classes). But it can open minds to possiblities, and that does.

I doubt that people only educated to the level of flipping hamburgers are going to design the next computers or energy systems or decode the gene that causes our cells to go crazy and cancerous. So can either build them, or buy them from the smart people.

[jtuck004]

8. It seems more logical that if I can hire them for $750 a month

instead of 3, or 5, or 6000 a month it would give me a heck of a competitive advantage

And do they have a choice beyond the mi/complex, if business is not investing in new products? China has made a decision to be number 1 in renewable energy, while we seem to spend an inordinate amount of time griping about the price of gas and not working
on our infrastructure.