With millions jobless, U.S. companies struggle to find skilled workers

By David McElroy · October 14, 2011

If you want to know just how out of touch the progressive left is about economics, you need look no further than two simple facts. First, the left is organizing and protesting to demands jobs. Second, U.S. companies are desperate to find workers who are worth hiring.

Do the protesters know this? Or have they bought into the delusion that they deserve to be handed jobs that let them do whatever they want to do, regardless of whether their skills provide value to anyone?

The problem is that American students are getting degrees, but they’re getting degrees in easier fields, so the choices they’re making mean they’re not competent for the jobs which are going unfilled in manufacturing. Someone who studied art history or theater is fairly useless to a company which needs an engineer or a skilled machine operator.

According to the Reuters story linked in the first paragraph:

“…American colleges are producing fewer math and science graduates as students favor social sciences, whose workload is perceived to be manageable, leading to a skills mismatch. Math, engineering, technology and computer science students accounted for about 11.1 percent of college graduates in 1980, according to government data. That share dropped to about 8.9 percent in 2009.”

If you’re about to get a degree, you might want to take a look at the 20 most useless degrees, in the economic sense. I studied journalism originally, which is the No. 1 most useless degree, and I happen to really like people who majored in some of the creative fields listed here. Honestly, I tend to find far more interesting about people with useless degrees than those with the useful ones, but that’s probably because I’m a bit weird. (OK, a lot weird.) So I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with studying obscure fields that don’t lead to high-paying jobs.

If you’re concerned with supporting yourself in the future, consider getting a job that’s likely to pay better. Time magazine looked at the best-paying majors and the worst-paying majors. Guess what? The best-paying ones are in subjects that require brains and a lot of hard work. Who would have thought? If you are willing to work and if you’re smart enough, become an engineer, because they dominate the list. You might not change the world, but you’ll be able to pay for your nice house in the suburbs.

I was struck again last night while listening to an economics podcast by the fact that most of the people who change the world didn’t finish college, but that doesn’t mean that skipping college (or majoring in a fairly useless degree) is necessarily a smart bet. It’s not, if you care about odds. It just means that a small percentage of extraordinary people don’t fit with the mainstream system and are going to struggle and find their own ways to make change happen. It’s a bad bet to emulate them, because the percentages who do it are tiny, but the rewards are great for a few. If you want a fairly sure bet, go with the odds. You might have what I consider to be a boring life, but you won’t have to whine that nobody’s giving you a job.

If you really have a passion for sculpture or music, though, I don’t object to you getting a degree in fine arts if you can afford it. However, I do object to you getting degrees such as these and then complaining that you have a right to a job. You are the one creating your future. Accept that and take control of your own life. It’s nobody else’s responsibility to give you a job.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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