If we raise the level of education for all citizens, does it become necessary to pay better wages for all jobs?

Raising the skill levels through education is no guarantee that you will get a better job. I see so many people go through 4 or more years of college and all they have to show for it is hefty college loans and a job working at Starbucks.

The best way to more better jobs is to make US companies more competitive with foreign competition though trade agreements that do not put our US companies at a competitive disadvantage.

A forced Federal minimum wage of $15.00 will be nothing short of disastrous for many companies. I just had to get that off my chest

The way it works, or at least since the beginning of the industrial revolution, is that productivity increases so that one person is paid more to do the job of several. For instance it may take 12 men or women with shovels to dig a big hole (sewer, aquaduct, whatever). Now as skills and technology improve we can hire one person with a bulldozer to do the same job. He’s more skilled so he gets paid more. Of course we also need the skilled labor to build and repair the bulldozers as well but the overall effect is that more holes get dug with less manpower by using higher skilled labor.

It takes time but as low skilled labor becomes expensive, it gets automated and the automation requires higher skills and higher pay to run and maintain. As the bag-boy at the grocery store get’s higher wages, he gets replaced by automated check out. The real loser in all this is the entry point for young workers.

I worked in food manufacturing for 20 years and there is actually a bizarre trend toward making education required for unskilled labor.

I worked in a factory where “palletizing” (stacking finished cases on a pallet in a specified pattern) was a job. When I started, a good work record and making it through a trial period gave you permanent employment status at menial labor. If you wanted better, you ‘bid’ on jobs with higher skills/responsibility, and received better pay. Most of the management came up through the ranks (including the Plant Manager). All you really had to have was a desire to work, and there was a place for you.

Fast forward 20 years.
College degree required for management.
*No coming up the ranks to management.
*No mamagement with ‘hands on’ expereince.
HS diploma or equivalent.
3 group interviews.
2 written tests, including higher math.
At the time I left, I was still doing essentially the same job as when I started, with the difference being that I had been taught Publisher and Powerpoint and spent 3–10 hours per week off the line having meetings while the rest of the crew worked short to cover me. And I was typical.
Instead of promoting management that was in tune with the jobs that needed done, they were trying to train the workforce to communicate with degreed management.

I equate it with the growing discussion about learning a trade vs getting an education. Factory workers are largely tradespeople who’s ‘education’ is the ability to do the job.

Rant

Apples and oranges.

Raising educational levels is a function of government and the educational system.

Raising wages is a function of business and the market. There is not a direct connection between them. Educated people might make more if their skills are needed (technicians) but likely make less if the degree was in Art History.\

Education doesn’t automatically result in higher wages.

And by the way – if wages do go up, who pays them? Yep, you and me, in higher prices.

I’m saying that education does not always result in higher wages, and that the education might be unnecessary for the job being done. I’m not promoting everyone get a college degree, nor am I talking about enforcing a high minimum wage. However, it seems to me many countries throughout time import immigrants to do a lot of the unskilled labor (I don’t know what term to use) and I’m just thinking we would have lower unemployment if our own labor wanted to do the jobs, and/or were paid better for the jobs.

I once saw a show about happiness and it talked about Denmark, because they score high, and one thing pointed out was salaries were not so vastly different from one job to another. This way people were more able to work in jobs that fit them best.

It seems to me a lot of people are underemployed, working in jobs they are overqualified for, and not happy about it. Them there are people who prefer to mow grass and take care of the grounds, but who got there accounting degree and have worked for corporations as a CPA making good money. I have a friend exactly like that, and he did the lawn care for about a year, but the money win out. He doesn’t really like being a CPA. He comes from a family where everyone is a doctor, accountant, etc., and he was drugged up to get through school, and pushed by parents to pick a profession. The salaries are so vastly different that once he had two children money won.

@jakx Yes, I see how that works. That makes sense.

@JLeslie “I’m just thinking we would have lower unemployment if our own labor wanted to do the jobs, ” Welfare and entitlements we have today have pretty much destroyed any chance of that ever happening today so we are forced to import the unskilled labor force who will gladly do these jobs for US cash and benefits.

Yes. Shame on American citizens for refusing to work for companies who want to pay them starvation wages for back-breaking labor and still be unable to afford a place to live.

No indeed. There are plenty of people with advanced degrees waiting tables and driving for Uber, and despite all protestations to the contrary, a college education decreases in worth with each and every degree cranked off the press. @Cruiser That’s an interesting view of the situation. “we are forced to import the unskilled labor” should read “we are ALLOWED to import unskilled labor at slave wages to displace our own citizens formerly paid a living wage.”

@stanleybmanly Word it anyway that suits you but the reality is we need cheap labor to pick crops, work in sweat shops, clean our hotel rooms etc. Paying $15.00 an hour is not enough to motivate the lazy asses to abandon their welfare checks and free health care and we will only have well paid labor we will still have to import. That is of course if you and everyone else is willing to buck up and pay $4.00 for an apple. What will happen is as said above automation will replace many of these higher paying jobs and you can pretty much kiss the “Made in America” logo good bye. Black markets will crop up everywhere. There is a whole snowball effect that will transform business and your wallet.

Not exactly “wages for all jobs.” You have to keep some separation to make the added education worthwhile. And some other person somewhere will have to pay the wage difference, be it higher or lower, which is why the higher wages can’t be for all jobs.

@Jaxk Don’t forget that the owner of the bulldozer also has to pay for the thing, another reason for higher prices paid for the amount of work done.

@kritiper – Actually the point in automating is to lower the cost per unit. If the cost goes up there is no incentive to automate.

does it become necessary to pay better wages for all jobs?

Saturation decreases value. Scarcity increases value.

I’m asking from a much bigger picture perspective.

The following is my list of jobs that I think have over a 95% chance of being automated:

maids, housekeeping cleaners, janitors, custodians,

tax preparers, loan officers, credit analysts, budget analysts, accountants and auditors, market research analysts,

roofers, rail-track laying and maintenance equipment operators, highway maintenance workers, brick and block masons, carpenters, construction and building inspectors, mine cutting and channeling machine operators,

archivists, librarians, teaching assistants,

restaurant cooks, waiters and waitresses, cafeteria cooks, bartenders,

motorcycle mechanics, home appliance repairers, aircraft mechanics and service technicians,
paralegals and legal assistants, court reporter,

tellers, procurement clerks, legal secretaries, bookkeepers, postal service clerks, bill and account collectors, correspondence clerks, medical secretaries, mail carriers,

manicurists and pedicurists, tour guides and escorts, barbers,

timing device assemblers and adjusters, packaging and filling machine operators and tenders milling and planing machine setters operators and tenders, grinding and polishing workers, jewelers and precious stone and metal workers, electric and electronic equipment assemblers, butchers and meat cutters, cooling and freezing equipment operators, cabinetmakers and bench carpenters, bakers, rolling machine setters, operators and tenders, machinists, meat packers,

telemarketers, fashion models, cashiers, retail sales person, insurance sales agents, real estate sales agents,

drivers/sales worker, garbage collectors, taxi drivers and chauffeurs, bus drivers, parking lot attendants, subway and streetcar operators, heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, city bus driver.

I think the first fall-down on this question is, “If we raise the level of education for all citizens”.

A better premise might be, “If we equalize the level of education for all citizens…”

I mean, we’re talking about public education, or K-12? Are we not?
I mean we can “raise the education level” in a woefully inadequate inner city or rural southern district and it will likely still be…woefully inadequate.

The premise seems flawed to me.

I’m not making promises about education. The population is becoming more educated over time, and there is a push for higher education. Moreover, a stigma is being created for those without tertiary education, which reinforces the cultural shift towards a more educated population. I prefer people get the skills they need for a job suited for them. If it doesn’t require college, then fine. If vocation programs need to be ramped up I’m good with that too. Apprenticeships also should not be forgotten. I was just stating what seems to be fact—more people have college educations compared to 50 years ago.

More people have degrees and ever more of them are finding that achievement irrelevant to the work they are doing (if they can find a job at all). The difference from the days when the complaint was that without a high school diploma, you couldn’t get a decent job, is that a free college education is not only unavailable, but what passes for a college education is usually accompanied by crippling debt.

The difference now is that if you don’t have that irrelevant Bachelor’s, it’s even harder to find work in irrelevant-to-a-Bachelor’s field.

Like, you have to go $50,000 in debt to get a $9 an hour job as a secretary for a construction company anymore. It’s absurd.

There are many ways to look at education/higher education debate. I went to college only because my dad talked me into it. After 13 years of K-12 school I was ready to go out and make some cash but again took off to college. My best friend didn’t. Got an apprenticeship at a printing company his dad worked at and started at $13,000 by the time I graduated college (1982) he was making $19,000 a year. I studied Communications radio tv film and after over 4 years of college the best job I could find was $5.25 an hour at a Spanish TV station working the night shift.

So at 23 yrs old I stumbled upon and opportunity….took a chance opened up a distributorship, then another contracting company and 16 years later took a job doing sales at and epoxy manufacturer 16 years later I now own.

The problem I faced going to college I really did not know what I wanted to do. I know I did not want to sell waterproofing or make epoxy. I wanted a business degree but flunked out of the Business college and later did the TV stuff I found I really enjoyed. The point I am making here is a LOT of people go to college not knowing or thinking they know what they want to do the rest of their working careers and as @stanleybmanly points finding their degrees irrelevant to what their jobs end up being like me.

I look around me at the people who are indeed doing what they love….knew very early on in their lives that was what they were going to be/do when they grew up. Most people I ask about this knew for sure by the time they were 10.

I have also found that success in the working world is very often not what you know but who you know and that axiom IMO is so very true.

We have too many workers and not enough jobs. The only jobs we’ve created since 2008 are menial service jobs. We seem to think that if we can educate everyone or pay everyone more it will all work out but it won’t. It will only make highly educated people do the menial jobs. If everyone in the country had a doctorate, you would still have doctors asking if you want fries with that burger. Education doesn’t create jobs it creates potential, new ideas, and innovation. Unless we can create the environment where these new ideas and innovation can take root and grow, the education does nothing for us. Although I’ll grant you that the guy asking if you want fries will be more articulate.

It’s the “everybody has to have a degree” thing that most take stock in. We live in a skills based economy. Most of my coworkers have a H.S. diploma and maybe an associates degree yet they all make close to six figures. What they have is practical and often specialized knowledge that is in demand. Few “educated” people could keep up with them. If your degree is not teaching you a marketable skill you are wasting your time. If you want to be educated in this day and age there are free ways to do it. but you don’t get “credit” for it There are plenty of jobs out there but not jobs a degree in liberal arts will qualify you for. People need to start taking the red pill when it comes to college education. Just because you went to school and have a degree does not mean you are entitled to anything at all.

@ARE_you_kidding_me “If your degree is not teaching you a marketable skill you are wasting your time.” Can you imagine the end results if these same degrees were free for the taking? HS!

Let’s get back to the original question and the OP’s details for a moment.

No. It would not become necessary to raise wages, but there might be more competence in the workplace. And the educated worker would have more mobility due to their documented skills. I’m not addressing just degree programs, but badly needed technical and vocational programs as well.

No matter what we do, either open up education in this country by removing the financial obstacles required to get it, or leave things as they are, we all pay. The difference is how much do we pay?

As things are, with corporations paying low wages in such large industries as fast-food, for example—wages so low that full-time, uninsured workers qualify for food stamps; public health (where it is available), utility and housing assistance—amount to taxpayers subsidizing corporate labor costs through these programs. If the public realized this, then they would force the corporations to raise these wages to a livable level, because supporting these people and their babies through thousands of government middle men (who must also be paid) is a lot more expensive than just making the corporations pay these workers directly. This just makes sense. Why should we be subsidizing the labor force of profitable companies? It’s bloody crazy.

At the moment, as to heavily-indebted college and tech school graduates without good job prospects, the present system results in late or unpaid loans—which negatively affect the financial quarter—and bad credit and crippling, compounded debt even after these individuals get good jobs which negatively affects their ability to consume durable products and also entering the mortgage market. This removes our most vested human resources from consumer market which drives our economy and the unpaid debt is often footed, once again, by the taxpayer. Remove the necessity for college loans and have the taxpayer foot the bill in the first place and it is cheaper, much more efficient and creates more taxpayers—taxpayers who will foot the bill for the next generation coming down the pike.

As every citizen of every first-world democracy is aware of, there are many people who would like to live and thrive in their respective countries. Traditionally, unskilled labor positions go to youth and the and unskilled immigrant in these countries and there has never been a shortage of these two groups. Unskilled labor is an entry-level position and we can expect no shortage of people to fill those jobs. However, if you really want to exploit your human resources, you will open up educational opportunities to them—free of financial obstacles.

Our one, great experiment of the government (read taxpayer) footing the bill for college educations for all, was the first 1944 G.I. Bill which resulted in the economic boom of the late 1950’s and throughout the 1960’s. It only concerned veterans—publicized as our people thanking them for their incredible effort in vanquishing our enemies in WWII—but it saved this country of the potential economic disaster of taking more than a unemployed million men back into a nation that was facing bankruptcy due to the War. It worked, and it worked miraculously.

At the end of the same war, both Japan and Germany were bankrupt, their infrastructures were in ashes, and their people demoralized. The people of both of these countries—with the help of the Marshall Plan—instituted what would become taxpayer supported education programs that covers daycare through PhD programs and single-payer national health programs that covers prenatal care through geriatrics. Within only 25 years, they both became the economic powerhouses of their respective global regions.

Today, German banks are the go-to institutions able to bail out their fellow Europeans from their latest national bankruptcies. So we don’t have to. They are capable of doing this only 25 years after taking in tens of millions of their bankrupt former East German brothers into the fold after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Tuition-free education, from daycare to the highest academic degree is an investment and it pays off like no other, except possibly good national health insurance. It converts welfare recipients into new taxpayers—a huge benefit on both ends when you have 40 million people on food stamps. And, by the way, It makes people more productive and protective to the system that enables them to reach their potential and live fuller, richer lives.

Who could be against that?

@Espiritus_Corvus I’ve said similar on many Q’s, especially about tax payers subsidizing corporations by paying for food stamps and healthcare for low wage earners. Although, I hadn’t considered the effects of the GI bill before, I’ve often credited the big boom of our middle class to higher wages forced by the unions, especially in the 70’s, but what you wrote about post WWII makes sense.

My dad is product of free education. He was extremely poor, but very smart, and luckily NYC provided free college education at a very respected college, and later on federal government money, he was offered a scholarship at Wharton, so that’s were he went to graduate school. Many of his peers had similar experiences, and so I very personally know how government expenditures on education can be paid back to the government tenfold when those students get well paying jobs, and pay their taxes back into the system.

However, the 40’s through the 90’s, there was an incredible expansion and technological boom in the country. People getting college degrees were needed in specific fields. Also, in my father’s case, that free college took the top percentage who applied. It wasn’t just some city school everyone could go to. The dollars were spent on people who Gould do the program and excel.

Is our country and technology changing in a way now that we need more college degreed people? Or, are we running low in plumbers and mechanics? I know NJ is low on plumbers, but nationwide I have no idea the data on where there are spots in the job market that we are short on labor, whether it be blue collar or white collar.

I always think education is worth it, in the sense that it’s always good to learn, and university life is it’s own little cultural pocket of wonderfulness in my opinion; not for everyone, but for many. Education can open the mind. High tuition I can’t help to think
is a little bit of thievery. I would love to one day look at the financials and see where all the money goes. I think all the govt loans given out for education make it worse, just to seem like I’m contradicting myself.

Back to what we need in the country, that’s one of the big questions right. Do we need white collar managers? Do we need sociologists (my fathers free PhD) or urban planners (one of my dad’s free master’s degree). Is the government spending it’s money wisely on tertiary education? Are we over educating the population where it’s unnecessary? I never would want to deny a college education to someone, but we also need to be realistic and not keep paying for people to go for one year and drop out because they never were really inclined to go, or don’t have the abilities to get through a university program, but certainly have valuable skills for themselves and society in some other realm.

The more I think about it, the more it becomes obvious to me that a lot of the very people who complain about illegal immigration, are the very people who want a supply of people in the country who will work for very low wages. Part of the supply is the illegal immigrants.

@JLeslie There is a very good chance that we would have been raised in very poor communities with all the associated social problems and lack of opportunities if it weren’t for both of our fathers receiving educations provided by the taxpayer. And since poverty is generational in most instances, our children would have had the same. I think a lot of people should think about that and what it means.

By the way, that post-WWII technological boom you speak of was a direct result of an educated workforce. It could have never happened in this country without educated workers on all levels—from vocational and technical people to the PhDs. A country has to be ready when a new step into science and technologies are possible or it will be licensed out to a workforce that can handle it with very little benefit to the original nation’s people.

The GI Bill covered not only University-studies, but trade, business and technical schools as well. Your father just happened to be an academic.

A couple of points here. I have no problem with the GI Bill but I think you’re assigning too much crdit to it for the post war boom. At the end of WWII all of Europe had been destroyed as well as most of Asia. The only industrialized country left unscathed was the US and we supplied the technology and manufacturing to rebuild the rest of the world. During the fifties we supplied fully half of the entire world’s Gross Product. Through the sixties and seventies as the rest of the world was rebuilt and began manufacturing their own needs our share of the global declined. In addition the country was very business friendly, remember the quote “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”. Not something you would hear today.

It is not the GI Bill that created the post war boom but I’ll grant that it was a part of it.

Point well made, @Jaxk.

If I didn’t know better I’d bet that @Jaxk was bucking for Boehner’s job.

@ibstubro – I’m not sure who would hate me more, the Tea Parties, The establishment, or the Democrats. Most of you here probably haven’t noticed it but I can occasionally, be the tiniest bit opinionated.

@Jaxk Being in the middle means there will be a lot of bullets from both directions whizzing over your head.

@Cruiser – It’s not the ones whizzing over my head that worry me.

@Jaxk Don’t worry neither side has given me much concern they could hit what they aim at.

Shot at and missed, shit at and hit.