The Tunisian protests began after a recent graduate killed himself because government authorities confiscated his fruit stand when they discovered he did not have an “official” permit. The BBC reported that most of the early protesters were unemployed recent graduates. Like Tunisia, Egypt also has a massive youth-unemployment problem. Unsurprisingly, it also has a system of “free” college education. FULL ARTICLE by by Joshua Fulton
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/15692/the-education-bubble-is-fuel-for-revolt/
The Education Bubble Is Fuel for Revolt
Previous post: Is the Price of Content Approaching Zero?
Next post: The Rise of Statism
{ 54 comments }
Good article. Egypt–and lots of places–ends up with large numbers of unemployed/under-employed men with poor marriage prospects and no opportunity for social advancement outside of government. So they join the Muslim Brotherhood or Hezbollah. Or march in the streets. Or fly planes into buildings.
The US is likewise moving toward a who-you-know not what-you-know society. For now, young men just watch Fight Club; eventually they’ll start living it. Actually, with the paleo groups, Crossfit and MMA some of them already are. Government is trying to hold the lid on some very powerful social forces.
Why would one want to marry in this tyrannical world and tyrannical universe ?
More babies is not what this world needs, women are only a bunch of troubles and sex drive is nothing but an assault against free will.
Please, stay single, no kids, no sex, no girlfriend, please boycott the system. Stop feeding the beasts.
I think the larger problem is the mentality of education, particularly college education, as some kind of panacea for all societal ills. Children are told practically from the time they start school that if they get good grades, go to college, and graduate, that they’ll(magically) find a ‘good’ job and live happily ever after.
The reality is that unless kids go to a trade school, or plan on working as academics(and theres only so much need for academics in the world), college simply doesnt teach real marketable skills. So you have lots of young men and women who think that because they have a piece of paper they are ‘entitled’ to a $20 an hour job, and that anything less is beneath them, but no work history or real-world-skills to actually qualify them for those sorts of jobs. And they wonder why they end up working at Target or Starbucks(of course minimum wage and mandatory school attendance until the age of 18 feed into this as well).
Those few adults that DO make those good jobs inevitably think that its because of their education, not their hard work, good fortune, or the fact that they had work experience in HS and college that landed them in the position.
Looking back, my college years(I did graduate btw) were pretty much wasted. I would have done better to spend those years starting and growing my business. Hell I probably should have dropped out of HS to do that. But you know what they say about hindsight…..
SirThinkAlot, >>>But you know what they say about hindsight….. <<<on a lighter note, hindsight is fabulous at SoBe (South Beach, Miami Beach, FL)! …and so is foresight!
Ummm…SOME hindsight. You have to admit some of it isn’t so great.
lol….here in Northern Indiana, the view can be quite different….
You are exactly right. As someone with a lot of education, I was lucky in that I learned technical skills that can be applied to several fields, such as biomedical, pharma, or agriculture. This kind of happened by chance. A lot of people I know were not so lucky. One of the biggest causes of this problem comes from the teachers themselves, who, quite frankly, don’t have a clue about the market or the private sector. Forced, public education is the real culprit here. We’ll have to take down the teachers’ unions and change a lot of minds before this will change.
Yes the lack of the teaching of critical thinking along with the teaching of so much dogma and narrow ideology is why many humans can’t adapt and won’t let others who can.
It’s not just that, but this strange expectation that teachers are something created via schooling. Outside of rare circumstances, you shouldn’t even see a teacher under the age of 40. Teaching is something you do when you’ve gained years of competence and experience in a field, enough to be able to pass on your own skills, techniques, and wisdom off to a new generation. They’re the artisan masters and their students are the apprentices. This teacher is effectively banned from teaching because of the heavy subsidization of public “school” that wipes out any ability to form private organizations, which are also heavily regulated. Even if such a person can offer an education for $2,500 a head, or 1/4 the current cost of public school education, that’s still $2,500 on top of the tax money stolen for education that will never come back. So why not take the “free” option?
Today, the thought process is that all you have to do is take 4 years at a university to get an Education Degree and get some teaching certificate and now you’re qualified to teach everything from gym to computer programming. Never mind the lack of direct education, experience, or real knowledge on the subject. Just hand out the book, repeat some pre-defined paper milled out by the Department of Education, tell them to do all the real work themselves at home, give them tests, then fling them through a ScanTron reader for final grading. And if they don’t pass those test, tell them their esteem is more important and shovel them up to the next grade level anyway.
And this kind of “teaching” is called the noble profession to prepare our future generation of productive citizenry.
At secondary levels you have a point, but to teach basic reading, writing and arithmatic does not require a “master” in those fields… For elementry schools teaching experience is much more valuable than subject specific knowledge (i.e in math, science, etc.)
Not only do you need marketable skills, but you also need marketing skills to market your marketable skills.
I have to wonder how higher education might be related to the incidence of writers who cannot distiguish between the spellings of “were” and “where”.
Or to those who write “we” instead of “I”.
Sione
Or there, their and they’re. Or the recent plethora of talking heads on both TV and radio who use the word “literally” incorrectly. I heard a woman on FNC say, “I literally crapped my pants when she was talking!”. That was a piece of incorrect information with an image I could well have done without.
Or “than” and “then”.
It’s a shame public education doesn’t teach tact, grace, and manners.
These are the roots of the War on Terrah. This entire chain of US-backed puppets from Morocco on eastwards across North Africa and the Middle East consists of brutal regimes in which lucrative industry and real estate are controlled by the governing clique and everyone else can barely scrape by with either a low-level job in the bureaucracy or army, or else by subsistence occupations such as running a fruit stand (if they’re even allowed to do that) or raising a few chickens. As long as they can survive adequately the vast majority of people will not even seriously complain about this situation, let alone do anything concrete to change it, but there is always a very angry and violent minority who will attempt direct action.
With reference to education, I would like to point out that Atta the 9/11 leader was an educated Egyptian who had studied the problems of urban planning in Cairo. Evidently he was completely baffled by the question of how any kind of peaceful academic or technical approach could positively affect what was obviously a problem caused by American-backed local tyrants.
It’s not that they’re “American-backed.” The Middle East has a long history of corrupt oligarchs combined with the corrosive social force that is Islam.
Evidently he was completely baffled by the question of how any kind of peaceful academic or technical approach could positively affect what was obviously a problem caused by American-backed local tyrants.
Yes. Poor, baffled Atta. If it weren’t for Mubarak, Atta could have started up the Mises Institute’s Cairo branch.
Anti
Don’t be so shallow. The regime in Egypt is US backed (can’t say the Mexicans or the Canadians had anything much to do with it, hence can’t really say it was “American-backed”). There are a few tens of billions of dollars or “military aid” and many hundreds of thousands of tons of grain that stand as evidence…
Atta was completely misguided. That does not mean that there wasn’t an element of truth in what he’d identified about the nature of the political situation in the Mid-East. Nor does it mean that your cheap shot has merit.
Sione
I’m not disagreeing that Mubarak was an American-Israeli viceroy. But corrupt oligarchy and socially corrosive Islam long pre-date American involvement in the Middle East. Egypt’s government accepts (and will continue to accept) US aid because, what with sucking up all the fat of the land for themselves, the private sector barely squeaks by.
The issue in Egypt, as in much of the Middle East, is who gets to spread the loot around, and it’s been that way since well before the US showed up.
Correct. But were the Middle Eastern oligarchs as corrupt and corrosive as they are now, and could they get away with their crimes with as much impunity as now? The US has provided these modern-day despots with many, many billions of dollars of cash and the most sophisticated military and spying technology.
In the past, a Middle Eastern despot might ruin his domain – then his domain would be poor, he would be unable to pay an army to oppress his people, and he himself would become poor in proportion to the amount that he impoverished his subjects. But nowadays the despot has almost no negative consequences for impoverishing his domain because the more poor his people become the more “foreign aid” he receives. The more restive his people become the more military and technical assistance the despot receives from America in order to kill, threaten, imprison and torture them.
The US is not the only government guilty of this crime against poor countries, but it is the worst by far. This is not because of any particular moral defect in Americans or in its governing class but because of the unique situation which for the last 98 years has allowed them to print and pass off on the world paper money in larger and larger quantities (counting from the formation of the Federal Reserve in 1913). Until now of course.
There is a statement near the end about return of money on govt. loans (in America), and I am only going to comment on this statement since it affects so many in America.
We trust that as told, getting a degree is an acceptable way to increase our chances of winning at “The American Dream”…we fall for the lie. We go get educated, and accept the loan that Promises, that we will land a better job and be easily able to pay it back. We are willing to believe this lie and forego some of the best years of our lives in hard study time. Next we graduate to find that no one is hiring us for the positions we have earned through hard work and a time sacrifice. Many of us are forced to (basically) neglect home and family during working through college, only to find it was all for naught.
We graduate to find that not only will those who we thought would hire us, have no openings…but those who would have in the pasy are now calling one overqualified. We have paid to get educations, and then we pay for the education with even fewer people wanting us to work for them. We were nudged out of the general labor pool. To swim in deeper darker water.
It is a system of lies and ties that bind. Stop the lie. It is very simple. As a manager or management team one must realize the individuals sacrifices to be educated, risking the dream, and applaud it by offering us work. Plain and simple…Hire us! Hire people who don’t have a great education because this country is born of the laboring class citizen, and Hire Us, who have wroked to get an education, because you promised, you have convinced us over the course of our lives, that it was a great idea, to get higher education, to be successful.
You hardly ever mentioned the failure aspect. We are like sheep going to slaughter…and that isn’t fair in any country, nation or town. We deserve work, you promised it. I promised my children I would be a sucess, after being an A & B student. What I am, in actuallity is a Certified Paralegal, with no job prospects, and no, the lanscaping company is’nt going to hire me anymore.
Now hire us for crying out loud, and let us pay our freaking loans off, believe me, my bills top my list of things to do asap. It’s just not always possible to pay a loan when you can’t buy enough bread.
~Thanks for letting me vent here.
Tracey Hill Faleofa
Tracey
You have been played for a sucker. In effect you do not count in the calculations of those who erect, inhabit and control the education sector. Nor do employers. Nor does the state of the economy. Nor does the question of loan repayment or job availability or anything other than gaining OPM (other people’s money) and power. The whole tertiary education scheme is nowt more than a cover for huge subsidies to the education “business” (should be called “monkey-business”). That and the game of politics.
Forget about doing law any time soon. You are going to be just another peon entering a hugely over-subscribed market. There is a saying, “Don’t throw good money after bad.” It is worthwhile considering time in exactly the same way. After all, you only have a certain amount of it.
Best policy is to ditch the practice of being non-productive to others and find something productive (as in supplying what other people do value and will voluntarily enter trades with you to attain) to spend you remaining time doing. That aint going to be law sorry to say.
Sione
Good rant! I had a different experience. I attended a (relatively) inexpensive state school and completed the coursework for a degree in engineering. It took me much longer than most because I paid as I went. This meant I worked full-time and went to school part-time as my finances permitted. I fixed my own cars, and shared a bedroom with somebody for years to ensure expenses were low.
When I graduated, I had two useful things: an engineering degree, and years of work experience. But guess what millstone was not tied about my neck? Huge college debt.
When I was in college, a lot of my compatriots complained about borrowing so much money. Yet, when I told them what I was doing, they informed that they simply couldn’t do that, that they HAD to get done with college as quickly as possible. In their minds, I was the crazy one, not they who had $30,000 in debt without ever having held a real job. Now that we’re all 35/40/45, their sense of urgency was revealed as the hollow passion of youth.
What do you think has paid greater dividends? My college education, or the work experience I gained while paying for college? It was my work experience, despite having a degree that usually has marketable value, unlike most college degrees. That work experience taught me a trade that I eventually turned into a specialized career and I make far more money than I would had I chosen to work in a field for which my degree is directly applicable. I still find value in the college education, for the mathematical and analytical rigor has trained me to solve problems many compatriots cannot. However, the dominant terms by far is the work experience.
What’s the lesson here? The idea that education cannot be valued (and therefore should have no price) is foolishness. This needs to be added to your apt description of the big lies told about education. I will not be returning to school, probably ever. Why? It has a negative return! Why would I *pay* to learn when I can at least learn during my leisure just as effectively, or even *get paid* to learn (which describes many of us who consult in technical fields)?
I assume you will be teaching your children the same lesson I will: you will only go to college on my dime if you intend to study a field with significant intellectual rigor and for which the degree has practical ability. My money isn’t your money, so if you want me to spend it on you, you must justify the future value of its expenditure. And I will encourage my children to start working early in their college careers, even if it means it takes them a couple extra years to finish. They can start learning life’s lessons much sooner than all their indebted classmates.
BuckeyeChuck,
Thanks for a great story. It definately looks like you entered college with your eyes open. I have personally not looked at anything with a guarantee at the end. Tracey is not any different than thousands of other young people who think that there is a formula and when it is followed there will be success. There are no formulas but hard work, common sense and yes even a good education. I went to college to get an education and not a job. I always thought that if I was educated sufficiently the job would follow. When I was young I looked at the world as an opportunity but I also knew it can be cold and cruel if you are not prepared.
I think your children will not have any problems and if they do they will have a strong character to face any problems.
BuckeyeChuck
You are very clever and moral as well. What you did was the best policy.
Sione
All this says to me is that the macro economic structural problems that exist in the world economy also affect those with college educations, especially in countries with mostly low tech disappearing job opportunities. The real problem is the evolutionary structural changes in productivity brought about by technology over the past century. These have caused major dislocations in all economies while sending what low skilled labor needs there are to the lowest cost exploitable labor pools which have been in mostly under-developed countries.
Until all desired and needed goods and services can be provided by the willing few and/or until robots can do everything from the mining of raw goods to the development and production of more needed robots to do everything, economic competition is going to be a source of social upheaval unless population comes under extreme control to be in balance with supply and demand for goods, services, capital, and labor. How to achieve cooperation for the managed goal of balance on a world economic level and then to actually achieve this balance are thorny questions that seem impossible to answer in light of so many different and often belligerently competing cultures.This is just my intuitive reasoning on the situation. Alan Brezin
economic competition is going to be a source of social upheaval unless population comes under extreme control to be in balance with supply and demand for goods, services, capital, and labor.
It’s called “the market,” and it will balance out things just fine. Social upheaval is caused by government interference in the market. In the case of Egypt and Tunisia, lots of young men get left out as sexual paupers in a society where it’s impossible to attain status other than thru government connections. So they start fighting. It will happen in the US too.
You can’t lay everything on the government. Generally, people breed like rats everywhere despite having poor prospects to even have enough food to eat much less make a living. Human nature is at the root of most problems. We are still superstitious and illogical beings in large part. Government is an attempt to overcome this problem but it is doomed to failure because it is made up by flawed humans.
Alan
Government is doomed to failure because it is an immoral institution based on force (such as theft), fraud and coercion. The justifications and theories behind that institution are fantasy and myth. They have no correspondence to reality.
The free market, which is the sum total of billions of transactions and decisions made by individuals, brings into balance supply and demand without any need for central planning or governments. The very existence of and the interferences of governments of various types introduces distortions and dislocations into the market. These are encountered as the problems and conflicts you identify.
In the absence of governments problems and imbalances are opportunities and are rapidly addressed. In the presence of governments these matters rapidly become institutionalised, intractible and permanent. They get worse.
Govt feasts upon its failures and grows. In parallel its failure become larger. More and more resource is consumed to support the existence of govt. In the end the results are always the same- impoverishment for the vast majority and establishment of a permanent state of violence and immorality.
Damn right the govt should be blamed. It is an institution without legitimacy, morality or practicality.
Sione
Alan,
After reading your post I thought of a book that would shed some light on your world view. After reading this book I hope you have a better grasp on reality and how the world really works. Otherwise throw it in the trash. The book is “Eat People” by Andy Kessler. Andy will answer all your questions and then some. Good reading. Also, The Anti-Gnostic gave you some good information. Please read the book and pass it around, it is a keeper.
Only the State and it’s Worker Bees can sell a Fairly Tale to Grown Adults.
J.K. Rowling can only dream of creating this kind of “Wonderland”!
In all seriousness, Jeff Tucker pointed this out a couple of weeks ago in a blog about the “Pass the Buck” mentality among adults, more specifically parents regarding the State’s raising of their children.
I always wondered why the “not so desireable” students were pushed into the trade areas. A lot of this stuff is technical,?????? So many Trustworthy people were Full of $###!
Really Sad…
A very good article Mr Fulton. I can see only one possible flaw – the mention of the “underfunded” Egyption education system. Of course to a libertarian the state should not be “funding an education system” at all, but even if it should be doing so, there is no way to know what the “correct” level of funding should be.
As for the United States – it is now clear (thanks to Wikileaks and so on) that the American government has been playing a double game in countries like Tunisia and Egypt.
On the one hand supporting the regimes (by the way neither the Tunisian regime or the Egyption one came to power with American support – they both started off as socialist regimes but, partly, changed over time), but on the other hand the State Department (and Google and so on) have busy playing complex games supporting various opposition groups (and getting them to cooperate).
I am not always opposed to intervention (unlike most people here), but this intervention is almost bound to blow up in the face of the United States and the West in general – the young opposition people will not turn out to be the fluffy bunnies that the State Department (and so on) assumes they are. And other people will prove better at manipulating them than the United States is.
The best that we can say as a country founded on some great ideals that we really haven’t practiced consistently, is “follow our ideals but execute them better than we have”. (do as I say, not as I do)
We will soon require a law degree to drive a green taxi. You can file for divorce on the way to the airport, make your will or some other thorny issue.The government can screw up any thing.
A teacher once told us of the great depression, how a man with one year of college manned a gas station with one pump, two years, two pumps, and three years, three pumps. It was too wry to be literally true, but I did take to heart the point he made about underemployment in times of economic crisis.
I would happily accept the lanscaping job. Eventually paying off the useless loan.
Tracey
You are the victim of a con. Default the loan. Walk away.
Sione
Except that bankrupcy usually does not absolve you of state backed education loans…
Then you must keep walking. Depart the country…
Sione
Perhaps the worst thing to say regarding the state of Education in this country is the fact that as more colleges inflate their grades and allow more students to enter, while restricting competition through State accreditation regulations and licensing laws, more employers will question the integrity of any college degree across the board. The Sciences are still in solid shape as far as demand goes, but this only means they will be the last domino to fall.
When even chemists and engineers are being laid off and overlooked, it’s clear to me that a major correction in the market for education is long overdue.
Presumably when there is a currency crash, or the unlikely even that taxpayers refuse to subsidize it any longer and pressure their politicians.
The left knows that education is the best way to further their political agenda through indoctrination. This article is interesting in that I had not thought of over-educated people in an economy that doesn’t hold a job for their specialization as a cultural destabilizing force.
I usually just think of the broken dreams and wasted money of all those graduates of liberal arts programs who aren’t able to get professorships, and have to take an entry level job in some unrelated field since their hard-won skills are not economically valueable to society.
In the leisure class, what used to comprise a ‘liberal education’ was socially valuable, and also a form of conspicuous consumption. Those of us who have to work for a living, can’t afford to emulate the leisure class with a non-vocational degree–but our culture conceals that fact from the credulous.
A young woman, classmate of my sons, is a very good visual artist. The other day I saw her sitting among lounging cats as a clerk in a not busy bookstore. It was sad to think of all the art education she had, all those hopes and exciting education, only to find that she had no employable skills. The false promise that education is the key to attaining one’s dreams, no matter what they might be, has a high human cost, in addition to the economic waste.
Hmmm. This article sounds quite familiar. Thanks for the link!
Why is that in some place increase in the population level produces good results? More goods and services available and more changes for innovation..
Then in some places this same change will cause hopelessness, very bad job prospects for young inexperienced people and increased possibility for mass uprisings..
Education can be partly thought as a storage for certain age-groups. It controls that only part of each cohort will enter workforce at a particular point of time.
In some countries young people dream of becoming a civil servant, gaining secure job and possibility for own house and marriage. It is said that in Spain younger people must gain many years of experience in various low-paid “apprenticeships” before they might get a more better paid job. Insiders are well-protected but temp-agencies thrive as well…
Why is that in some place increase in the population level produces good results? More goods and services available and more changes for innovation. Then in some places this same change will cause hopelessness, very bad job prospects for young inexperienced people and increased possibility for mass uprisings.
Because what matters is the quality of the population, not its quantity. It takes Egypt 84M people to produce $217B in GDP. Sweden generates over $400B in GDP with a population of 9M. Are you just now figuring this out?
“Because what matters is the quality of the population, not its quantity.”
No, what matters is the amount of capital goods which the population can use to increase its productivity.
If 9M Swedes and the Egyptians traded places there would be little change to the GDP’s 1 year later.
do you seriously believe your last point?
And who created those capital goods? Or were they just lying around waiting for the Swedes to come and trip over them?
One Finnish writer has said that he believes that Arabs have not been able to produce anything worthwhile since the medieval times because Mongols destroyed civilization based on urban city life and same time the best section of population.
So this means that since G-factor is so strongly inheritable then some selective destruction will show its effects for very long time.
I dont know if this is true or not…
to adi:
here’s another take on the differences between the middle-eastern social structures and ours, and why the outcomes are different.
http://is.gd/x4UeyT
U.S. schools fail to teach critical thinking. Thus President Obama receives a 50% favorable poll rating despite the almost continuous flow of lies and half-truths from his lips. The teachers’ unions prevent culling defective teachers from the system. Defective teachers produce defective education. The cycle continues. This, despite the reality that although government allowed Bernie Madoff, produced (with help) the financial crisis, and the coming ruin of the country, millions of “educated” citizens are grasping for “Obamacare” which will assure the destruction of the U.S. economy.
The problem with education is that it is not runned by free market capitalism.
Entirely private schools should decide by themselves what courses and programs they will offer and they should consult with their customers and businesses what are the skills needed. Then the design and offer courses to meet those needs and sell them to their student customers who purchase those courses and acquire the skills needed.
The problem is that the government is involved in designing and authorizing the courses and then is involved in graduation.
Nice, informatve article (to me) but it is in error about US expenditures on education.
“The Tunisian educational system is also enormously expensive. Of Tunisia’s GDP, 7.2 percent
is spent on education, more than any European or North American country beside Denmark
and Iceland, which also spends 7.2 percent of its GDP on education.”
In 2005 Taxpayers spent $909 billion via state local and federal government.
K – 12 $536 billion
Higher Ed $373 billion
http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/index.html
This does not include private schools: K -12 and higher education.
It is not clear whether higher ed govt expenditures are gross or net of tuition, room and board, fees paid to schools paid by students.or whether the expenditures include grants and subsidies paid by govt to private schools.
I would guess that today we spend 10% of GDP on education. Probably $1.3 trillion of $13 trillion.
We spend 4.5% on defense.
Comments on this entry are closed.