Education: It's not everything

This past Friday, March 4, President Obama gave a speech at Miami Central High School alongside former Florida Governor Jeb Bush about the growing importance of education in our economy.  As we emerge from the recession, he argued, companies will be looking with unprecedented force for highly-educated workers to increase productivity and create a new generation of American prosperity.

Unfortunately for us humans, many companies have already found these high-skilled workers, and they work for free.

Paul Krugman, in a recent column entitled "Degrees and Dollars", refutes the conventional wisdom that receiving a college degree will dramatically increase your chances of getting a well-paying job.  Instead, citing a recent article in NYT, Krugman notes that rising levels of technology have allowed companies to efficiently carry out tasks for a fraction of the costs associated with college-educated human labor.

Today's economy in America is often described as increasingly "hollowed out".  This means that more jobs are available at the lowest and highest levels, but that middle-income jobs are less prevalent.  Technology has been blamed for this hollowing out, since mid-level jobs can often be completed by computers with much more efficiency than with humans.  But now, as the NYT article shows, technology has begun to fill higher-level jobs formerly done only by those with college and even doctorate degrees.

And, as this editorial from NYT shows, unemployment among college-educated Americans under 25 line up with average unemployment levels almost exactly.  So, nowadays, a college degree doesn't guarantee a job.

Still, as someone who anxiously awaits college notifications, I firmly believe that college is the best path to success, as it always has been in America.  First of all, America's universities are among the best in the world, and the innovation that has fed America's prosperity for decades is in large part due to their integral nature in our culture.  Second, innovation is predicated on humans with critical thinking and entrepreneurial abilities, things computers can never replicate.

But that doesn't change the fact that technology will increasingly hollow out the economy, creating greater class separations and eliminating the middle class, if not kept in check.  As I read through the hundreds of comments on Krugman's column, I noticed a great one making the connection between this hollowing out phenomenon and Karl Marx's prediction about capitalism.  He argued that, eventually, technology and globalization would drive down wages to the point that the proletariat would rebel and socialism would emerge.

Both Krugman and the NYT Editorial Board argue that health care reform and more collective bargaining rights for workers, to name a few, can help revitalize the middle class, keep wages up, and keep American capitalism working for everyone.

Now, how can education play a role in that success?  Although a college degree may not guarantee a well-paying career today, it can bring about the innovation that is key to the success of the American middle class in the future.  And the government must take an active role in improving primary, secondary, and higher education accessibility and standards for this innovation to take hold.

So, to sum up, Krugman is right, and so is Obama - but for different reasons.