Daily Archives: August 29, 2022

The True Cost of Higher Education!

I retired at the age of 43 after working from 1984 to 2000. I was a hardware and software design engineer and engineering manager at U.S. Robotics. We started small and became the largest modem manufacturer in the world. We had to hire lots of folks with higher education and advanced degrees. We could not find them here in the U.S.A. We hired many on work Visas from Japan, India, and China. I am sure with the state of higher education in our country today, we are probably worse off than we were then.

The fact is we need job creators. Not the kind that Republicans think of as investors but the kind that can handle very high-tech research, development, and manufacturing. We must have these kinds of folks to help us keep high tech jobs here in the U.S.A.

Helping people get a higher education is not just for college folks. If we want jobs in today’s global economy for people with less education, we need many more college educated folks to make those jobs possible.

Conveniently, the Republicans want to harken back to the past to make folks angry who paid off their loans without help or play on the inferiority of folks with no college education, or complain about raising the national debt, or falsely stoke fears about inflation.

What Republicans will not acknowledge is that college educated folks are job creators. CEOs do not do the actual work to make research, development, manufacturing, and logistics jobs required for a company to be based in the U.S.A. College education will give jobs to the children of people with less education so their children can help us compete with the rest of the word. The effect of creating more jobs in the U.S.A. will reduce inflation by reducing the cost of shipping and supply chain problems and bring good paying jobs back to the U.S.A. We also need to think about critical strategic defense which such programs as the new CHIPS program addresses. All of this will increase GDP. It is the best way to reduce the national debt by far.

College education is about the future not the past. Republicans say they do not want foreigners to replace jobs here in the U.S.A. but everything they do seems to require us to either hire overseas on work Visas or hire undocumented workers because we cannot pay folks a livable wage. You would think if they had any logic or at least consistency they would support a livable wage and highly educated ‘Jobs Creators’ here!

It appears to me that the Republicans of old which valued higher education with financial support (e.g., the GI bill) have been replaced by Republicans who only see higher education as a mere tool to make liberals. Their ideology is short sighted and will not prepare us for the world we are living in now. We will get left behind if we adhere to their divisive agenda.

Please, folks let’s not let them set the message – let’s be on the offensive not the defensive!