Trump To Fund Technical Training?

Trump’s idea of redistributing $3 billion in grant money from Harvard to trade schools, which he posted on May 26th, is the start of a long overdue discussion about a larger and more serious issue:

“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land. What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”

COLLEGE ISN’T ALWAYS THE ANSWER

It’s absurd that a four-year college degree has become the only gateway into the American middle class. Many high school seniors feel compelled to go to college because they’ve been told over and over that a college degree is necessary. But not every young person is suited to four years of college. Some are bright and ambitious but won’t get much out of college.

An estimated half of recent college graduates are in jobs that don’t even require a college degree. And they’re stuck with a huge debt, some into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and will be paying down these student loans for decades. Trump’s Department of Education has restarted collections on defaulted student loans. For the first time in years, student loan borrowers who haven’t kept up with their bills could see their wages garnished.

If young people start college and then drop out, they feel like total failures. Too many colleges and universities hand out useless degrees in such categories as “women’s studies” and “gender studies” and numerous other recently created Leftist curriculums designed to brainwash the student against America such as Critical Race Theory.

Leftists in America cling to the conceit that four years of college are necessary for everyone and looks down its nose at people who don’t have college degrees. This has to stop. If the election of Donald Trump has taught us anything, it’s that people without college degrees, fully 60 percent of adult Americans, most of whom voted for him, need better jobs, better wages, and more respect.

Young people need an alternative to a four-year college degree. That alternative should be a world-class system of vocational-technical education. A four-year college degree isn’t necessary for many of tomorrow’s good jobs. The emerging economy will need platoons of technicians able to install, service, and repair all the high-tech machinery filling up hospitals, offices, and factories, along with people who can upgrade the software embedded in almost every gadget you buy, and who can implement machine-learning algorithm, and can process natural language for AI, and can install and service robots. Today it’s even hard to find a skilled plumber or electrician.

The vocational and technical education now available to young Americans is wildly underfunded and inadequate. And too often, vocational and technical education is denigrated as being for “losers.” These programs should be creating winners.

A world-class technical education doesn’t have to mean young people’s fates are determined when they’re 14. Instead, rising high school seniors could be given the option of entering a program that extends a year or two beyond high school and ends with a diploma acknowledging their technical expertise.

WHAT HAPPENED TO COMMUNITY COLLEGES?

Community Colleges, FKA Junior Colleges, the under-appreciated crown jewels of America’s education system, could be developing these curricula and credentials. Businesses could be advising on the technical skills they’ll need (which they were doing in the 1960s and 1970s) and promising jobs to young people who complete their degrees with good grades.

Government could be investing enough money to make these programs thrive. Trump’s $3 billion redistribution of grant money from Harvard to trade schools is a good start. Instead, we continue to push most of our young people through a single funnel called a four-year college education, a funnel so narrow it’s causing applicants and their parents excessive stress and worry about “getting in.” That is too often ill-suited and unnecessary, and far too expensive. That can cause college dropouts to feel like failures for the rest of their lives.

Trump has started a discussion to rethink one of the central tenets of American society: It’s time to give up the idea that every young person has to go to college. America should offer high school seniors a genuine alternative route into the middle class as it did in the recent past. An extra bonus would be that young minds would not be poisoned with the hate-America Marxist propaganda found on most college campuses.