I started my working life, paper route aside, working at McDonald’s for $2.35/hour. Before I left, I was a store manager, training, and experience which lead to other such positions. Those lead to a testing gig in high-tech. QC and ISO positions (all self-trained), product management, technical writing, logistics, and other productive skills the free market needs.
But it all started when McDonald’s taught me the value of being valuable.
That having skills, determination, and work ethic could elevate both feelings of self-worth and your lifestyle. A value I created, not perceived value forced on my employer by outside forces.
Over at Prager U Olivia Legaspi shares a similar story, contrasted against her experience at a modern university.
Can working at McDonald’s better prepare a young adult for life than attending college? For Haverford undergraduate Olivia Legaspi, college taught her that her feelings are more important than anything; but working at McDonald’s she learned that serving others comes first. Which of those lessons is more important? Olivia Legaspi explains.
In her case, it was the job. For a lot of folks, it will be a job. A point Mike Rowe made yesterday
“My intent is to remind people that a university is not the only place to enrich your mind or prepare yourself for the real world. Nor is it necessarily the best place. It’s merely the most expensive.”
And it is.
“Tuition has increased at two and half times the rate of inflation. Nothing else this important has ever done that. Not real estate, energy, food, even healthcare,” he continued. “The question is why? Is the quality of education two and half times better than it was thirty years ago? No way. Are universities turning out more graduates? Hardly. Fifty percent of those who enroll don’t even graduate. Do people have more disposable income today than they used to? Of course not.”
“No, universities have been able to raise their prices partly because too many parents believe that anything less than a four-year degree will doom their kid to a less productive existence, and partly because we’ve pressured millions of kids to borrow whatever it takes from a bottomless pool of unlimited money that doesn’t really exist,” Rowe shared.
Rowe has committed his time and energy to an important issue that is not just ignored but crucial to our nation’s survival. College isn’t for everyone. And it creates problems the left is ignoring in their quest to use Higher-Ed to indoctrinate future generations.
If you don’t have electricians, plumbers, OTR-drivers, and a long list of other trade-skilled “expert” laborers you can bitch about wanting commuter rail, affordable housing, or infrastructure all you want. Those manufacturing jobs you claim to support, the domestic wind, solar, or battery plants in the green jobs future you talk so much about, can’t exist.
You not only won’t have anyone around with enough training to do the actual work, there won’t be enough people with the skill to fix what’s there now.
Your superior-minded, culturally engineered narratives will crumble right alongside the crowded, walkable, atmosphere-warming, concrete island me-topias.
For the party claiming to support workers, your goal leads us to a worker-less dystopian-metopia.
You need to cut the crap.
Not everyone is like Olivi. They won’t come out the other side of the Campus Culture with their work ethic intact. They’ll have debt, no productive, skills and a degree is everyone’s out to get me, whether they graduate or not, and a resume populated with craigslist “jobs” as a paid protester (or campaign canvasser) and a knowledge of how to fill out forms online to ‘manage’ your government-funded subsistence “lifestyle.”
And I’m not saying that isn’t a goal of the left. But without skilled labor it’s a notopia.
As for Oliva, she added skills and kept her head in the right place only because a much-maligned employer, pilloried by the professional left, taught her about something more important than herself and she deiced not to let the propaganda mill of higher-education take that from her.
Too often we’re not that lucky, and the nation will pay a price for that greater than the student debt bubble.
Here’s Olivia’s story from Prager U.
(H/T to Susan Olsen on Facebook for the Rowe piece).
