Re:The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade...
by tomp on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @04:55PM
(#10383417)
> The problem is the quality of education in America.
That's quite a statement. By most standards, US has one of the best (but not the cheapest) education systems in the world. But don't worry, even in Europe, non-STEM majors, especially the likes of social studies, are pretty much worthless.
Simply said, what do such majors really give you that you couldn't learn by reading books? Abstract reasoning? Worse than most STEM. Understanding of life? Living life gives you that. Social skills? People with good social skills usually got them during their teens, whereas people with shitty social skills won't get them through a degree. Critical thinking? Well, given the state of the world and the quality of public discourse, it's not working.
A high quality education in philosophy or English, makes for effective communicators with excellent critical thinking skills. Outside of the very best universities students don't get that kind of education.
A STEM major isn't necessarily the answer either. It's often a struggle for highly educated math and science majors to find work in their industry. Sure they may have a leg up on getting certain jobs outside their industry, but it's by no means easy going for them either.
"American students need to improve in math and science—but not because there's a surplus of jobs in those fields."
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myt...
Fact of the matter is that, there are largely just fewer jobs to go around. Part of this is that the older generation is working longer, not vacating their positions. Some of it is efficiency gains from software and other modern technology have let companies do more with fewer people, leading to a smaller workforce requirement.
We're very quickly nearing a point where not everyone needs to work full time in order to support our population and in fact not everyone CAN work full time in productive work. As a planet we're going to have to make some serious societal and economic decisions.