Contributors

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

The Anti-College Crusade

The other day Rick Santorum said:
Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands. Some people have incredible gifts and ... want to work out there making things. President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob.
The fact is, Obama said that he wants everyone to go to a university or two-year community college or vocational school of their choice. In this modern world of computerized cars and highly-automated factory floors that require the people running those machines to have programming skills, you need to know more than just readin', ritin' and 'rithmetic. After the tea-party crowd finished applauding, Santorum continued:
There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.
Santorum went to Penn State (I wonder if he knew Jerry Sandusky?). He also got an MBA and a law degree. He seems to have escaped his indoctrination by liberal secular state university professors. Santorum also seems to be unafraid of his own children being indoctrinated: his two oldest have started college, though they're taking a break to work on his campaign.

The fact is, on average people with college educations make a lot more money than people who don't. The unemployment rate among the college-educated is half that of the rest of the nation. Their divorce rate and out-of-wedlock birthrate is much lower. They have better health and live longer. People make connections at college that will set them up for life, even if they drop out like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.


For a long time now Republicans seem to have been striving to become the party of stupid. Now they have a candidate who's actively denigrating getting a college education. It seems crazy for the party of the rich and soon-to-be rich to advocate against the best track to wealth and influence.

Is Santorum off his rocker? Or has he unwittingly revealed the Republican party's real agenda?

Two camps of Republicans have long been at odds. The first camp is big business and its frontmen, guys like Rick Perry, George Bush and (until recently) John McCain. These businesses have relied on large numbers of illegal aliens to pick tomatoes, clean hotel rooms and butcher chickens. The same group has been relentlessly busting unions, most recently with states like Wisconsin and Indiana gutting the ability of unions to even exist.

The second camp is relatively uneducated lower- to middle-income, blue-collar, union-hating, anti-amnesty Republicans who are afraid that illegal aliens will steal their jobs. Because the only real qualification the aliens lack is the ability to speak English. So they want the aliens out now, though they aren't interested in taking the aliens' jobs because they don't pay enough to live on.

Is the real Republican agenda to encourage the economic descent of the average American so that they will fill the void left by all those deported illegals? To get this to work, Republicans have to make low-wage blue-collar Americans feel smug and superior and that they're somehow more authentic than college-educated politicians (and their multi-millionaire CEO buddies, but let's not mention them). Santorum and Sarah Palin seem to be doing just that.

Or would we be better served by sending more people to college who will study computer science and engineering to fill the hundreds of thousands of current high-tech job vacancies here in the United States? Jobs that are now going to foreigners with college educations. These well-educated Americans could start companies that build machines that pick tomatoes, butcher chickens and clean hotel rooms, eliminating the need for illiterate aliens who can't speak English. Maintaining and programming those machines would create decent-paying jobs for Americans who like to work with their hands. This would also increase the productivity of the American economy and allow us to beat out China, which still relies on prison slave labor and low-wage workers stacked eight to a dorm room.

Will all these Tea Party Republicans still feel proud and smug when it's their kids lopping off their fingers on the meat-packing floors instead of illegal aliens or shiny metal robots?

1 comment:

Mark Ward said...

Just when you think that the GOP couldn't be any more tone deaf, they somehow are able to hit a J Flat and prove me wrong.

As you say, Nikto, the president's initial call for everyone to go to college was meant for all sorts of higher education including trade schools and community colleges that would feed into those entry level jobs.

My chief concern is that, as we shift from a unipolar world to a multipolar one, we need to have the most educated work force we can in order to compete with the likes of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China). People from those countries come here to get educated and then, because of our FUBAR immigration policies, leave and go back to their country.

So, our work force not only needs to be more educated but we need to kill two birds with one stone here and loosen immigration laws so we can retain more of the world's talent.