We were alone at the top on three of the four tests, and tied for first on the fourth. That’s amazing. In 2005, the last time the test was given, Mass students also were number one on all four tests, so this isn’t a fluke.
Our total state tax burden, as a percentage of income, is in the bottom half of the nation – yet we are still able to have such a public school system.
I wish our country’s bumper crop of wing nuts would stop yammering about awful public schools and come up to Mass and learn how to do it.
Hooray for our educators!
Please share widely!
NCLB is an attempt for the “bumper crop of wing nuts” to learn from the leading MCAS model. Standardized tests gasp, raise standards. This is a victory for MCAS.
…what?
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I will remind you that correlation != causation.
Before you go praising the MCAS, ask a few questions:
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What trainings / qualifications do teachers have here relative to other states?
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What is the average teacher’s salary relative to that of teachers in other states?
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How is our physical infrastructure compared to that of other states?
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What’s the level of child crime/poverty statewide relative to other states?
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Okay, yeah, how has standardized tests changed the dynamic at public schools?
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Etc. etc. etc. Then you can come back and tell me that this is a victory for MCAS.
What trainings / qualifications do teachers have here relative to other states? We are now able to verify that they can pass English and math proficiency tests; the teacher cndidates flunking these standards when testing was first begun are not in classsrooms like their older classmates.
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What is the average teacher’s salary relative to that of teachers in other states? Salries are higher – as is cost of living. Salary per se is not a reliable figure.
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How is our physical infrastructure compared to that of other states? Older – we have schools built before some areas becme settled! I WENT to them!
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What’s the level of child crime/poverty statewide relative to other states? Why would this be relevant to school performance? Millions of poor kids excel in school, and rich kids who set cats on fire flunk out. I am tired of the Born Poor = Lifelong Failure equation.
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Okay, yeah, how has standardized tests changed the dynamic at public schools? For all the kvetching about ‘teaching to the test’, one response has always lingered in my mind – now, we know they have been taught at least THAT much. I had teachers who napped at the front of the room for 40 minutes.
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We’re not discussing about individuals — we’re discussing the aggregate. In the aggregate, there are lots of great indicators of performance by individual students. Some examples include
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Individuals will always succeed or fail in spite of demographic correlations. That’s not the point.
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I expect Massachusetts does very well on the tests for a variety of reasons, including average income, average education of parents, a very low divorce rate, qualified teachers, a general environment that values education [Boston metro higher ed, etc], salaries that attract and retain a larger pool of qualified teachers, etc.
Okay, yeah, how has standardized tests changed the dynamic at public schools?
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You tell me. When I was a HS student in a suburb of Cincinnati in the mid 1960s we took standardized tests–the “Iowa standard” tests.”
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Standardized testing isn’t new. The issue is what the results of the standardized testing were used for. The results of the tests that I took were certainly not used to determine who should and who should not be able to graduate. Nor were they used to determine the quality of a school. What they were used for was a guide to the teachers who might need a bit of extra tutorage.
The born poor = poor for life equation isn’t 100% accurate, but certainly there are traps in poverty that can stop many (most?) poorer students from achieving the maximum possible standards that they could. Furthermore, while there are plenty of wealthy kids that flunk out, there are even more with parents that insist they have tutors in any subject they get as low as a B in. I don’t think it’s any strange coincidence that the vast majority of intelligent friends I’ve had came with family backgrounds that were at least middle class (usually higher) and really valued education.
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Furthermore, I don’t disagree that the MCAS has probably lead to higher national test scores. We’ve certainly taught far more students how to do well on tests. However, the question is “has the MCAS made everyone better students?” And then, if we’ve seen improvements with our public education, is it necessarily because of the MCAS? There have been a lot of changes made to schools in Massachusetts over the decades – from the MCAS, to more difficult teacher standards, to new and better understandings of how to cater to individual students. Who’s to say what’s had the highest impact? We simply don’t know enough.
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However, at some point we’re going to have to move beyond standardized testing as a measure to show how well students are performing. I think the MCAS has driven standards higher in struggling or average school systems, but has been an overall drag on schools that were already doing well. Every student needs a solid bevy of information, which the MCAS seems to be good at encouraging, but also the ability to think and act like extremely rational and intelligent human beings – which the MCAS won’t ever achieve. At best, the MCAS can be used as training wheels before Massachusetts learns to ride the bicycle on our own.
…one of the most important questions is, what were similar statistics before the institution of MCAS, and, after doing regression analyses (a standard mathematical to eliminate the effects of other variables that you mention, and others) what would have been the effect without MCAS?
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That’s what I meant when I wrote correlation != causation on another comment thread a while ago.
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(“!=” is the C-programming language for “does not equal”)
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There are a lot of other variables, two of which I will mention. One obvious variable is funding.
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The second, and much more subtle, is drop-out rate. It has been widely reported that Rod Paige, who was GWBush’s first SecEducation would, while he was earlier superintendent of the Houston public school district, encourage low-performing students to drop out before tests were administered. Why? Because it would raise the consolidated school testing scores, and make the public schools in the Houston school appear to be better than they actually were. But that practice would not serve the students very well.
That in addition to MCAS, ed reform in 1993 brought a lot of additional money to our schools. I could just as easily argue that it was the funds, and not MCAS or anything else, that is responsible for our strong standing.
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Of course, the actual answer is probably a bit more complicated…
I've always been under the opinion that the “more money in 1993” was somewhat smoke & mirrors. If you look at the state's DOR website, you'll see that there were always regular increases in education aid prior to 1993. But a few years before 1993, those increases froze. The 1993 increase looked big, but it was a lot of backed-up aid. For example, in Springfield, here are our Chapter 70 aid numbers from 1982 forward:
Year Amount (m) Increase Pct 1982 $ 32.3 1983 $ 32.3 0% 1984 $ 39.2 21% 1985 $ 46.1 18% 1986 $ 51.0 11% 1987 $ 57.6 13% 1988 $ 62.9 9% 1989 $ 69.0 10% 1990 $ 63.5 -8% 1991 $ 61.0 -4% 1992 $ 61.0 0% 1993 $ 61.0 0% 1994 $ 105.4 73% 1995 $ 114.5 9% 1996 $ 125.3 9% 1997 $ 133.5 7% 1998 $ 146.4 10% 1999 $ 164.0 12% 2000 $ 181.5 11% 2001 $ 188.4 4% 2002 $ 206.6 10% 2003 $ 208.6 1% 2004 $ 208.4 0% 2005 $ 215.6 3% 2006 $ 225.4 5%
If the aid increases from 1990 to 1994 were the same as the average aid increases from 1984 to 1989, by 1994 Springfield would have received $118.7m instead of the $105.4m that it got under “education reform”. It seems like the state, knowing that it would lose the court case, simply held back aid from 1990 to 1994 so it could say “see, here's the money!”
Granted, the state couldn't afford to increase education aid at a 12.7% clip indefinitely, but “education reform” seems to be a lot of symbolic puffery, and little real change.
You are apparently examining only Chapter 70 aid. That is a key piece of the funding puzzle, but school building assistance and other strategic education investments also figure in to the increased aid after 1993, I believe.
Funny that your first thought wasn’t to even consider the students who took the tests, or the teachers and families who prepared them. Nope — it was to try to stitch together a wispy justification for conservative practices.
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Congrats to the kids of the Bay State, props to the teachers and families.
I fear this result hides some troublesome inequalities. I went to some of the best public schools in the country (K-8 in Brookline, then two years of Brookline High School, and then two years of Newton South High School), but just a few miles away from me, kids I knew were in some mediocre schools in Boston, and the difference between what we were getting in school was obvious to us.
However, to be number one in all four tests twice in a row is so unusual – it srongly indicates that even our mediocre schools are much, much better than other state’s mediocre schools.
Here’s the mean SAT scores for every public high school in Massachusetts in 2006, courtesy of boston.com and/or the Globe.
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Looking at verbals, there are ten above 600: Acton-Boxboro, Boston Latin, Bromfield, Corwin-Russell School at Broccoli Hall, Dover-Sherborn, Francis W. Parker Charter, Lexington, Mass. Academy for Math and Science (663, tops), Wellesley, and Weston. Rich suburbs and magnet schools.
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Looks like there are about 35 with verbals under 400 — many of them charters targeting such a population but also Brighton, Charlestown, East Boston, Boston English, Greater Lawrence Voke, Hyde Park, J. E. Burke, Lawrence High, Lynn Voke, Madison Park Voke, Monument, Putnam Voke, South Boston, Springfield High, West Roxbury, Dean Tech, Worcester Voke.
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There were other voke schools in the mid-high 400’s. 145 out of 336 were 501 or above. Lots more data to look at.
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One factor contributing to the low mean schools of the Boston district schools, of course, is the flight of stronger students to Boston Latin, other magnets, privates, and parochial schools. The vokes also have an obvious selection bias away from conventional academic achievers.
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Seeing students coming into UMass, it’s really clear how different the level of preparation is between the schools at the top and the bottom of this list.
The vokes also have an obvious selection bias away from conventional academic achievers.
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…schools engaged in vocational education in the US are not doing their students any service.
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Another of my little stories. In Germany, vocational education is actually held in high regard, and people who choose not to go to Gymnasien (college prep schools) get a rigorous academic education, as well as vocational training. In the US, it needn’t be an “either-or” situation, it could be a “both” situation.
But we take kids who disproportionately start out with less of whatever the SAT measures, then spend less time on their academic education than do the standard schools. They wind up, it seems to me, not only unprepared for college but seriously uneducated for life.
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My understanding is that there is stiff competition in Germany for placements in educational programs that lead to manufacturing jobs. Anecdotally, this has been suggested as a reason why they make BMW’s and we make Chevys.
I was listening to WBZ last night, and they were reporting that young lawyers now graduating are finding it hard to get employment, with $100,000 in loans to pay off – while voke school grads who took HVAC, plumbing, etc, now not only have jobs but have no loans to pay off and are able to buy houses and begin their lives as adults instead of parent-dependent student-paupers.
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The single worst thing Bill Clinton ever said – and that’s a WIDE selection – is that EVERY child in America should go to college.
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BALDERDASH!
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Disclaimer – a young relative, aged 24, is manager of the parts dept. in a car dealership. He did not attend college, and already makes 50% more than his college-graduating classmates
Peter,
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A couple of things. You can always look and find antecdotal evidence that proves that college isn’t worth it, but if you look at studies that follow large groups of people (rather than one guy and his friends), they consistently show that college graduates will make more over the course of their careers than those without college degrees. An October 2006 report by the US Census Bureau found the following average salaries at the varying levels of education:
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No HS Diploma: $19,169
HS Diploma: $28,645
College Degree: $51,544
Advance Degree: $78,093
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The lawyer story is a whole different ball of wax and is all about kids going to law school with false impressions of what it will do for them. I believe the WBZ story (which I admit I did not hear) is based off a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about lawyers finding it tough to find jobs and having a huge loan amount to pay off. This actually isn’t a new phenomenon and is an interesting result of bad perceptions and unrealistic expectations.
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There are a group of large law firms, based in a select group of metropolitan areas (New York, Boston, Chicago, LA, DC), that have over the past 5-7 years dramatically increased salaries to compete with pressure from investment banks, hedge funds, each other, etc. The new salary structure starts with first year associates making $160,000 right out of law school. These firms really only recruit students from a handful (about 10-15) of the nations top law schools (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYC, UVA, Michigan, Georgetown, Chicago, Northwester…and locally BU and BC). Those schools have job placement rates at graduation that are in the mid to high nineties (as a percentage of graduating students) and most of the students take jobs at these big firms.
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The problem is that these firms do not represent most legal jobs and these students do not comprise a large percentage of the law school student pool nationwide. However, the media loves to talk about how much firms are paying these kids and prospective law school students get enamoured with the possible big payday. So, the students go to a non-top 15 law school with the idea that they will land the big firm job and then are crushed to learn the system really doesn’t work that way. The law schools, eager for warm bodies, do little to dissuade the notion these kids have and charge equivalent tuitions to the top schools. The end result is a whole bunch of law grads with huge debt loads and not enough top paying firm jobs for them to take.
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But this has been the case for years now. The only reason it’s getting press is because the Journal decided to report on it and now it’s getting picked up by all sorts of media outlets. Ironically, if anything, competition among firms for students from top schools has actually increased and those students have a wide range of jobs to pick from.
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…”Dutko Worldwide continued to grow. The firm, undergoing a broad reorganization, reported just more than $10 million for midyear, up from $8.8 million during the second half of 2004“…is my friend Ron Kaufman, former White House staffer.
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He didn’t go to college either.
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How many kids do you know who are going to college, not because they have the slightest interest in academics, but to get thier ticket punched? The NEW BA is the MBA, as it were, and academic credentials are further cheapened.
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Meanwhile – kids who WOULD do a good job as a tradesman or merchant are SHAMED into getting superflous degrees – and debt – by a society that thinks you MUST go to college.
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People are beginning to look around, and this merry-go-round scam is winding down.
Peter,
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Your last statement makes absolutely no sense to me and doesn’t seem supported by any facts. If anything, more and more young people are applying to college today. Admission rates at top schools have continued to drop due to increased applications. Schools that were once considered “safety schools” for the Ivies are now nearly impossible to get into because of the large number of students applying. Obviously people see that there is a high value in obtaining a college degree.
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Whether it’s a love of learning or a desire to have a degree on your resume to increase job prospects, the motivation to enter college doesn’t lessen the impact college has on a person. College is much more than academic learning (though obviously the critical thinking and other skills you develop in the classroom are beneficial and important). There is a ton of social learning that occurs while in college that you just could not get any other way, and which is vitally important throughout one’s life and professional career. I learned a lot in my college classes, but very little is practical to my day to day life our my career. However, the things I learned outside the classroom from my interaction with fellow students and from the college experience as a whole (i.e., having roommates, time management, etc.) really do play a role in my every day life, both personally and professionally. Regardless of why I went to school, those lessons had to be learned to get through the four years.
Heck, don’t show up for WORK on time and you get docked!
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It fascinates me that in this era of ‘lifelong learning’ that some place an ever greater emphasis on the K-12 to 13-16 merry-go-round – At $30k per year in debt.
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I’ve spoken before about the ‘bubblefication’ of young people, which I honestly think leads to LACK of critical thinking and lack of credit management on the part of young people who have never worked for an hourly wage, and never got to know anyone who had to meet a payroll. When you describe the pleasures of academe, it seems apparently a ticket into the middle class, not an intellectural exercise – an expensive summer camp on the way to real life. And after you HAVE acquired this veneer – what do you do when you can’t find that upper class job suitable to your purchased status? Like the person who mentioned the Master’s degree holder working as a house painter.
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I submit my young friend has greater latitude in travelling UP the ladder, when he is financially secure, than somebody who expects to BEGIN at the middle rung and finds himself crowded off.
I used time management as an example rather than the ultimate lesson that college teaches Peter.
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I’m not sure where you get this idea that somehow college kids don’t know what it’s like to work for an hourly wage? I held jobs in high school and during school (both during the school year and each summer). Most of the folks I went to school with where in the same boat.
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Like it or not Peter, chances are that at some point along your friends climb up the ladder, his lack of a college degree will hurt his advancement. Quite simply, for many jobs, a college degree is a barrier to entry.
…more is learned at college outside of the classroom than inside. That applies to academics and most other facets of life.
While I can’t agree with much of what wahoowa says, I will say that colleges are an important location for vocational and social networking. Most people I know met their social circle while in college, and colleges offer (to varying degrees) a push to that first job, something that is lacking for many high school graduates — voke excepted.
I agree with Peter. I think his point can be better explained by saying that perhaps the college education isn’t necessarily the only cause of monetary rewards for these students, perhaps it’s just that nearly every bright and resourceful kid is going to college now and that those kids would have done well on any path they chose.
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There is a stigma attached to anyone who does not attend college, and everything in this state is geared towards getting kids there. Even the MCAS assures that kids have the skills necessary for college, there isn’t a separate “voke” MCAS that tests the voke kids in their particular trade.
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Does it make sense to pay $100k for a college education to be a chef? How about to be a marketing analyst? How about a mortgage broker? How about a high-tech salesperson? Seems to me that while college is a valuable and rewarding experience, there’s a point where you have to say “is it really worth the expense”? Because looking back after being out of college for a number of years, I think the majority of the impact of my college education on my career was only about 5 years, my job experience impacts me more.
…it’s that it costs $100K in the first place.
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Degree X might hypothetically be worth $70K but degree Y might only hypothetically worth 10K. Yet they are both over priced and both priced the same. If people don’t want to go to college, cool. But people who might want to be marketing analyst or an attorney should not be dissuaded from doing so because of a $50-$150K price tag. They should be dissuaded because they are unwilling to spend the time earning the degree or dissuaded by the rigorousness of the course work.
place sacred UVA law in the middle of his/her list of top law schools. I think I hear teeth nashing from the Rotunda to the beautiful new John Paul Jones Center.
OF course I realize that UVA is far and away the premier law school in this country and that all other law schools pale in comparison. Just didn’t want to rub salt in the wounds of all those who had the terrible misfortune of not spending three years in the splendour that is Charlotesville.
… while voke school grads who took HVAC, plumbing, etc, now not only have jobs but have no loans to pay off and are able to buy houses and begin their lives as adults instead of parent-dependent student-paupers.
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…when I was growing up in a northern suburb of Cincinnati in the 1960s (continuation from the 1950s) we lived in a so-called “professional” neighborhood, not wealthy, but not poor either. In a couple of houses up the street lived a plumber. He and his family didn’t socialize with the others in the neighborhood very often, and vice versa. There was a very definite pecking order.
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It made no sense to me. If your toilet is stopped up, or if you want to renovate your bathroom, who are you going to call? An aircraft designer or an accountant? No, a plumber.
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BTW, there is even a pecking order within the technical professions. There are (or at least were then) engineers, and there were engineering technicians (basically, assistants). The engineers (4 yr college) were at the high end of the pecking order, and the technicians (2 yr) a bit lower down; although the engineers couldn’t get their work done without the technicians. There was even a heirarchy among different types of engineers, but I’ll refrain, because it gets even more ridiculous.
…should be based on their income? I know that is not the gist of your comment, but that’s the way it comes off.
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What you point to here is the financial penalty for most people who seek higher education. Why does this make sense to encourage people through economic forces not to pursue higher education and limit their future options? The realities of the day dictate that, while the young relative is earning 50% more than his college graduating classmates today, the earning potential for a person in his spot will top out far quicker than a college graduate, especially a graduate with an advanced degree.
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Also, there are many doors closed to a person without a college degree. It will be tougher for this young man to change careers (or I should say there will be far fewer options) in the future. People with a college degrees can almost always choose a blue collar career track if they decide not to apply their degrees to finding a job, but a blue collar worker would have to start the college degree path from scratch.
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This is not to say blue collar workers make a bad decision by not attending college. I’m saying I find nothing wrong with a parts manager who also holds a degree in English or Polisci or MechE. I know a man who is employed as industrial interior painter in Boston who holds a Masters in English and is adjunct faculty at a local University – he teaches mornings and works a 3-11 painting shift. I also know a lot of smart, mechanically talented people in the engineering world who are at a dead end, constantly passed over for promotion because they lack a degree. My friend’s dad holds several patents for microprocessor mountings and this is the case.
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How many Congressman or Senators (state or federal) serve without college degrees? How many lack a graduate degree? By choosing not to obtain a college education, your young relative has all but disqualified himself from running for major political office should at the age of 40 he has an epiphany, finds a “calling” if you will. Or perhaps he wants to become a teacher.
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My point is education (both the actual education and the piece(s) of paper) is a commodity we as individuals use as capital to advance ourselves. People are being discouraged from bettering themselves through education via economic pressures. A recent study showed the University of Massachusetts generated $8 in Economic Activity For Every $1 of State Investment. At minimum, I can’t see how a more educated populace would be a bad thing; I, in fact, think it would be great for society if more people would achieve a higher degree of education. Other countries have reduced financial higher education burdens of individuals – many to almost zero. Why is it ok for market economic forces to decide who becomes our next crop of teachers, doctors, attorneys, engineers, journalists, etc? In what world is a Northeastern education really worth $40K per year?
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Of course there is a monetary value to a NU, BU, Harvard, or Columbia education, but who in society benefits from tuition costs that routinely exceed median family incomes? Not the average joe and not the children of the average joe. Who benefits by putting college graduates in a position where they start their young adult lives in debt, often, as you point out, in the neighborhood of $100K? Why are so many engineering jobs ending up in India? Where did they get so many engineers from?
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Hey, this is not to put down blue collar workers. I went to a “voke” school (I hate the term voke – it’s a slur to my ears, lol). But there lacks in the US a reverence for education and scholarship. Shouldn’t every American not have the opportunity to develop their intellectual commodity to their fullest potential?
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Who benefits from less people attending college and more college graduates burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in debt?
220ish? You have to admit that beyond say town meetings that elected office is the pervue of the educated class. Even appointed high ranking offices. While not impossible, the odds are stacked against a non-degreed individual winning significant elected office.
What’s the correct spelling? I’m legitimately curious.
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It’s not for me to decide who has a chance, it’s the voters. But analyzing the data, 4 (even 22) out of 22 doesn’t bode well for the non-degreed (note I didn’t say uneducated). It gets more selective for federal office. It’s not me saying this, it’s the numbers.
…it’s “purview.”
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But Ms. Porc misspelled “how.” So I guess the two of you are even.
The assumption that liberal arts education can only occur in college is exactly what the Germans reject in having academically rigourous “voke ed”. I want the population who does not go to college to also learn to read critically, evaluate scientific arguments critically, handle practical mathematics, and know the history of their country and the world. By “undereducated for like” I meant that I think the vokes are not doing well enough at this. There are a lot of reasons to get a 400 verbal, but one of them is not reading very much.
…Germany has a thriving apprenticeship system for manufacturing, but there are limited numbers of Lehrlingstellen (apprenticeship positions), and, yes, competition for them is quite intense. But there are other vocational education situations that do not require manufacturing apprenticeships, which are handled through other types of high schools, but which also provide for some modicum of “on the job training.”
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I’ll avoid the issue of the quality of BMW/Mercedes vs. Chevys because the issues are very complex. Our taxi driver to the Munich airport yesterday was driving a Toyota RAV4, and she was doing very nicely at about 80 MPH (130KM/H).
Doesn’t Germany have a little problem with chronic unemployment?
…Germany’s unemployment problem stems mostly from the former East Germany (thank you, Helmut Kohl). Bavaria appears to be doing quite well.
My understanding is that in Germany:
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1. Getting a first job is tough, but once you get a job, you’re unlikely to become unemployed. In the US, you can get the boot as easily at 55 as 25. Germany has kept away from outsourcing to micro-wage countries – they throw up tarriffs, as we should do here.
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2. Unemployment is counted differently in Germany than here. Count it the same way, they’re roughly the same.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that you guys arent Democrats, but are the left part of the left wing of the Democratic Party.
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The day the Democratic Party starts extolling the benefits of Western European labor markets is the day I make my peace with the nutty social conservatives and register as a Republican.
It’s true that I’m almost – but not quite – as far to the left as Dwight Eisenhower – but is there anything in particular that is sticking in your craw? Or are you simply one of the Europeans=Commies=Bad crowd?
European labor markets are regulated to death, which makes it great if you have a permanent job, but crummy if you are younger, and thus a semi-permanent temp. No one should be entitled to a job.
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If the American government ever decides to stick its nose in my hiring decisions to the degree that is considered normal in Europe–beyond ensuring that I comply with basic non-discrimination laws–then I will vote for a less intrusive government.
Anecdote: In early 1990s, I spent time in Germany with the task of closing a small business (a subsidiary of a larger US company). The Germany authorities were basically incredulous that a business would actually cease. Unheard of! the
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Then when you consider the costs of redundancy and shut-down, it’s obvious. Businesses are too expensive to close, regardless how marginal they operate.
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Then, look at the efficiencies of the average German worker. They work something like, on average 1700 hours per year compared to US 1900 hours; and, have incredibly large and business damaging unemployment tax rates.
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BTW, unemployment in Germany is something like 12%: 10% in the west and 20 in the east. (I know, I know, no links…sue me).
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Who’s to blame? The SDP and the Greens and the stupid Hartz IV laws.
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So no, Europeans don’t equal commies nor do they equal bad, but their Labor laws are one huge reason that the US can currently out-compete EC–Germany in particular.
One of the shocking things about going to English 101 at UMASS Dartmouth, as a Freshman, was the fact that about 50% of the class really, truly couldn’t write a thesis paper. I was sneezing out As in that class on work that I knew was mediocre at best (and probably would have been a B or even a C in high school honor English classes.) Given the fact that students taking 102 were greatly improved on average, I don’t think it’s too hard to teach people how to write a decent thesis paper. So, clearly we do have some work on improving the overall quality throughout the K-12 system.
I’m always curious as to whether Republican states do as well as ours. South Carolina is one of the most Republican states in the country.
http://www.myrtlebea…
We just have the lowest divorce rate in the country and believe in educating our children.
AS far as vocational schools and their educations, you have to see the subtle genius of that path in this day and age. You could get an advanced degree in engineering, do calculus in your sleep and design planes, but your job could peace out to India in a flash.
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However, a person’s stopped up toilet will never be packed up, sent to india, unclogged, and sent back. Vocational jobs are pretty insulated from the fear of outsourcing.
…illegal immigrants “stealing American jobs” is the boogeyman of the skilled trade class.
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That or the out-of-work engineer has so much free time that he designs a better toile that doesn’t get stopped up, gets a VC seed, sells his product, allows only “certified licensed technicians” to work on his product, so that he control who fixes his toilet and gets a cut of every person’s business who fixes his toilet.
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Or a big recession can hit and new construction grinds to a hault forcing commercial plumbers into the residential plumbing business creating a surplus of labor over available work.
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Or perhaps engineers retrain and become plumbers themselves, flooding the market with unneeded plumbers and depressing wages for all plumbers.
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The possibilities are endless.
…it has been reported that, with modern communications over the Internet, X-ray images are increasingly being sent over to India to be analyzed and interpreted. That has usually been the province of radiologists in the US.
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The point being the question why would anyone want to spend a fortune at a medical school in the US, when his work can be done for a fraction of the cost by an Indian.
You should have done your homework. According to Eurostat the EU’s statistical agency, the unemployment rate in Germany (seasonably adjusted, of course) in June 2007 was 6.4%, down from 8.3% in June 2006. http://en.wikipedia….
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By comparison, the cited page indicates that the US unemployment rate was 4.5%, but it does not indicate whether that was a Euirostat figure or a US government Bureau of Labor Statistics figure. Eurostat and BLS may very well use different methodoligies for calculating unemployment rates.
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Recall two things. One, the BLS calculates unemployment as a percentage of those who are “in the work force,” which means those who are actively employed or who are looking for work (it’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the general idea).
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Two, the BLS determines whether someone is employed even part time as being “employed” even if the “part time” is a miniscule percentage of 40 hrs/week. BLS methods are like an on-off switch, either you’re employed or you aren’t. It is possible to use something like a dimmer switch, which would reflect the extent to which the employee is employed.
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I don’t know whether Eurostat uses anything like those criteria. That’s one reason why I claim that the unemployment rates between Europe and the US are not readily comparable.
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Why is it that you begin, nearly each post, with some deprecating comment?
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Want ‘homework’? Try something other than Wikipedia. Try Bloomberg, August 2007:
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That’s jobless rate. High in the East low in the West. The figure comports with my off-the-top-of-head estimate.
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Want a figures comparable US BLS data?
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http://www.bloomberg…
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Quibble further with the numbers as a collateral exercise if you will. The point is that the labour laws in Germany strangle business, and the result is stagnant growth and higher unemployment than the US.
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…you really should look at the date at the bottom of your Bloomberg page: Last Updated: August 31, 2006 09:56 EDT
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The unemployment figure that I cited for June 2006 from Eurostat (8.3%) correlates pretty well with the “last update” date on your 31 Aug 2006 Bloomberg page (8.2%).
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Cite something from Bloomberg a little closer to June 2007 (the most recent date in the Eurostat table), and I’ll sit up and listen. Actually, given the correlation between the German unemployment rate from the Eurostat table on the Wiki page I linked to, and the figure cited in the Bloomberg article (and considering that your the Bloomberg article indicated that the German unemployment rate was declining) I would be surprised if Bloomberg didn’t get their statistic from the same source as Wiki: Eurostat.