Lost in the endless political arguments about the ImagineIF Library is an underlying problem in the U.S.. Between 1990 and 2018 median earnings went up 117%. During that same period the cost for the following items were up by the accompanying percentage; new vehicles 19%, food at home 78%, rent 130%, physician services 130%, prescription drugs 182% and college tuition a whopping 374%. Clearly, the education industry’s costs are out of control and yet we continue to force young people to incur additional debt by adding more educational requirements to qualify for certain jobs. This unnatural increase in demand feeds the inflationary spiral in the education industry. Shouldn’t we ask, does it really take five years of education at an average cost of $38,000 per year to run a library? Fours years just isn’t enough? Several states also require master’s degrees to teach. Do you really need five years of education to teach first-graders? I was a CPA in the ‘90s and thankfully a four-year education was sufficient back then, but I would argue that I probably needed less than two years to learn what I needed to work in the accounting industry. I’m sure almost everyone reading this agrees they learned more in the first six months on the job than they did throughout their college career. Let’s take a look at these educational requirements, which seem to disadvantage the poor, to determine if they are really necessary to create an effective workforce in America.
John Zardis
Polebridge