post high school education is becoming more unobtainable for some

Nancy points to this ...

sad stuff

And I'm sure some will see this as a great opportunity for some predatory money making..

Comments

[Roger]

Not only is post high school education becoming more unobtainable, it is becoming more critical. If you are going to borrow and spend a lot of money on higher education, it would be wise to pick something related to research and development and manufacturing. Your education will be valuable if it supports big products that Americans can't live without. Not just products that Americans want or need.

The following is not all my words. Manufacturing is not what it used to be. We import the bulk of small stuff and make mostly the bigger stuff, products that are easy for dumb robots, requiring fewer employees and providing hugh profits for investors. Manufacturing doesn't look like it used to. Now we emphasize high value added manufacturing and jobs. Our factories are in the midst of a revolution with emphasis on efficiency. A new $Billion dollar plant produces 500 cars/day at 12,000 parts per car, requiring a much smaller number of employees, a significant percentage of them programming and maintaining robots that perform from 1/3 to all fabrication and assembly tasks, work that had been accomplished by uneducated manpower. Even in the last decade or so, one third of the jobs have disappeared and production has doubled. Robots are dumb. Educated and talented people must program them. They must envision and plan and implement each and every task for the robots. They must think for the robots. That is the new modern manufacturing job.

Forty-five years ago I was an electrical engineer at Collins Radio Company. One of my jobs was to move a tested power supply module from prototype to manufacturing. I worked closely with a young lady whose job was to write up a detailed task description manual for fabricating the parts, assembling, and testing power-supply modules that would be installed into military radios. She had to determine the precise order and procedures for each of several hundred minute assembly steps. Then she took photos and marked them up for illustrators and drafts people to convert into a detailed assembly manual. Then she handed off the draft assembly manual to a group of experienced employees to assemble and test the first prototypes and work the bugs out of the manual. When the prototype power supply boards were tested, many were found not to work. So the processes were tweaked until everything worked and the units could be assembled efficiently and reliably. My job was to answer questions and initiate redesign when necessary. And some redesign was necessary to get a reliable product.

These were the critical and higher paying jobs. The lower-paid workers who could read and breathe then went through an intensive training class to learn how to follow the steps in the assembly and test manuals. Those who could master and perform these mundane tasks got a job and the rest were sent home. Today such low-level jobs don't exist. Today's critical and higher paying jobs still research and develop products and still define fabrication and assembly processes, but these assembly processes are for lower-paid robots, who don't join unions or call in sick.