In the 1970's a high school graduate could earn a decent living, buy a house and raise a family.
Then the boomers started selling off everything. They urge everyone to go to college. Everyone. Even if it was to get a history degree. This diluted the value of a college education to the point that now you need a college degree just to stuff files into a cabinet.
At least a current graduate has a mountain of debt to climb as well.
One of the other offshoots of this was the idea that you could, "Do what you love and the money will follow". No longer were you to choose a career based on earning a living you were now meant to, "follow your bliss".
This created a nation of people with marine biology or women studies degrees. Degrees that definitely won't help you to, 'put food on your family'.
One of the things that was lost was nursing degrees. Given the choice of following their bliss or going into nursing folks (both women and men) choose their bliss. (Cool, with my art history degree I can make lattes at Starbucks!)
This has set the stage for another crisis. There are not enough people in the field of nursing or related caregiver jobs.
From the News-Press comes this article:
There's one certified geriatrician for every 2,500 older adults; as many as 90 percent of home health aides leave their jobs within two years; primary care physicians - the gatekeepers for seniors' medical needs - are a shrinking part of the medical work force; and Medicare and insurance plans focus on short-term treatment rather than wellness and preventive care.
Those numbers are according to a new Institute of Medicine report that aims to rattle the nation before the first of its 78 million boomers hits 65 in 2011.
...
As the sheer number of seniors outmatches the health care work force, experts say a few shifts must happen: The focus of care needs to move from treating disease to preventing it, the delivery of care needs to move from institutions like nursing homes and into neighborhoods and seniors need to play a more active role in maintaining their health.
"The boomers have already reached age 60," said Sue Maxwell, the director of Lee Memorial's Older Adult Services. "We are really running out of time."
Actually, time already ran out. We already need health workers trained and into the workforce. If there was a giant shift in thinking about a career choice it would be the Millennials that are just starting college that would be training for these jobs. That would take 4 - 6 years. Then they would need experience too. I think the boomers would want someone with a few years of practice under their belt to be working with them.
It is not the kind of work that draws bright and budding practitioners into its ranks.In a Me generation world the focus is solely on what is best for oneself you would expect people to be discouraged from going into career that would benefit many people.
"I remember a friend saying to me, 'Peg, you are too good a nurse to go into gerontology,' " said Peg Gray-Vickrey, a registered nurse who is the associate vice president for curriculum and instruction at Florida Gulf Coast University. "But it's the most rewarding area; I'm so happy with this profession."
Maybe the boomer generation will take health care into its own hands.Well, we all know the answer to that one.
"The body does respond to small amounts of attention to diet, exercise, smoking, coffee and liquor," said Clarke Dahlgren, 77, of Fort Myers, who is active in senior issues as a regional AARP advocacy volunteer.
He asks not how prepared communities are for seniors, but for how prepared seniors are for the reality of their retirements - from their financial stability to their oversight of their own health issues.
Remember Gen-X. Live a good life now. Don't wait another 15 years to start exercising and saving for retirement. Yes, you may not live to be 80, but odd are you will.
Be prepared. Don't be a boomer.
2 comments:
I hate to say it, but if you are planning on going to college, choosing your career path based on what will make you money makes just as little sense as taking a degree. With how rapidly the economy is changing (or should I say, how quickly the corporate overlords find new ways to screw everyone), it's not worth going to college for a specific career anyomore. I went in 1999 for a Comp Sci degree. I ended up changing to History (to teach History, with the ability to teach math at the middle school level) because the tech bubble had burst and all the jobs flew over to India.
In my opinion, unless a student has a very specific field they want to get into, such as medicine or law, I'm not sure if it's prudent to recommend college anymore. I have a friend with a degree in Chemical Engineering with Honors who is currently an assistant manager at Red Robin.
Given the costs of college and the ridiculous qualifications for most jobs anymore, I think the best place to go for career training is to a trade school or community college. You can start working in two years on average with a much lower amount of debt. If your job field becomes obsolete, you've lost less in terms of debt and opportunity cost, and you can retrain much quicker.
Most jobs that "require" college degrees shouldn't. A graphic artists' skill be evualted in a matter of minutes by looking at their portfolio. A secretary doesn't need college. Even many programming tasks don't require a Comp Sci degree to perform competently anymore as most of the low level details are implemented in libraries. For these programmers, mentoring or trade school would probably be the best thing. As an aside, I've heard more than a few programmers lament that most of the good programmers they knew either didn't have Comp Sci degrees or were good inspite of having one. Having gone to a decent school, I can tell you that though I only took a few comp sci courses, it tooks years to unlearn the idiotic techniques they taught in order to write effective code.
I'd also suggest that anyone going to college take business courses so that they could run their own business. While I understand that large corporations are a necessary evil IF we want to continue our way of life, but for the individual worker, manager your own business is the only way to escape the increasingly unethical practices, often tantamount to theft, that employers are practicing today.
I agree about college. If you stick around you'll see that I don't recommend it to very many people.
I would be hypocritical if I did. I only did 30 credits at a community college.
I've worked as a computer programmer for years. I taught myself when I was a teenager. Then feel over backwards into my first job.
I never took a college computer class in my life. In fact. The only college class that I took that was of any value was accounting. I think everyone should take an accounting class. I got more mileage out of that then anything else.
It is tru that the best programmers I've met have all been college drop outs who did not take programming classes. I don't know why that is. Maybe I’m just impatient with sitting in a classroom. (The best programmers seem to be ADHD (go figure).)
Anyway, I think trade school is the best bet these days. You can't send a plumbing job oversees.
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