The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

The per-pupil spending graph reminds me of the healthcare spending as a percent of gdp graph. They are both symptoms of the very American ideology that the only way to improve anything is to blindly spend more money on it.

He is 1 step away from saying that the government should be telling people what education to take, and what jobs they'll fill. (Remember Gattaca?)

Some industries (not all!) have a shortage of workers. This has -always- been the case. Each generation feels a different pull when they are children, and so has different goals for later in life. We even encourage children to pick a career in Elementary school! By the time they are out of college, the job market has had 15 years of changes. It's no wonder that the jobs available and the skills that people trained for aren't a match.

Is there a solution for this problem, other than the government ordering people around? Not that I see. I think the system is working as well as it can while not encroaching on people's freedom.

1 final note: It's a LOT easier to find people for jobs if you offer better salary. Nobody ever mentions that when they're complaining that they can't find people to hire. Instead, they blame the 'market' or the 'government' and keep their offered salaries low.

I never understand the hiring requirement of a degree for a startup - that is a silly way to hold your company back. The best coders and designers I have worked with have either had no degree or have an irrelevant degree. Skilled people with sharp minds will train themselves to do the things that interest them.

Absolutely. I'm in my 30s and haven't noticed any decrease in my ability to continue learning. It's definitely a challenge to discard your old mental models if/when they start to become hindrances, but far from impossible.

My Mom (nearly 60) went back to school last year to learn occupational therapy, and has been doing great. It's not rocket surgery by any stretch, but it's exactly the kind of retraining that's relevant to the article's assertion.

+1

I'm a self taught designer/developer, not a genius but pretty competent with some useful skills. No CS or Art/Design degree so a lot of companies (start-ups included) will dismiss me out of hand rather than for my own merits and failings. And as the saying goes, I know some really dumb people with some pretty great degrees.

I agree there's value to a degree (any and all degrees I mean) and there's certainly some painful ineptitudes in my self-taught skills which I might not have if I did a CS or Art/Design degree. My point is that just requiring a degree seems somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't tell you if I scraped through and don't really understand the subject or if I'm the next Woz. It doesn't tell you if I know how to ship or if I'll need constant hand-holding for the next few years.