“EDUCATION” AND HEALTH CARE SECTORS: MINDLESS GROWTH
Whenever government employment data comes out it’s always instructive to look at jobs created in education and health care – two heavily subsidized sectors of the economy.
But what happens when we look in the rearview at these “(government) growth” engines? How have they evolved over the long-term? And what does this evolution mean for the future of the American economy (such as it is)?
Glad you asked …
There’s an excellent post up this week from Charles Hugh Smith’s Of Two Minds blog which explores those questions …
The “money shot?”
“Education/healthcare employment rose by 81 percent since 1990–three times the population growth rate and four times the percentage increase in full-time employment,” Smith writes. “If education and healthcare had expanded to meet the needs of a larger population, employment in the sectors would have increased about 30 percent since 1990, not 81 percent. So 50 percent of the sectors’ expansion is above and beyond population growth.”
Wow ..
Now … is this unsustainable growth fueling better academic and health outcomes?
No … in fact Smith’s piece goes into meticulous detail about how greater spending has actually created a worse product, especially as it relates to higher education. The problem there? “Bloated administration and non-teaching staff” at our nation’s colleges and universities – something South Carolina knows all too much about.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Mindless growth is the ideology of the cancer cell – and America’s government in the 21st century has become a cancer on our economy.
Anyway … to read Smith’s revealing post for yourself, click the link below …
3 comments
A large part of the growth is increasing specialization. You now have English as second language teachers, teachers for trainable and educable mentally handicapped children, reading recovery teachers, teachers for learnimg disabled, psychologists, guidance counselors (even at elementary schools), and the non teaching bloat of teaching assistants and additional secretarial staff to handle the glut of paperwork.
Then add on all the administration level jobs that were basically breathed into life by federal requirements, and you can kinda see why the education ranks have swelled.
You can also see why education needs to be taken completely away from the feds and given back to the states.
The average child leaving the Education-administrative complex borrows from the US and leaves skool with non-dischargable debt of approximately $29,000. Law Skool degrees burden the graduate with an average of $150,000 before dumping their students into an economy of non-paying internships and ‘make-work’ that cannot possibly support retiring their student loan repayments. So lets merge them all into a state university system in Charleston. Makes a lot of South Carolina cents. This promises to be a disaster.
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