Government Subsidies Responsible For Unemployed College Grads

Of the over 18 million unemployed in this country are millions with college degrees that are virtually worthless when it comes to getting a job doing the skills they learned in college.   On top of that many courses are dumbed down. Government subsidies and loans drive up the tuition.  College debt is now greater than credit card debt. 

At the same time millions of technical jobs go unfilled.  Many require college degrees in math, science and engineering which fewer and fewer American students are pursuing. But many more are blue collar.  Machinists are in desperately short supply.   No one subsidizes training factory workers. 

This is the classical example of why social engineering does not work.  The institutions that train and educate people have no connection with the entities that employ them.  Hayek called this connection “Spontaneous Order”.  The reason that there is a shortage of skilled and technical workers from machinists to doctors and nurses is that all college education is subsidized while the vocations and technical skills that are in demand have no more dibs on the education dollar than those vocations that seldom lead to jobs. 

Government subsidies distort markets leading to poor allocation of scarce resources.  They create more problems than they solve.