The Time of Our Lives (11 page)

I like to remind upscale parents that while they fret over admission strategies for the Ivy League schools or any number of the elite institutions, the first choice for students in some parts of America, including in much of rural America, is enlisting in the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or Army. The U.S. military is tough duty, but it’s also a gateway to learning real skills or qualifying for college financial aid.

During a reporting trip on the USS
John C. Stennis
, one of America’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, I was taken deep into that floating colossus to meet the young technicians who work 24/7 to maintain its high-tech components. The skills they learn there are readily transferable to a civil society in constant need of a workforce trained to keep our electronic homes, factories, offices, and public institutions humming.

Throughout the ship I saw earnest young sailors bent over their laptops, taking college courses or vocational training online. That was before passage of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, under which young men and women are now eligible for financial support for tuition, fees, books, and housing after ninety days of aggregate service or thirty days if discharged with a service-connected disability.

Democratic senator Jim Webb of Virginia, a highly decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam and a graduate of Georgetown University’s law school, led the drive to expand the educational benefits for those currently in uniform, recognizing that the vast majority of men and women in the all-volunteer military are the underrepresented working-class young.

This is an investment that goes well beyond the young person who heretofore had little hope of getting a college degree or specialized vocational training. The presence of veterans on campuses or at select training schools is a major step toward addressing the disconnect between the 1 percent of Americans in uniform and in harm’s way and the 99 percent of us who can go about our pleasurable civilian lives without even acknowledging wars are under way.

Washington University studied the gap between the uniformed military population and civilian society and concluded it represents a serious threat to the American polity because it could lead to a more politicized military, presumably because those in uniform believe they’re either being ignored or are underappreciated by the civilian population. Furthermore, if those in uniform feel they’re being ignored or undervalued, why bother joining in the first place?

On the campuses where they’re enrolled in GI Bill programs, veterans do much more than remind their fellow students by their presence that the military is not incidental to American life. California State University chancellor Charles Reed says the veterans are “the exact profile of the kinds of students we want—smart, serious but balanced, committed, contributing and diverse.”

Corporate America knows the value of military training and the disciplined, technologically based education that comes with it. General Electric is an enthusiastic recruiter of military officers in their late thirties or early forties who are captains, majors, or colonels. They’ve given their country fifteen or twenty years of their lives, and many have graduate degrees to go with their on-the-job training as personnel managers, problem solvers, and motivators. They arrive in the private sector with a can-do attitude and the chance for a second career that will take them into their fifties and sixties. In the modern parlance, that’s called a win-win.

In a book called
Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle
, authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer studied the impact of mandatory military service for young Israelis on Israel’s booming entrepreneurial economy and concluded that early training in the Israel Defense Forces was the critical component. Israelis go into the IDF right out of high school and quickly learn the values of teamwork, discipline, and, most of all, wise risk management.

Following their military service they enroll in college and continue their preparation for the daunting world of start-up businesses. They’re mature beyond their years and Israel gets a twofer: a strong, all-inclusive commitment to national security and a post-military population equipped to take the economy to the next level.

The economic downturn did force one important change in post–high school education: Community colleges suddenly became popular destinations for the young who want a job but are not inclined to four-year higher education institutions.

From 2007 to 2008 enrollment at community colleges promising job training jumped 10 percent in the eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old demographic. And they’re a bargain at under three thousand dollars a year on average.

More important, community colleges are rapidly expanding their capacity to train workers for the demands of the modern world. Gateway Community and Technical College just south of Cincinnati in Covington, Kentucky, is a model. The president of Gateway told me, “Twenty-five years ago eighty percent of the factory work was brawn, twenty percent brain. Today it is ten percent brawn, ninety percent brain.”

Gateway Community was opened in September 2010 with the help of local manufacturers who desperately needed skilled younger workers to fill in behind a generation of workers trained on the job and now approaching retirement. It is a gleaming twenty-eight-million-dollar college with classrooms and a gymnasium-sized space filled with workstations to train students in electronic power systems, hydraulics, and pneumatics. A major part of the curriculum is problem solving, so the graduates emerge with much more than just a rote set of skills. They must have brains to match their manual dexterity to land jobs in local plants, such as MAG Industrial Automation Systems, once an old-fashioned tool and die company.

MAG is now part of a privately owned conglomerate turning out sophisticated elements for aerospace, automotive, mining, rail, wind, solar, oil, and gas industries around the world. Its local factory, about fifteen minutes from Gateway Community College, is a showcase for the modern age of manufacturing: precision mining tools, airplane fuselages, solar panels, fighter jet wings, and automotive gear boxes.

The brightly lit, quiet workspace shows off space-age, highly computerized machines as complex as the human nervous system. At each station workers in company-issued polo shirts manipulate them with their laptops open in a temperature-controlled, filtered air environment.

This is the leading edge of the evolution of American manufacturing, the high-tech business that can help redefine the new industrial age. It is a long way from the grimy, steel-on-steel tool and die origins of the factory when manual laborers were required to have only a strong back, good hands, and a tolerance for earsplitting noise, low light, and high temperatures.

MAG is on a desperate hunt for younger workers with the brains and skills to replace its graying employees headed for retirement, a generational shift so widespread it is called the “silver tsunami.” In the middle of a long run of high unemployment, you’d think that would not be a problem. But it is.

Bill Horwarth, the athletically trim president of MAG, told me that too many of today’s high school graduates are simply not prepared. “It’s been a real struggle,” he said, “to get the mechanical and electrical discipline we require to build the products we do.”

As MAG’s human resources officer Bill Weir puts it, “You can’t find ’em. You can’t steal ’em. You have to grow ’em.” Gateway Community College is the nursery, and thirty-three-year-old Joe Snyder is one of the workers under the grow lights.

Snyder was an enterprising electrician who had a small residential contracting company, the kind of work that has long been a fixture on the American landscape of housing developments and strip malls. Then came the Great Recession.

Joe’s business dried up, but his skill set was a strong foundation to take him to the next level of worker competency. Besides, Joe had an uncle who was preparing to retire at the MAG plant.

Joe caught on as an apprentice at MAG with the proviso that he’d simultaneously enroll at Gateway Community College in their mechatronics program. As he told me on the MAG factory floor, “When I got here I thought I knew it all; three and a half years into it, I still don’t know enough.”

So after a full workday at MAG he shows up at Gateway for classes in hands-on electronics and problem solving. Gateway knows what he needs because as Dr. G. Edward Hughes, the school’s president told me, “We’re constantly checking with the employers so we can customize our training. We also get requests from them on how to adjust to what we’re doing.”

Joe is a perfect match for the Gateway program. The school has been able to place 80 percent of its graduates in good jobs, but I wonder about the future of two other men I saw laboring over an electronic circuit board at Gateway.

They were probably ten years older than Joe, and they seemed to be struggling with the task at hand. One was an out-of-work truck driver and the other was a laid-off warehouse employee. They had been enrolled at Gateway for more than a year and still had no job prospects.

The figures are stark. The unemployment rate at the beginning of 2011 for those without a high school diploma was more than 15 percent. Workers with just a high school diploma represented the mean, at 9.8 percent. The unemployment rate for college degree workers was half that.

Age is a complicated issue in the national workforce. Forty percent of the members of the national workforce in 2009 were forty-five and older; that’s almost a 100 percent increase in the share of older workers in the last quarter century.

Paradoxically, while older workers have a lower unemployment rate than their younger counterparts as a result of seniority on the job and the experience they bring to their positions, in the universe of the long-term unemployed, older workers represent the largest single group. Why? Seniority does you little good if your plant closes or your company goes out of business. Unemployed older workers have higher wage expectations, and hiring companies often want to start fresh at a lower salary.

As a result, long-term unemployment, twenty-seven weeks and more, hits the older worker the hardest. That rate is 37 to 40 percent among older workers, a further complication for a society already struggling with the prospects of elderly health care and entitlements.

Two Rutgers University professors in the fall of 2010 released a survey of workers not unlike those two Gateway students. The poll of eight hundred workers nationwide showed 14 percent of them had lost a full- or part-time job, and 73 percent of those questioned said either they or a family member or a friend had also lost a job.

Professor Carl Van Horn said the workers have “diminished expectations about America’s economic future,” a troubling reversal of the long-standing optimism of Americans who have always thought that things will get better. A majority of the workers in the Rutgers study believed the economy has undergone a fundamental change and will get worse.

Who can blame them? During the Great Recession companies learned they could get along with fewer employees. Those firms that did begin to hire again were able to get new workers at a lower starting wage than those they replaced. Pensions and other company-provided retirement benefits are under assault. Families, companies, and the government should start addressing these issues now in a realistic fashion so we don’t end up midcentury with class warfare based on age.

Joe and his classmates represent an important change in attitude among male workers. They now know they can’t take a job for granted and that their future depends much more on their reasoning skills than on their strong backs and a good pair of work boots. Still, nationally men make up less than 40 percent of community college enrollments. Women—both those in search of additional skills or career changes and mothers returning to the workplace—are now the dominant sex in the classroom, representing more than 60 percent of the community college enrollment nationwide.

Those women and their college-educated sisters are making a rapid ascent through the layers of America’s workaday world. Women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four with a college degree can expect to earn a whopping 79 percent more annually than their generational sisters who finished high school only. Women with some post–high school education make 25 to 30 percent more than those with only a high school diploma.

Disparities in earnings between college- and high-school-educated people go well beyond purchasing power; these disparities affect their confidence and self-esteem as well.

In the 2010 midterm elections a representative cross section of voters were asked if they still believed in the American Dream, that fixed part of the American experience.

A stunning 40 percent said they had given up on what we’ve always assumed was a common goal. The one factor that separated the dreamers from the disenfranchised?

Money.

Those who had surrendered the dream, however they defined it, were earning as much as fifty-five thousand dollars a year, while those who still believed in the dream were making seventy-five thousand dollars and up annually.

The income and cultural gap between those with at least some higher education after high school and those without has been widening for the past three decades. As
New York Times
columnist David Brooks has commented, “In 1964 the educated and the less educated lived similar lives. Same divorce rates, same smoking rates. But since the rise of the Baby Boomers coincided with the importance of education, that has changed.”

College-educated couples have half the divorce rate, half the obesity rate, and half the smoking rate, and they vote twice as often. When it comes to income, the differences are just as striking and perhaps more ominous, for if the money gap between the working class and the college educated continues to widen as dramatically as it has in recent years, how long can it be before there is measureable class warfare, especially with the old safeguards of pensions and other social contracts starting to fray? At a time when we need to be strong at our weakest points to deal with global competition, an economic civil war would be fratricidal.