In his speech at the A-TEC Academy ribbon-cutting yesterday in Aberdeen, Governor Dennis Daugaard uttered these vitally important words:
The Future Fund was started by Governor George Mickelson decades ago to invest in South Dakota’s workforce and build its economy, and I can’t think of anything better to invest Future Funds in than career and education programs throughout the state and right here in Aberdeen [Governor Dennis Daugaard, speech at A-TEC Academy, Aberdeen, SD, 2015.09.01, timestamp 7:58].
If Governor Daugaard meant exactly what he said, he is making a remarkable statement about how South Dakota should dole out corporate welfare. In 2014, the Governor invested far more of the Future Fund in schools than he did in direct handouts to private businesses. His statement yesterday and his 2014 Future Fund investments appear to go beyond the standard proposed by readers of this blog in 2014, that if we must redistribute tax dollars to corporations, we should at least match those handouts dollar for for dollar with increased funding for K-12 education and higher education.
I agree wholeheartedly that $2 million for A-TEC and $1.24 million for a similar project in Mitchell are much better investments of the Governor’s economic development slush fund than handouts to Manpower, Inc., Capital One, and Northern Beef Packers. The public schools offering these vo-tech programs tend to deliver real results and not leave the state or go bankrupt.
But the Governor isn’t valuing education in itself as a great humanist enterprise. Education remains a means to a corporate end. Consider his revisitation of his disdain for philosophy majors, along with psychology majors and art historians who don’t get jobs in their academic fields:
[4:02] It frustrates me today to see many young people enter their postsecondary academic pursuits not knowing what they want to be….
[4:39] This building gives you the opportunity while you’re still in high school to explore possibilities, to try your hand out at electronics, to try med tech, or try machining or welding or some of the other things that are taught as part of your career and technical education offerings either here or elsewhere in the state. It gives you a chance to try it out.
Someone told me recently that the most common college major is psychology…. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but there certainly are a lot of them. I know when I go to college graduations, sometimes I’ll be a commencement speaker, and you can read through the program, how many graduates there are in this or that field, and boy there are plenty in of psychology grads. There’s philosophy grads, there’s art history grads. And those are great fields of study. They’re interesting. Those who graduate with those degrees will go on to become counselors and historians and great philosophers. Many of them, though, will go on to work at jobs that don’t require those kinds of degrees, and those students will be burdened with lots of debt and a job that has nothing to do with the degree that they spent a lot and borrowed a lot to obtain.
Conversely, behind these walls, lies training for a degree or the beginnings of a degree for which there is truly demand in the marketplace, for which there are jobs available and employers who want you. So career and technical education programs prepare South Dakotans, prepare students for opportunities awaiting them after graduation [Daugaard, 2015.09.01].
The Governor says a couple nice things about philosophy, but the thrust of this passage discourages students from pursuing education in the humanities. I don’t mind the Governor’s promoting career and technical education. I agree that for plenty of students, CTE is a good career path. But I still don’t get why the Governor has to persuade students away from one education path in order to promote another. Studies and career paths are like towns. Saying “Aberdeen’s a nice place to live” does not require that (and is not proven if) I say, “Huron and Watertown suck!” I can say, “Huron and Watertown are nice; Aberdeen’s nice, too.” Why can’t our Governor stop playing the grouchy, narrow-minded dad and say, “Psychology and art history are nice; vo-tech is nice, too”?
The Governor’s statements here suggest that education is valuable only if it translates into a clearly related, lasting, and lucrative job. But graduates of any educational program, liberal arts or vocational/technical, may change career courses for perfectly good reasons. An math major may reach graduate school and decide he’d rather be a lawyer and work in politics. A welder may move to a market where she can get better pay or better working conditions as a carpenter or a freelance writer. An art historian may meet a wonderful mate, take twenty years out of the workforce to raise wonderful kids, then jump back into the workforce as a pastor or a pastry chef.
And that’s fine! We need not view any of those choices to work outside one’s academic preparation as a loss, a waste, or a declaration of error. The demands of the marketplace change. People change. Philosophers and welders, humans both, share the potential to tire of philosophizing and welding and to crave broader horizons. That’s why, instead of programming them to follow one paycheck-promising career path, we must teach them to be open to broader possibilities.
The Governor ignores the non-economic value of learning. Some students willingly devote time and money and go into debt to study certain subjects just because those subjects are fascinating and beautiful parts of human culture. The Governor’s philosophy of education seems formed entirely by employers and the transient demands of consumer culture, with an at-best dismissive eye toward the more enduring intellectual and spiritual aspects of learning. (Check this out: Dennis Daugaard is the live-in-the-now materialist in this discussion, while I am fighting for the everlasting soul.) In the Governor’s impoverished view, education is not for building souls; it is for building tools to be used by corporations to make widgets and profit.
I welcome every two-million-dollar investment Governor Dennis Daugaard wants to make in my school district to help give kids more opportunities to learn and grow. The Future Fund grant that built A-TEC is still corporate welfare, but less direct, and providing broader benefits for young South Dakotans through our public school systems than any handouts filtered through corporate exploiters of state largesse.
But if the Governor can spend $8.5 million dollars to help kids in twelve K-12 districts try out welding and carpentry, why not spend another $8.5 million to fund a gifted education coordinator/teacher for every South Dakota school district to help kids develop their fullest intellectual potential? (151 districts, $8.5 million… that’s over $56K per district.) What are you afraid of, Governor Daugaard: that the gifted kids might do more philosophizing?
If Daugaard does not know what a CNC machine system is, that is very discouraging. I wonder if he is aware of 3-D printing which can allow cheap manufacturing of prosthetic devices.
[4:02] It frustrates me today to see many young people enter their postsecondary academic pursuits not knowing what they want to be….
My best guess is since many of them leave the state,they don’t want to be South Dakotans and work for miserly wages in a state that does not value education enough to recruit and pay more outstanding teachers. What kind of a place is that to raise kids? Wingnuts don’t want to insure their health,either.
Pierre should be named Dead Last Gulch. Wingnuts are the Deadlaster Disasters.
I going to have to find a balance scale and send it to Cory.
What good does it do to train workers, if there are no employers to hire them?
What good does it do to entice companies to move to South Dakota, if there are no trained workers?
There has to be a balance of bringing in new employers and training employees for those new employers. Eventually you want the business to support the training facilities.
Nothing says bipartisanship like cluelessness, right, Mr. Clark?
EB5 program (NBP)had a balance between the number of new workers and the number of investors who were fleeced, or so it seems.
“to persuade students away from one education path in order to promote another”.
– The current analogy towards the right’s scorn of “Black Lives Matter”. Just because you say, “Save the rain forests doesn’t mean, to hell with all the other forests.” Are they maintaining that whites are getting the short end of the stick and they have to stand up for “white rights”? C’mon, Powers …..
So MC, your position is that government has to create both the labor supply and the labor demand? Government has to create businesses? What happened to the free market? If we have well-trained workers, and if we spend big money to train them in the specific professions and on the specific technology that corporate donors are demanding, they still won’t come and hire those workers for their awesome skills unless we give those corporations another handout to build their factories?
Forget that! Kids need our help. We have an obligation to educate them, to provide a variety of opportunities to learn. Corporations have tons of money. They don’t need our help. Your call for balance is like saying that if I give my daughter $2 allowance, I also have to give Walmart $2 to help them build a store for her to shop at. Balance that demands handouts for entities who don’t need them is bad government.
I stand by the Governor’s statement that his investment in education, even if it’s limited to career and technical education, is the best use he has made of his Future Fund money. The money he spent on Manpower, Capital One, and Northern Beef Packers, created few lasting opportunities for our youth.
Doug, I didn’t know what a CNC machine was before yesterday. I’ve been spending too much time philosophizing.
One of the many things Daugard is wrong about is the benefits of psychology majors. The demand for psychologists is big, and for psychiatrists it’s huge. That may not be true in SD, but that’s because the Koch/Republicans are indifferent to the struggles of South Dakotans. The K/R governance is one of the reasons so many graduates plan to leave SD upon graduation.
Psychology majors are often preferred for management types, especially in the upper levels. When I read about senior level executives, many of them have undergraduate degrees in psychology.
Maybe, Deb, our Governor is tired of all those senior-level executives psyching him out in negotiations. :-D
It is hard to build a reserve army of the unemployed (a Marx concept) without having the unemployed be trained sufficiently to take the place of the employed. The bigger the pool of eligible labor, the more wages can be decreased, and the more the labor can be exploited.
This leads to unions that protect their own while those not under that umbrella are screwed.
Airline pilots are a great example, sure you may make six figures flying for Delta, but that is not after flying for one of the Delta Regional airlines that pays $14,000/year starting. Up until recently, it seemed there was always a warm body to fill a seat, thus the cycle continued.
I am all for education, and my social science bachelor’s degree is an asset to my non-social science related occupation, but we need to walk a fine line to ensure we aren’t flooding the market.
MD, if I were a free-market purist (and some days I am), I would say that government intervention stands a chance of flooding the market with welders, machinists, medical technologists, and the other specific trades Governor Daugaard is promoting. Why are captains of industry sending their labor demand signals to the state? If they believe in the free market, why don’t they send free-market signals directly to labor: “We want welders! We train, we pay big!” Wouldn’t that action by industry more effectively rebalance the labor market to their needs than all this fussing about with government?
I say, put the philosophist kids and the welding kids next to each other in a line, and then have the employers show up and pick kids they want working for them.
Put the teachers for these kids on a line too, and then pay them commensurately. So for every welding kid picked, the welding teachers all get a $1 raise on their $40,000 salary. And for every philosophist kid picked, the professor fellow gets a $1 raise on his $100,000 salary.
Someday reality will catch up with those fat brained and useless philosophers, eh?
Reality hasn’t caught up with me yet, Grudz.
Paying teachers based on what the graduates they taught make… that’s an income tax, right? That’s fine with me.
in reality, how many car dealerships or auto body repair shops are going to hire a kid that just took those classes in high school? Don’t they need some sort of certification, and don’t they need to go to an actual post-secondary institution to get it? also, if these business do hire these kids, doesn’t it really drive wages lower? why hire someone with experience, when you can hire a high school kid for $7.50 an hour?
salary.com lists the lists the 8 college degrees that bring the worst return on tuition investment. Philosophy is not among them. Unsurprisingly, teaching is on the list, as is preaching. (Bad news in your household Cory.) To see the entire list, go here:
http://www.salary.com/8-college-degrees-with-the-worst-return-on-investment/