Been thinking about deregulation lately.
Headed to the airport one week from today — well, that’s the plan — and I am not a comfortable flyer. Yet I’m also a data guy, and I understand that the odds are almost absurdly in my favor. To claim that air travel is safe is akin to claiming that the current occupant of the White House has never had a real job. Assuming the flights occur, there’s every reason to believe that I’ll make it from ABQ to MDW in one piece, then continue to BDL without major incident.
As deregulation goes, the end of federal domination of air travel is probably the best-known example of D.C. clipping unnecessary red tape. But trucking is another industry that benefitted from removing rules that never should have been imposed. In 2015, I wrote about a promising job opportunity that didn’t require a college degree. Today, it’s still a viable option.
■ ■ ■
Financial child abuse takes many forms. Washington’s unfunded liabilities grab the most attention — the greedy-geezer lobby’s maintenance of the Medicaid-Medicare-Social Security complex ensures that younger generations surrender an ever-larger portion of their incomes to age-based welfare programs. But a subtler, scarcely discussed economic crime against youths rivals the damage inflicted by runaway entitlements: go-to-college groupthink.
The share of U.S. 25-to-29-year-olds with at least a four-year degree rose from about 23 percent in 1995 to 34 percent today. The explosion in “higher learning” hasn’t come cheap. In recent testimony before the U.S. Senate, the Brookings Institution’s Beth Akers noted that in the last 20 years, “there’s been a dramatic increase in the share of young U.S. households with education debt. The incidence has more than doubled, from 14 percent in 1989 to 38 percent in 2013.” The nation’s barrel of collegiate red ink surpassed $1 trillion in 2012. And bankruptcy is no solution — filing for Chapter 7 does not absolve borrowers of their obligations.
If everyone who earned a B.A. landed a lucrative career, the college surge might make sense. But as a 2013 study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity documented, “barely half of … graduates are in occupations requiring bachelor’s degrees or more. Some 37 percent, in fact, are in jobs requiring a high-school diploma or less, and about 11 percent in jobs typically requiring some postsecondary training, usually an associate’s degree.”
The prevalence of overeducated workers is mighty disturbing, but the college-dropout rate is arguably worse. Multiple studies have revealed that nearly half of enrollees fail to complete their degrees with six years. Some eventually get a sheepskin, but most leave campus and never return. “American higher education,” Slate’s Jordan Weissmann observed, “continues to set a global standard for inefficiency.”
Meanwhile, there’s a dearth of truck drivers. In April, the industry’s trade association reported that the “driver shortage — which we now estimate to be between 35,000 to 40,000 drivers — is getting more pervasive.” One estimate puts the personnel gap at 240,000 by 2022.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to No Dowd About It to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.