The skills gap.

OldWiseGuy said:

Those sources aren't interested in solutions, only beating us over the head with the problem. Note that none suggested separate classes for women, only yours truly.

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Weird you'd claim this, given you don't even know what sources I looked up.

OldWiseGuy said:

US economy faces impending skills gap

The article deals with economics, but the real time bomb is the global social upheaval that is coming as a result of massive job losses and overpopulation. Because education hasn't kept up with the needs of industry automation and AI will likely displace millions of workers in the near future. That will mean social upheaval of biblical proportions.

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Who needs skills when you got tariffs?

....speaking of displaced workers:

The U.S. Postal Service is carrying mail between Phoenix and Dallas in driverless trucks for a pilot program starting this week, as the agency aims to make mail shipments more efficient and safer on long-haul routes.

U.S. Postal Service will test self-driving trucks in Arizona

OldWiseGuy said:

I read several. None advocated separate classes for women.

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That's nice, but we were talking about the articles I looked up after you told me to search the internet.

OldWiseGuy said:

Post the articles and I'll peruse them.

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To quote another post in the thread :

OldWiseGuy said:

Google the topic.

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crossnote said:

Also it doesn't help when there are 25-35 year old males still living off mommy and daddy at home, when they could be getting schooling and/or job experience.

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Generally they already have "schooling" and can't get effective job experience.

Goonie said:

Easy to say, but training is expensive and out of the reach of many. In the future you will have millions chasing ever fewer jobs, requiring ever more qualifications, for less pay.

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The problem in the US is that there is no such thing as "training," only "education."

Let me explain. In the Air Force, we had specific definitions for "training" and "education."

"Training" is teaching a person how to accomplish a task. It might be an extremely complex task, and his job may encompass a great, great many tasks. But essentially, training is teaching task accomplishment. Learning how to fly a jumbo jet is just task accomplishment. Writing a computer program is just task accomplishment.

"Education" is teaching a person how to think about which tasks must be accomplished. What is the goal of accomplishing those tasks? Why should that be the goal? Is the task accomplishment achieving the goal? Should we change the goals? Answering those kinds of questions requires "education."

Most people in society--even a highly technological society--don't need education, they need training. They need to know how to do thing things a technological society needs done.

Back in the latter 80s, the smart folk who determine the national direction began preaching, "The United States is no longer a production economy." With that, the US began to abandon the concept of training--teaching people to accomplish tasks. Only "education" was needed.

The results of that decision filtered all the way down to how we teach reading to children. Or rather, how we don't teach it.

RDKirk said:

Generally they already have "schooling" and can't get effective job experience.

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Granted 'generally is a relative term. The neighborhood I'm in most males drop out of high school, then sit at home, playing video games and sponging off mommy and daddy. Most of my generation would never have dreamed of that, even as hippies. Sponging off the government, well maybe, but mom and dad? Nahh. lol

usexpat97 said:

I doubt the "for less pay" part. Supply and demand. If demand for skills goes up, pay goes up.

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Except it has not been (at least not in real labor value), which economists have been pointing out for a couple of decades. Businesses that have not been able to hire at low wages have simply not hired, forcing the remaining employees to do more to keep their jobs.

crossnote said:

Granted 'generally is a relative term. The neighborhood I'm in most males drop out of high school, then sit at home, playing video games and sponging off mommy and daddy. Most of my generation would never have dreamed of that, even as hippies. Sponging off the government, well maybe, but mom and dad? Nahh. lol

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Then you'll have to describe your neighborhood. A neighborhood where "most males" drop out of high school is a slum. Most people do not live in a slum, so your experience is a statistical outlier.

I'm in a middle class neighborhood, I work (until I retire in a couple of months) in a Fortune 50 company that pushes IT. But the primary focus of this company since 2008 has been to reduce the work force to nothing but computer programmers and managers (at high wage), and people who answer telephones at low wage, probably a 30/70 mix. The "business analysts" are being forced out very obviously and swiftly.

Moreover, the culture of the company has very much changed so that upward mobility within the company is significantly stunted even for the computer programmers and the phone reps. Right up until 2008, this was a company in which someone could literally start out in the mail room and work up to being an executive. The company used to bring in new employees with a planned career ladder and the intention of keeping them until retirement--and that was as late as 2008. No more.

Goonie said:

More like programming, engineering and IT.

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Most people will not do well in those fields (at least not as well as people in those fields ought to do), nor does society really need more than a minority of total workers in those fields.

Also, those are easily outsourced fields.

iluvatar5150 said:

You read wrong, ate least regarding the gender gap. Women have done just fine in these fields when dudebros haven’t crowded them out. CompSci used to have a higher percentage of women back in the early days before computers were considered “for boys”.

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That happened in the early 80s with personal computers.

Back when "data processing" was part of the math programs in colleges, there were just as many women as men. Women, in fact, dominated the field in many areas in the days of "big iron"-- mainframe computers.

But personal computers first entered the social sector as "boys' toys," not as serious business tools. We had to build our own computers and then figure out how to make them do something, so those of us for whom the Archer catalog was favorite reading and Radio Shack was a favorite store had a leg up. It was not presented as an interest to high school girls, so as the field turned in that direction, IT in general was no longer presented to women.

If you look at a graph of women in college taking what would become "IT" studies, the graph rides high, 50/50 male to female until about 1985, at which point the participation of women in technology begins to drop like a rock. That's when PCs happened.

Kalevalatar said:

Here in Finland, girls outperform boys in education, including STEM subjects.
So, is that down to the fact that
1) Finland is the forerunner in gender equality; consequently Finnish girls have positive role models of women who can and do
2) Finnish women have an extra gene that makes them smarter than global ladies for whom math, apparently, is too hard
3) Finnish men lack that extra gene that makes global men better at math than woman?

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My daughter has a theory that about ten thousand years ago, an advanced alien race came to earth and captured a sample of human beings. The aliens raised those humans in special development colonies, then returned them to the area now known as Finland about four thousand years ago.

RDKirk said:

Then you'll have to describe your neighborhood. A neighborhood where "most males" drop out of high school is a slum. Most people do not live in a slum, so your experience is a statistical outlier.

I'm in a middle class neighborhood, I work (until I retire in a couple of months) in a Fortune 50 company that pushes IT. But the primary focus of this company since 2008 has been to reduce the work force to nothing but computer programmers and managers (at high wage), and people who answer telephones at low wage, probably a 30/70 mix. The "business analysts" are being forced out very obviously and swiftly.

Moreover, the culture of the company has very much changed so that upward mobility within the company is significantly stunted even for the computer programmers and the phone reps. Right up until 2008, this was a company in which someone could literally start out in the mail room and work up to being an executive. The company used to bring in new employees with a planned career ladder and the intention of keeping them until retirement--and that was as late as 2008. No more.

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I'm mainly speaking of Gen Y (Millennials) who are programmed to have others care for their needs and provide entitlements regardless of their social status.

crossnote said:

I'm mainly speaking of Gen Y (Millennials) who are programmed to have others care for their needs and provide entitlements regardless of their social status.

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Well, that's certainly not the "most males drop out of high school, then sit at home, playing video games and sponging off mommy and daddy" situation you spoke of.

You may not realize that the peak of the Millennial generation is now in their early thirties and doing most of the grunt work of getting things done in society right now.

OldWiseGuy said:

We are a product of what we know, and what we know is largely a product of our education. So, how are we doing?

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IMO, we are becoming speciaty experts especially in technology, but imbeciles in godly wisdom.