Pass on college for a Marcellus job? Maybe
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On an icy morning well before dawn last winter, I found myself sharing a shelter with a young man waiting for the airport parking lot shuttle. We struck up a conversation, and as soon as he spoke, I heard my mom's East Texas twang in his polite "yes, ma'am."
What was a college-age kid from Tyler doing in Pittsburgh?
Laying pipeline in the Marcellus Shale. He was flying home to visit his folks. He did so fairly often -- implying, it seemed, that his wages were high enough to allow it.
Good for him, I thought. And my next thought was, Why are we importing workers from another state? Don't we have plenty of folks hungry for jobs right here?
Apparently not enough. In fact, last week a state representative from North Strabane hosted a "youth jobs forum" to connect Washington County high schools and trade schools to the booming natural gas industry. He was laying a pipeline for grads to well-paid work.
That's because industry representatives are encountering local resistance to Marcellus Shale jobs that seems to have nothing to do with environmental concerns and everything to do with bitter lessons learned from the collapse of the steel industry.
But what if lessons learned 30 years ago no longer apply?
Parents and grandparents who went straight from high school into factories and steel mills found limited job opportunities when those industries died, because they lacked a college education. They don't want their offspring to suffer the same fate.
That's understandable and commendable. It's been clear for decades that higher education translates into higher earnings potential. Parents who want economic security for their children aren't wrong to urge them on to college.
Purists may wish that we all pursued education for its own sake, not as an income-enhancing strategy -- that "business" was not a major offered to undergraduates. But in a nation devoted to economic striving, the university's battle for arts-and-sciences-only was lost a long time ago. Purists will have to console themselves -- ourselves -- with the truth that no education is ever wasted, or lost.
And regardless of major, the college degree assures prospective employers that applicants have reached a level of literacy and thinking skills high enough to make them reliable employees (as the high school diploma once did).
First Published October 24, 2011 12:00 am
