To the Editor:
In this week’s article in “The New York Times,” it stated that the employment rate for new college graduates has fallen precipitously in the last two years. And yet, we expect to spend a billion dollars to raise the road-way of the Bayonne Bridge to further destroy our economy as foreign ships with foreign made goods enter our shores.
What’s even more disheartening is that half of the jobs that our graduates do find don’t require a college degree. A graduate of Pittsburgh University, a prestigious college with high standards, has spent the last two years waiting on tables, delivering beer, working at a bookstore, and entering data. None of which paid very much. He is beside himself worrying how he is ever going to pay back the $70,000 of student loans that he has.
The median starting salary for college graduates in 2009 and 2010 was $27,000, down from $30,000 for those who entered the work force in 2006 to 2008, while the cost to educate a student in a private college far exceeds that. The debt that many have taken on at such a young age is the highest in the world and extremely worrisome to them. They have no way to pay off what they have borrowed, and if we continue along the path we are on, their time in school may have been wasted.
If you or I collectively were to buy just one American made garment, we would add $9 billion to our economy – a staggering amount. What if the light bulb you buy or the sneakers for your child, or the pencils for school were made here? That $9 billion would be $18 billion. In doing so, we would be chipping away at the dichotomy that is sinking us. The Port Authority plans to spend a billion dollars on reconstructing a bridge so ships higher than most apartment houses in Bayonne can come and bring us goods from foreign lands that were once made here, while Kyle Bishop, a recent graduate of Pittsburgh University, tries to find a decent job to help him pay off his college loans. We must change the way we think and the way we buy, or we don’t have a chance in this extremely competitive world. Four years of college may not be the answer. Three years may be enough, with the fourth year devoted to learing a skill.
When I was younger, I worked at Western Electric in Kearny and they had the finest tool and dye workers, maybe in the world. If you have one of their phones, in all probability it still works.
TOM BRAGEN