David McElroy

Right after World War II, a revolutionary group forced the Vietnamese emperor to resign and then declared Vietnam independent of French colonial rule. The emperor headed to the southern part of the country and established a new capital in Saigon, where he got his new government recognized by the U.S. and French governments.

In 1949, U.S. President Harry Truman ordered U.S. military advisors into the country to train the South Vietnamese forces in how to use American weapons. From that tiny detachment of advisors grew a war that killed more than 58,000 Americans, some of whom hadn’t even been born yet when the advisors were first sent.

I couldn’t help thinking about that as I read Friday about Barack Obama sending about 100 armed U.S. troops into Uganda to train government forces fighting rebels for a religious group calling itself the Lord’s Resistance Army. Will more Americans get sucked into a conflict that we know almost nothing about? I don’t know. The only thing I’m sure of is that there’s no reason for U.S. taxpayers to be paying for training another country’s army in a civil war.

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If you want to know just how out of touch the progressive left is about economics, you need look no further than two simple facts. First, the left is organizing and protesting to demands jobs. Second, U.S. companies are desperate to find workers who are worth hiring.

Do the protesters know this? Or have they bought into the delusion that they deserve to be handed jobs that let them do whatever they want to do, regardless of whether their skills provide value to anyone?

The problem is that American students are getting degrees, but they’re getting degrees in easier fields, so the choices they’re making mean they’re not competent for the jobs which are going unfilled in manufacturing. Someone who studied art history or theater is fairly useless to a company which needs an engineer or a skilled machine operator.

According to the Reuters story linked in the first paragraph:

“…American colleges are producing fewer math and science graduates as students favor social sciences, whose workload is perceived to be manageable, leading to a skills mismatch. Math, engineering, technology and computer science students accounted for about 11.1 percent of college graduates in 1980, according to government data. That share dropped to about 8.9 percent in 2009.”

If you’re about to get a degree, you might want to take a look at the 20 most useless degrees, in the economic sense. I studied journalism originally, which is the No. 1 most useless degree, and I happen to really like people who majored in some of the creative fields listed here. Honestly, I tend to find far more interesting about people with useless degrees than those with the useful ones, but that’s probably because I’m a bit weird. (OK, a lot weird.) So I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with studying obscure fields that don’t lead to high-paying jobs.

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More and more people are taking online courses today and doing well with them. For subjects that lend themselves to the format, the courses allow students to take courses more conveniently and they allow universities to save money. It’s a win for everybody.

Unfortunately, not everybody sees them that way. Even though they’re good for colleges and students, the union representing nearly half of the lecturers in the University of California system has won veto power over the university offering any more online courses. You see, universities obviously exist for the purpose of providing jobs to union members, not to educate students in a convenient and efficient way.

The new contract between the American Federation of Teachers and the UC system has a clause that prohibits any of the UC campuses from adding online courses that would result in “a change to a term or condition of employment” of any lecturer without union approval, according to the union’s president. He’s quite happy about it, of course.

Bob Samuels, the president of the union, says this effectively gives the union veto power over any online initiative that might endangers the jobs or work lives of its members. “We feel that we could stop almost any online program through this contract,” Samuels told Inside Higher Ed.

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