Well, and part of what happened over the last 15, 20 years is that so much money was made in finance that about 40 percent, I think, of our overall growth, our overall economic growth was in the financial sector. Well, now what we’re finding out is a lot of that growth wasn’t real. It was paper money, paper profits on the books, but it could be easily wiped out.
And what we need is steady growth; we need young people, instead of — a smart kid coming out of school, instead of wanting to be an investment banker, we need them to decide they want to be an engineer, they want to be a scientist, they want to be a doctor or a teacher. And if we’re rewarding those kinds of things that actually contribute to making things and making people’s lives better, that’s going to put our economy on solid footing. We won’t have this kind of bubble-and-bust economy that we’ve gotten so caught up in for the last several years.
What Obama is getting at is that if you are going to spend 4-5 years in college to obtain a degree, you should use some common sense and not spend that time preparing for a high-risk job that may blow up in your face. Too many of my friends in college who were very bright were interested in jobs that equated to high paychecks, not high-emotional-satisfaction.
I will probably not ever be an especially wealthy individual because I chose engineering as my field of interest, but I am enjoying relatively high job security compared to many of my old college buds. My long-term employment outlook is good. Engineering jobs, even in the current economy, are in massive demand (see here, here, here, and especially here). And with a huge exodus of foreign engineering graduates, the domestic openings for engineers continue to be numerous.
Don't get me wrong, swimming in a giant vault of coins like Uncle Scrooge is very appealing to me, but I definitely prefer where I am to the unemployment line. Even if I left this company unwillingly through firing or lay-off, my rehiring prospects elsewhere are high.
But as was accurately noted in the comments of this post, Gen Y has a real internal separation going on: on the one hand you have a lot of cultural pressure and economic incentive to go into get-rich-quick careers and much of Gen Y is headed that way, having lived the majority of their lives in the economic boom of the 95-05, and then another large group of Gen Y has gone into secure, honest work...at which they toil 50-60 hours a week.
I've always like the phrase "he wants a paycheck...just not the job that goes with it" to describe lazy people. It seems to me that the 40% of the economy that was financial vapor-money Obama describes was created by people who wanted the paycheck...just not the job that was required to earn it.
Listen to me, high school seniors that are pondering an undergraduate major: in American history, time and time again, the service sector turns out to be the tortoise, and the financial sector was the hare...
Or if you wanted (because you enjoy subtle references) to try to equate the modern American financial crisis to a Bette Midler song, then the financial sector is Bette Midler and the service sector is The Wind Beneath My Wings.
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