Why? This is what he said:  "We are in a tough fight.  We’ve been in a tough fight over the last two and a half years to get past a crippling recession, but also to deal with the problems that happened before this recession -- the fact that manufacturing had weakened, the middle class was treading water.  I don’t think the answer is for us to turn back.  I think the answer is to stand up for what this country is capable of achieving, and to place our bets on entrepreneurs and workers and to get behind some of the great work that’s being done here at NOVA and in schools all across the country."

It is one tool of many.

The other tool ...........or DUPES

Cutting the throats of college grads; junior college graduates will work a lot cheaper, they dont have as big of demands.

Another Tool: If Corporations need more College grads, the governement has another tool; expand the H1B visa laws;  another tool to destroy the current middle class

Another Tool: Bring in cheap immigrant labor, they too work cheaper, is that another one of this administrations tools, to destroy the current middle class?  

The dupes are US. 

This administration is using the Tools to destroy us; the wage slaves.

Been been poking through the research a bit. Something about their approach is rubbing me wrong, not 100% sure what it is yet. I think the results are off base to some degree. the education-requirement rankings seem by-and-large pretty accurate, but IMO their percentage calculations seem off base; significantly so in some categories.

Thanks for the highlight. I plan to go through it in detail. This could be germane to a part of our business (finding jobs for people who have been injured).

One thing they don't catch is that many of the "stocker/gopher" type of entry level positions (for example) are being eliminated by dumping the tasks on the sales and managerial workforce. It used to be pretty easy to find a good job in retail/management for someone with a sedentary limitation - for many industries such roles only required being good at sales/management. Nowadays managers and floor sales staff are increasingly required to lift upwards of 50+ lbs. It's happening in certain types of office positions too. It has gotten to the point where it is sometimes easier to find better opportunities for a HS grad who can lift 50 lbs frequently than a college grad with a serious lifting restriction. Perhaps apropos of nothing - but it's a semi-related trend that seems to be increasing of late.

Microsoft purged tens of thousands of those kinds of jobs not long back. I don't now how stuff is on your side of the mountains, but refugees from that flooded the contract development/business support market over here and are still kind of brutalizing opportunities (smaller pond though). My understanding is that they started using H1Bs to cut bene' overhead (MS was getting 80% of all H1Bs there for a while), give them on-the-job training and send them back to do the same jobs far cheaper through subsidiaries held in third world economies. They still hire some engineers - especially for gaming (and now mobile) - but they have a nasty habit of taking the institutional knowledge established by innovators at HQ and moving it to their third-world workforce as soon as it proves out and staffing needs expand to scales. That's one upward limit on tech employment that we can't educate out of.

Google is on the upswing; somewhat. The socials are looking pretty much tapped. Amazon has some good expansion going on in their EC2 platform - but I don't think that's effectively in the educational pipeline yet. The mobile platforms have some growing opportunity too - but it gets kind of sketchball with a lot of spec work once you get outside the mega-corps or their affiliated studios.

Don't get me wrong, of course education is important. And in this world - tech education more so than many other types. But it's not like there are a bazillion awesome jobs in tech either right now. This isn't the 90s ... heading in to the internet boom and seeing the maturation of the office PC LAN and mass adoption of the home computer. The market really sucks for the most part (and the job numbers generally seem to back this impression up). Tens of thousands of techs have been rendered jobless. Employment is tight and average compensation is contracting in a big way. Your kids are pretty lucky (hopefully it's company growth and not a case of clearing out experienced techs earning pre-crash scale with entry-level folks working for cheap - which is happening a lot these days).

If education is going to do it, there must be jobs available. Not a big fan of retraining as response to lack of employment, I have seen a LOT of people go through retraining who never got back to work. To fix the current employment problem, someone somewhere is going to have to invest in doing something that makes a lot of jobs. Who that is, how aggressively they invest and what those jobs will be has a lot to do with if retraining is useful - and what folks should be retrained to do.

Our infrastructure is a mess. From roads to rails to bridges to power transmission lines. Many infrastructure components have a duty cycle that is nearing (or past) an end. Sit in on a few rural city council meetings and see how folks are cobbling together their sewers from surplus bits and pieces left over from 1978 because buying new stuff is too expensive. This is the most logical place where a bunch of work could be created - and in the reasonably short term will HAVE to be created if we don't want society to crumble. That stuff is a function of math; municipal planners can even tell you to the day and dollar what's slated to fail. So, truthfully, there is a great need for blue-collar workers in our current society if we simply were to catch our nation's infrastructure up. And even the expansion of energy infrastructure; wind, solar, and smart grid upgrades would be be largely manufacturing and installation type jobs.

I don't exactly see what can be done to create an explosion of new SQL management jobs without creating a bunch of new businesses that need database management. A significant increase in those sorts of jobs seem like it would be facilitated as sort of a trailing benefit to investing in creating a bunch of jobs in the rest of the economy. Which is the point. We need to invest in creating jobs, or all the education in the world won't help a lick for many of the unemployed and underemployed. And if we make those kinds of investments, many of the people who today are looking at retraining (with uncertain prospects at the end of it) could just go to work doing something they are perfectly well educated for.

But, let's get real here. Obama hasn't thought about ANY of this. He was just busting out his canned "I'm at a college - what do these people want to hear?" presidential blah blah blah.

Yeah. That whole giving Democrats the White House and both chambers of congress thing we tried totally didn't work out for us at all.

How can you possibly be opposed to providing kids with training and credentials to match the sectors that are hiring or expected to be hiring when hiring picks up? Have you considered demographics? Did you know that the average age of a welder in the U.S. is 55, and that they are retiring twice as fast as kids are coming into the field? Many of these are jobs on bridges and pipelines and skyscrapers that can't be done overseas. If part of what the government is doing is planning for a post-recession workforce, with non-service-sector middle class jobs, then great.

Nevertheless attending a Community College increases the chances of getting a job...

What this program does is increase the number of applicants for the same limited number of jobs. So, sure, in a sense it increases the chances of those previously unqualified, but it does so only by decreasing the chances of those already qualified and now out of work.

Unless jobs are created, this is just a zero-sum game. And hence wasted money.