“If you don’t have enough jobs….you cannot train your way to victory.”

 

Higher ed is great.  It’s a public good and a private good.  If it weren’t for higher ed, I’d have to set my murder mysteries somewhere else.

But training displaced workers doesn’t make jobs magically appear; not only that, the time spent retraining may have been better spent looking for employment:

“What is more surprising — because no one else has looked at this question lately anywhere in the country — is that the laid-off people around Janesville who went to Blackhawk [Technical College] are faring worse than their laid-off neighbors who did not.”