U.S ECONOMY KEEPS ROLLIN' ALONG BUT THERE IS A JOB PARADOX?

The Remarkable Recovery continues another month.  The preliminary jobs reports for June shows an increase 222,000 new jobs, handily beating estimates.*  And wages increased nicely too at an annualized rate of 2.5%.  Even better, the figures for the previous two months were also raised.  The thing is that the report could be even better if we had a better trained work force.**

• By 2020 there will be 1.4 million computer science–related jobs available in the U.S. but only 400,000 graduates with the skills necessary to fill them.

I have long been interested in motivation, based on my personal experience.  If you are strongly motivated, you can make up for low brainpower IQ (Of course there is a limit to what motivation).  In the late 1960s, I participated in a program to motivate 5th graders in a large low-cost housing development in Denver.  Then around 2000, I participated in a reading program for 2nd graders in a school in a low-cost housing neighborhood.

A parents best friend is to be in a neighborhood where children are motivated.  In such a case the likelihood of your children being motivated is greatly enhanced.  In the neighborhood where I grew up, I think my whole gang rose to the level of their abilities.  In some cases it was Ph.D. and in other is might have been a two-year certificate, but everyone took things as far as they could go.

All us oldersters know that if we need to know something about our cell phones or computers, we should seek out a 10 yr old.  Since children are so motivated to learn about tablet computers and such, it would seem easy to get a workforce trained in computer science.  The main problem is in getting such things to them in such a way that the youngsters can interact.  It seems like there are attempts to do this.

But there is also a paradox about the shortage of coders and other computer science specialists as graduates have difficulties in finding jobs:

With coders (A.K.A. computer programmers) in such high demand, you’d think it would be obvious to “start ‘em young” and put high school students on a path to a rewarding career. And yet, according to Computer Science Education Week, computer science classes don’t count toward math or science high school graduation requirements in 22 states, including Colorado, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. It is no wonder that computing occupations are among the highest-paying jobs for new graduates, fewer than 3% of college students graduate with a degree in computer science.***

* http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/07/us-nonfarm-payrolls-june-2017.html
** http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/07/heres-what-the-unemployment-rate-is-not-telling-you-about-job-losses.html
*** http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/tech-skills-gap-stem/