Of Shipyards and Colleges

I was born and raised in a proud shipbuilding town--Bath, Maine, home of Bath Iron Works (a General Dynamics company responsible for construction of about half of all US Navy destroyer ships, and Maine's largest employer). In fact, Bath's public high school mascot is one that often elicits begrudging pride within even rival?teams' communities, the Morse High Shipbuilders. My spouse and I have a rare bit of family?history in common, too. Both of our grandmothers number among our?many family and friends who have worked in shipyards (hers in Portsmouth, NH, which specializes in submarines). So, on behalf of many friends and family, and all proud shipbuilding communities, I took particular umbrage with the second-to-last paragraph in George Will's The Washington Post opinion of last week :?

"Time was, high school teachers might have told slackers, 'If you don’t get your grades up, you’ll have to work at the shipyard.' Today, they can say, 'Get your grades up and you can have six-figure careers at the shipyard.'"

Now, to be fair, Mr. Will's larger point has merits; however, the elitist vantage he brings to the subject matter prevents a worthy conclusion. What he is trying to say is that educators, parents, and civic leaders need to stop pushing "college for all" as a singular path to the middle class--both for reasons of personal aptitude, interest, and fulfillment and, more distinctly, of national security. He would have readers believe this is a core driver of a workforce shortage at the Newport News Shipbuilding (VA), where another proud community?builds Navy submarines.?

Three Problematic Views, and a Missed Opportunity

The first problem with Will's quote, above, is that there was never, ever a time when high school teachers in shipbuilding towns told students: "If you don’t get your grades up, you’ll have to work at the shipyard." If the word escaped you in my first two uses, I repeat THESE ARE PROUD COMMUNITIES, because of their work, not in spite of it.?Admittedly, this first issue is what really got my back up.

Secondly, besides the nobility of the work, these jobs are great jobs, and always have been. Many of them, by the way, require college education, or even advanced degrees--which Mr. Will fails to note. I would argue a much more relevant direction for this opinion might have been how roughly 1/3 of all first-time, full-time students in four-year colleges and universities don't finish their degrees there within even six years. They may never make it through college on their way to shipyard employment.

Thirdly, the assumption that ill-advised college aspiration is siphoning blue-collar workers from anywhere at all, let alone employers engaged in national security enterprises, lacks any sort of evidence. Four-year college enrollment is down among both young men and young women, but the decline among young men is substantially greater . Women comprise less than 1 in 5 workers in the shipbuilding sector (and people of color just over 1 in 4) . Whatever gendered overtones one might read into Mr. Will's assertion that waning encouragement around "shop," or "industrial arts," high school curricula, the quandaries facing shipbuilding and those facing undergraduate colleges are too similar for simple us-them analysis.

One civic duty on which both U.S. higher education and American employers alike owe much more to the nation (and the world) is the development of human capital--the adding of value. This is the most glaring opportunity for comment Mr. Will missed. Both of these social institutions hold substantial responsibility for American prosperity, and for the health of U.S. democracy going forward . Especially as an-ever-more-divisive 2024 national election cycle comes to a head, experts and influencers owe Americans more than soundbites on the virtues of welding .