An amazing study was released today. A Boston group called Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, set up by Michael Porter of Harvard marketing fame, announced that jobs in inner cities pay about the same as other urban jobs. To add to the shocking report, the study found that in a national sample 77% of the people working in the inner city jobs commute to work. The inner city jobs had a wide range of skill levels from hospital orderly staff to engineers and other professionals.
This tells me two things. That the half century of efforts to create more employment in the inner city is meaningless. It hasn't reduced unemployment in the inner city. It endangers the people who go to the inner city jobs and clearly provides little work for the people who live there.
The people who are unemployed in the inner city are either unqualified for the jobs, don’t want to work or have other types of work that doesn’t get counted in employment data.
I know that the education offered at local community colleges and local state universities in San Francisco is doing little to train inner city dwellers for jobs. My friend Alex asks why people are being forced to read Marx, Adorno and Marcuse when they need job training.
I further know what the market tells me. Last year I bought stock in four profit-making, college level trade skill schools. I tripled my money. I still own two trade school stocks, CECO and COCO, and they are still going up.
Trade skill schools are booming because the demand is great and plenty of people know which skills count. The money wasted in community colleges and local state universities should go for scholarships at profit-making trade schools.