Responding to a query about jobs, Rubio said America’s education system and society in general need to better emphasize vocational school.
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“We need more welders and less (sic) philosophers”, he said.
Rubio is hardly the first GOP candidate to snipe at liberal arts degrees.
Fact-checkers went into overdrive, quickly asserting on social media that people with philosophy degrees tend to earn more than the average welder.
One of the three attack ads featured on the home page of the super PAC’s YouTube channel is titled “Marco Rubio, Mansplainer” – and no other Republican is the sole focus of an entire ad on the Priorities channel, The Hill reports.
If you hit the mute button on your TV at that moment and listened closely, you could nearly hear the collective groans of a million philosophy majors echoing in the atmosphere. Or better yet, more welders who can philosophize. But that’s not what most philosophy majors are aiming to do. The data on wages and education reveal two things. But financial success, while important, is not the sole measure of a person – another point we emphasize in philosophy.
To get a better breakdown, I consulted the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, which helpfully compiles career earnings for 80 different college majors, including “philosophy and religious studies”. Note that Rubio’s primary opponent Carly Fiorina, who has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Stanford University, has a net worth of about $59 million. The gap is widening for young people.
That said, philosophy isn’t exactly a booming department at many schools. These numbers are why we must continue to fight to make college affordable, accessible and high quality for everyone. Rubio, however, described his proposal as “a very long path” to citizenship. Marco Rubio has found himself at the center of a political storm, but his voting record and policy positions aren’t drawing the unwanted attention. If you add up the years, it is a lot of years before someone who is here illegally now could become a citizen….
It’s true that a few owners of plumbing businesses make lots of money. “It made no sense to me then, and it makes no sense to me now”.
Yet this is not the case, and neither is his claim about welders. For philosophy teachers, the wage is significantly higher: $63,630. The DOL’s figures show that “Welding, Soldering and Brazing Workers” make $39,570 on average. The welders at the American Welding Society message board all testify to the job security and generally higher pay of union jobs.
“If you can find a philosopher that can weld, that’s pretty good”, Rubio said. Yet the series of subsequent quibbles over who makes how much continue to side-step the bigger issue. Never mind obscenely indebted. That’s for another day. “Because you deserve to know that the market for Greek philosophers has tightened over the last 2,000 years”. We see that in the reaction to Rubio’s welding vs. philosophy gaffe. Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases.
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“I learned a very powerful lesson in 2013: the American people do not trust the federal government to enforce our immigration laws”, Mr. Rubio said Thursday, speaking at an event hosted by the SC Chamber of Commerce. Blue-collar and white-collar, college-educated and skilled labor, should stand united, shoulder-to-shoulder.
