The following are excerpts from a Toronto Star article. I've selected out what I feel are the most important points.

"The young have not experienced increases in average earnings over the last two decades . . . . A university education offers only a partial buffer... "

"One national survey by People Patterns Consulting, a B.C. company that examines earnings and debt, found that the net worth of households in which one breadwinner has a university degree has fallen 25 per cent since 1984. Households without degrees, it should be noted, were even worse off - with net worth down 48 per cent."

"David Livingstone, who teaches at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, notes that since the 1980s, employers have ``jacked up their entry requirements by requiring a Grade 12 diploma for virtually everything, including pushing a broom in a steel mill."

"Dennis Redovich, an American researcher, argues "the problem for the world is on the demand side (creating living wage jobs) not on the supply side (education and training of workers)."

"Hypocritical and unscrupulous national and international employers move their operations based on the lowest cost for labour rather than on supply of so-called `skilled' workers."

"Livingstone has done research suggesting that 30 per cent of young people hired today have more educational credentials than the job requires. He believes there should be "less fixation on educational solutions to economic problems."

"In other words, perhaps it is jobs that need to be redesigned, not education systems."

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This has been my experience: after 6 months on the job there is no more challenge. It is boring. And that is when managers start becoming irate when us "upstarts" start slacking off. Goddam managers! How much skill do they think it takes to push a few buttons and flip a switch every few minutes??!!

I think this is the inherent problem with the space program. Not only is it boring and anally retentive to the point of being retarded, but no progress is being made, and the cost is so obviously outside our personal budgets that most of us young "upstarts" just don't give a shit anymore whether these people ever get around to getting their f-ing rockets off the ground.