To those who are unfamiliar, Mike Rowe is the host of television’s Dirty Jobs and Somebody’s Gotta Do It, shows that focus on difficult, hands-on, blue-collar jobs and the people that do them. In both shows, Rowe joins the workers that do these jobs and works with them for a day, showing viewers what the jobs really involve and what skills are necessary to do them.
In real life, Rowe is a promoter of vocational job training. He believes that in today’s America, there’s a gap between white-collar jobs and blue-collar jobs that needs to be addressed, because in today’s work environment, even with a large number of people out of work, there are still good jobs going unfilled because people don’t have the skills to do them.
The problem, as Rowe says, is that too many young people graduating high school want to go to traditional four-year colleges or universities and learn disciplines that are not really in demand, such as art-or-music-related skills, leading to a glut of college graduates who aren’t qualified for many of the country’s available jobs.
Instead, these young people should be learning skills that could actually get them relatively high-paying positions, if they only knew which disciplines were hiring. Watch this clip to see Rowe talk to Politically Incorrect’s Bill Maher about the scam of a college degree in today’s society.
