MANCHESTER, Conn.

What a wonderfully subversive and politically incorrect idea has exploded from the committee set up by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities to study the problem of the state's estimated 119,000 "disconnected" and alienated young people.

Meeting last week at New London City Hall, the group heard a vice president of Yale New Haven Health, Paul Mounds Jr., criticize the widespread misimpression that hospitals and other medical companies hire only applicants with college degrees.

Mounds said Connecticut's hospitals have hundreds of openings for people with high school diplomas or the equivalent. He added that employers should reach out to overlooked potential workers, including former convicts. (A decent job is a strong incentive not to return to crime.) 

The president of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, Chris DiPentima, elaborated. He said many of Connecticut's reported 93,000 job openings don't require college degrees and he urged employers to shift from degree-based hiring to skill-based hiring. DePentima scorned what he called efforts to "over-educate the population."

That is, Mounds and DiPentima were lamenting the cost of the credentialism that has been inflicted on society by higher educators, who profit greatly from it, and by society's own vanity. (See "Doctor" Jill Biden.) Credentialism is why millions of Americans are hobbled with billions of dollars of college-loan debt incurred in pursuit of degrees that conferred little in the way of education or job skills.

Of course, credentialism is a big business in itself, as shown by a review of salaries in higher education, especially administrator salaries. Reducing credentialism might cause a fair amount of unemployment, since much of higher education is just unnecessary overhead expense for society.

Higher education isn't useless. But outside highly technical fields, it is grossly overpriced and distracts catastrophically from the country's big education problem,  lower  education.

A recent survey by the Connecticut Education Association, the state's largest teacher union, illustrated a big part of the lower-education problem.

It wasn't the survey's finding that teachers in Connecticut say they are underpaid. As they are members of unions it's practically their  obligation  to feel underpaid, just as they felt underpaid in 1986 when the state's Education Enhancement Act became law, leading to decades of steady pay increases for teachers in the belief that student performance was mainly a function of teacher salaries. (There turned out to be no connection, and student performance has declined as teacher pay has risen.)

No, the CEA survey was valuable for showing that teachers are increasingly demoralized by student misbehavior, which is prompting teachers to leave their profession earlier than planned and making it harder for schools to hire good applicants. 

This problem is worst where poverty, child neglect, and mental illness among children are worst -- cities and inner suburbs. While Hartford's school superintendent, Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, showed her usual enthusiasm in welcoming children back to school this week, she also acknowledged that the city's schools are still trying to fill 200 vacant positions. As the CEA survey indicated, teachers want to teach, not break up brawls or restrain children who freak out in class and don't know how to behave because they have so little parenting -- and because school administrations prohibit disciplining them.

This social disintegration is part of government's general impoverishment of society but Connecticut's political class remains oblivious to it and busies itself instead with politically correct irrelevance, as New Haven's city council did the other day even as the city's schools are just as dismal as Hartford's.

The council is promoting a resolution that would apologize for New Haven's having blocked the establishment of a college for Black people back in 1831, nearly two centuries ago.

Maybe in another two centuries New Haven will apologize for the failure of most of its schoolchildren to perform even close to grade level, for the racial achievement gap in its schools, and for the city's constant crime, most of whose victims are members of minority groups. Maybe in two centuries state government will consider apologizing too. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).