Spend Sunday Morning with Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe Talking College Debt, Work Ethic, and Blue Collar Jobs

If it’s Sunday morning, it’s Reason’s deliberate
counter-programming to the boring, Team Red/Team Blue yak shows.
Here’s a 40-minute-long conversation with Mike Rowe, popular host
of Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs show. Originally released on
Friday, here’s the writeup:

“If we are lending money that ostensibly we don’t have to kids
who have no hope of making it back in order to train them for jobs
that clearly don’t exist, I might suggest that we’ve gone around
the bend a little bit,” says TV personality Mike Rowe, best known
as the longtime host of Discovery Channel’s Dirty
Jobs.

“There is a real disconnect in the way that we educate vis-a-vis
the opportunities that are available. You have – right now – about
3 million jobs that can’t be filled,” he says, talking about
openings in traditional trades ranging from construction to welding
to plumbing. “Jobs that typically parents’ don’t sit down with
their kids and say, ‘Look, if all goes well, this is what you are
going to do.'”

Rowe, who once sang for the
Baltimore Opera and worked as an on-air pitchman for
QVC, worries that traditional K-12 education demonizes
blue-collar fields that pay well and are begging for workers while
insisting that everyone get a college degree. He stesses that he’s
“got nothing against college” but believes it’s a huge mistake to
push everyone in the same direction regardless of interest or
ability. Between Mike Rowe
Foundation andProfoundly Disconnected, a
venture between Rowe and the heavy equipment manufacturer
Caterpillar, Rowe is hoping both to help people find new careers
and publicize what he calls “the diploma dilemma.”

Rowe recently sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie to discuss
his bad experience with a high school guidance counselor (3:20),
why he provides scholarships based on work ethic (6:57), the
problem with taxpayer-supported college loans (8:40), why America
demonizes dirty jobs (11:32), the happiest day of his
life (13:14), why following your passion is terrible advice
(17:05), why it’s so hard to hire good people (21:04), the hidden
cost of regulatory compliance (23:16), the problem with Obama’s
promise to create shovel ready jobs (33:05), efficiency versus
effectiveness (34:17), and life after Dirty
Jobs (38:24).

Aprrox. 41 minutes. Cameras by Meredith Bragg and Joshua Swain.
Edited by Bragg. 

More, including links, downloadable versions, and more,
here.

Editor’s Note: At one point, Rowe says
that college costs have risen over 500 percent the rate of
inflation. According to the Department of Labor, college tuition
costs have increased over 500 percent in nominal dollars since
1985, not 500 percent the rate of inflation. Read more about the
increase here.