Education Is Not a Luxury Good

Why a functioning economy pays to train the people it depends on.

We have spent decades pretending that education and workforce training are consumer choices. Personal investments individuals make at their own risk, financed with debt, justified only if they pay off later. That framing is foundationally flawed.

If a skill set is required at scale for the economy to function, then educating people in that skill is not a luxury purchase. It is economic infrastructure. And infrastructure is something societies fund collectively because everyone depends on it.

We do not ask people to take out loans to build the roads they commute on. We do not tell power plant technicians to personally finance the electrical grid. Yet, we routinely expect nurses, teachers, engineers, technicians, and machinists to mortgage their futures simply to qualify for work we already know the economy needs.

That isn’t market discipline. It is systemic negligence.

Carrying a Private Burden to Support the Public Economy

Student debt exists because we have shifted the cost of workforce preparation onto individuals while the benefits flow outward to employers, industries, and the broader economy. It functions as a private tax imposed on people for producing public value.

The downstream effects are entirely predictable. Workers delay homeownership and family formation. Career mobility collapses because debt makes risk impossible. Entire fields suffer shortages because the cost of entry is irrational. Wages are distorted downward because desperation replaces bargaining power.

And when people opt out, burn out, or leave altogether, we feign confusion.

If a role is essential – healthcare, education, engineering, public safety, advanced manufacturing – then the training pipeline should be publicly financed and deliberately managed. Not priced like a boutique product. Not backed by lifelong debt. Not left to a market that has already demonstrated it cannot and will not solve the problem.

Include Skilled Trades and Technical Work

This failure extends well beyond four-year degrees.

Machinist. Mechanics. Electrical technicians. Tool-and-die makers. HVAC specialists. Precision manufacturing operators. These are not peripheral jobs. They are foundational to any economy that intends to make things, maintain infrastructure, and remain resilient.

Yet we have allowed training pathways for these roles to become fragmented, underfunded, and culturally devalued. Community colleges are treated as budget leftovers. Apprenticeships are inconsistent or unsupported. Employers demand experience while refusing to fund training.

Then those same employers complain about labor shortages.

If we are serious about domestic manufacturing capacity, supply-chain security, and economic stability, technical education must be treated as a strategically important national security asset.

Pay for it. Standardize it. Scale it.

Workforce Shortages are Manufactured for Exploitation

Here is the part we rarely say out loud: many of our so-called labor shortages are self-inflicted.

We have made education and training expensive, risky, and debt-laden. We have discouraged domestic participation through cost and precarity. Then we point to the resulting gaps as justification for importing labor under exploitative conditions.

The H-1B system, as it is commonly used, is not primarily about a lack of talent. It is about cost control. Companies avoid investing in domestic training, suppress wages through constrained visa labor, and lock workers into dependency.

They call it “competitiveness.” It is a two-fold exploitation: foreign workers are trapped, and domestic workers are excluded.

If companies were required to fund training pipelines, pay enforced market wages, and demonstrate genuine domestic recruitment, much of the shortage narrative would collapse overnight.

Remove the Incentives to Avoid the Domestic Workforce

None of this requires radical policy innovation. It requires political will.

If the economy needs certain skills at scale, we should pay to train people for them. If companies want access to skilled labor programs, they should meet wage standards and training obligations. If imported labor is used, it should not undercut domestic wages or serve as a substitute for workforce investment.

When training is publicly supported and wage floors enforced, employers stop gaming the system. They hire locally. They train. They retain.

That is how functional labor markets actually work.

This Is a Governance Failure, Not a Mystery

Ballooning education costs, student debt, labor shortages, and stagnant wages are not separate crises. They are symptoms of the same underlying failure: our refusal to govern the education-to-workforce pipeline as a coherent system.

We pretend the market will handle it. Then we intervene piecemeal. Then we blame individuals when it breaks down.

A serious country does not do this.

A serious country decides which skills it needs, funds the training required to produce them, enforces standards that prevent exploitation, and treats workforce development as infrastructure rather than a gamble.

Education is not a luxury.

Corporate needs should not be employee subsidized.

Labor is not disposable.