[Hoot Gibson]

You realize you’re saying KY is worse off today than it would be if half the population were in poverty? In EKY it was worse.

I don’t like some of the culture that social welfare has created, but it’s obtuse to not recognize the fact that our population is exponentially more educated and healthier than prior to those benefits.

Colleges haven’t cut any breaks. Federal assistance has been around for 55 years, but this century has seen tuition skyrocket. I’ve seen it first hand; paid my last tuition bill in 2002 and paid my son’s first in 2018. I paid about 25% of what he is paying. I am suspect of KEES money, wage stagnation, and public education cuts.

Where are people going to migrate to?
Where’s that huge industrial center that can take about a 1 million Kentuckians?

I’d much rather see improvements made to my state than Kentuckians have to pick up and leave.

What I realize is that most people on the planet Earth are much better off materially than they were 50 years ago and yet you are crediting liberal politicians for improving the plight of eastern Kentuckians.

You do not seem to recognize the link between rapidly rising college costs and liberal government "assistance" programs. Students and/or others footing the bills are not the real beneficiaries of such assistance. Those who benefit are the mostly liberal professionals in the higher education racket. College professors have been required to teach fewer and fewer hours for more money and benefits. The average size of classes has soared and an increasing number of undergraduates have been taught by graduate teaching assistants and associate professors.

While I agree that basic literacy rates in eastern Kentucky have improved and drop out rates have dropped, I strongly disagree that the level of education of the typical college graduate has improved.

As for migration, there are not 1 million eastern Kentuckians unemployed. Who said that everybody needs an industrial job? The fact that you think that eastern Kentuckians need manufacturing jobs when the manufacturing sector of the economy continues to shrink is a reflection on the state of public education in this country.

For example, many but not all young people are perfectly capable of teaching themselves computer programming and robotics skills. The cost of a Raspberry Pi single board computer is well under $100, including a wireless keyboard and mouse. Linux operating systems for the computer are free and there are plenty of free instructional materials available online to teach oneself to program using the Python, Java, or C programming language. YouTube is the source of a lot of useless information, but it also hosts countless outstanding and often free technical courses on a vast array of topics.

Every year, people travel to this country on H1B visas and accept programming, network administration, and other tech jobs because too few Americans are available to fill the jobs - jobs that often pay upwards of $100,000/year.

My degree is in engineering but I taught myself various programming languages and have worked as a software architect for nearly 20 years. For young people with some people skills who are willing to invest the time and effort, it is not difficult to land a job with a tech company in a technical support (help desk) position and once they have a foot in the door, they will get an opportunity to prove their technical skills.

Why do more American students not pursue high paying tech jobs? I chalk it up to a failure of public schools to prepare students for an ever changing job market. Education should be a life long process and those who do not know that by the time they graduate high school are facing a long series of struggles as the world leaves them behind wondering what happened to the good jobs.

Good jobs are not going to come to eastern Kentucky in large numbers without fundamental change to the culture. More federal assistance is the last thing the area needs. The entitlement culture has taken hold across the nation, but Carl Perkins gave eastern Kentucky a big head start in that area.