Invest in the Youth of America

John Faith
July 13, 2014

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The economy is still struggling to pull itself out of the tank of sinking recovery. Jobs are not plentiful enough to employ the population of Americans in need of work. Too many jobs have been shifted overseas as a cost-savings strategy for large corporations. Each time one job is transported overseas, one more American is out of a job. Many of the young people who are trained to fulfill digital positions have been trained in the United States. The talents and skills they acquire are taken back to their home countries. Many of those young people’s education is paid for by U.S. concerns. However, those same opportunities are not available for bona fide citizens of the United States.

There is clear evidence that the American workforce is in need of digital expertise. It is also clear that the United States has an abundance of young people interested in everything digital. The next step would be to identify those students, pay for their education, train them and refuel the pipeline with talented individuals ready to advance the United States to compete on the world station in digital technology. It is as if the United States is buying into a stereotype that U. S. students are not prepared to be digital technologists. The notion is simply far fetched. Three-year olds know how to Google a game they want to play or a video they want to watch on the computer. Three-year olds know how to pull down the print menu and stroll over to print and wait for the appearance of a picture they want to color. I asked one three-year old when I witnessed this, “Can you read.” She said, “Sure, can you?” Then she asked me if I knew what an impostor was. I didn’t know where she was going with that so I simply left that three-year old to her computer.

Young people, just as that three-year old, are born into a digital world. They come out of the womb knowing about technology. It is easy to get these young people up and ready because they have a kind of thinking and innate preparedness individuals could not imagine even 30 years ago. It is time to invest in American youths. It is time to pay for their education and not have them saddled with horrendous student loan debt. We have the talent within U.S. borders to fuel the pipeline for the next generation of leaders within the Federal Government and Industry.