Solano Real Estate Scene: I’m counting on STEM kids to save American Dream
I am not worried about the Covid-19 virus permanently ruining the American Dream, homeownership and what’s left of our middle class.
The reason I am so optimistic about the future for my kids and grandkids is because although California public schools have ranked terribly low in the U.S. over the past 20 years, something very special has been happening in our great country. The number of people with master’s degrees has doubled to 21 million and the number of doctoral degrees has also doubled to 4.5 million in just 20 years.
Most of these people are those kids we went to high school with who did three to five hours of homework every night while most kids do three to five serious hours per month. My nephew Joey, for example, graduated from Harvard last year and will be starting his second year at UCLA medical school in the fall. By the time Joey was 16, he was already 6 feet tall, 170 pounds and had a powerful golf swing like Tiger Woods. His dad, my dad and his uncles had Joey hitting golf balls when he was a toddler and at 4 years old he was hitting pitched whiffle baseballs farther than his much older cousins.
Joey could have been a great amateur golfer and because of his character, SAT scores and good grades would have received full-ride scholarship offers to play golf at numerous great universities. All he had to do was cut back on the homework a little bit and get passionate about competitive golf.
If he had practiced golf every day during his junior and senior year, he may have been a PGA tour rookie this year. Instead, he had a successful and fun high school golf career and beat his dad and his uncles routinely on the golf course while he did homework four hours per night and obtained a 4.5 GPA at his high school in Petaluma.
Somewhere along the line he decided he wanted to save lives and become a doctor rather than become a California state golf champion.
STEM has worked for the young people like Joey in America. Science, technology, engineering and math is the future and this enormous number of young people who have become doctors and scientists over the past 20 years will beat this virus.
Most kids, like me when I was in high school, do enough homework to remain eligible for sports and other high school clubs and extracurricular activities. Most good kids do just enough to graduate or to keep from being grounded by Mom and Dad from video games and their phone and then there are the academic kids and luckily some of them want to save lives and make a difference in the world.
I believe this generation will save the American Dream and while they are at it, save the planet. The brainy STEM kids will solve the world’s health problems and the next generation of MBAs will solve the wealth gap over the next 30 years because smart business people who are not evil, greedy and shortsighted understand that for them to be successful in business, a strong consumer and middle class is required. These millennials with doctorates and master’s degrees know that the greatest country in the world will fail if most of our population is poor.
I am counting on this generation to rebuild our middle class, defeat Covid-19 and pay off the national debt with the leadership of these 25 million brilliant and hardworking MBAs and doctors. I wish I could say us baby boomers left the country better than we found it, but it is what it is and like the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team coach, Herb Brooks, said to his team before they pulled off the Miracle on Ice, “It’s your time.”
