Million$ in college grants for bogus "green jobs"
The federal government has been very busy on the "green jobs" front – spending lots of your money creating nebulous jobs (which they couldn't define) that ultimately end up in China. Recently the regime simply labeled all jobs as green jobs (more here), including financial advisers, wholesale buyers and reporters. This allowed them to speciously claim that the government has created 200,000 "green jobs." Hmmm…
According to this story (from the Daily Caller), the Labor Department has gotten into the act by providing grants to colleges and universities to train students in "green jobs" technologies. What could possibly go wrong?
The Department of Labor has issued several million dollars in grants to community colleges and specialized universities around the country to train students for "green jobs" in renewable energy fields. While the grants are supposed to fund the future "rank and file" workers of the renewable energy industry, there's a glaring problem the DOL seemingly overlooked — those jobs are either non-existent or scarce.
A former college official who has applied for these grants and has in-depth experience working with the Department of Labor and the Department of Education told The Daily Caller that colleges will often fudge expected job placement numbers just to get extra government cash.
"On ground level – it's a real struggle – my grant writers came to me and honestly said, 'I don't have any job projections, what do I tell them?' You do your best to make up job numbers," said the former college official, who wished to remain anonymous to prevent jeopardizing future job opportunities. "But it's not like lying – it's just guessing what we might be able to do in a best case scenario, but you don't say it's not likely for many jobs."
The former college official told TheDC that, though his college received five different "green jobs" grants from the Department of Labor to train students, no program has been set up yet.
Let me see if I've got this straight:
- The government is giving taxpayer money to colleges to train students for jobs that either don't exist or can't be defined.
- The colleges don't have a clue on job projections so they're making up numbers based on "best case" scenarios.
- The colleges may be inflating the numbers of potential jobs to get more money.
- While they have already received the grant money, few of the programs have actually been implemented.
Jeez, sounds like a winning formula to me. I think I'll start Da Mook College of Green Stuff. I could offer courses in "How to Use 7 Union Workers to Screw in a CFL Bulb" or "Let's Build a Wind Turbine – In China." The feds would fall over themselves to give me grant money! SHEESH!
It's not like these grants are being given to research and development programs at big name schools focusing on developing new renewable energy technology, either. They're being given to universities and community colleges to train students in technical or associate degree programs to work in yet-to-be-developed fields. Many of the grants are promised to colleges that pledged to push "green jobs" or "new energy technology," but don't go into much more detail about how they plan to go about doing that.
The former college official told TheDC that, though solar and wind are emerging energy sources and though some people around the country are interested in making their homes or businesses "greener," he thinks there isn't enough business to support the people being trained to go into these industries. Colleges, he said, are simply incapable of turning down free government money.
Free money indeed. Who the hell do they think pays for this bullshit?
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This entry was posted on January 18, 2011 at 7:49 AM and is filed under BIG Government, Climategate, Goin’ Green, Government Folly, The Regime . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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