class warfare heats up

College degrees increasingly help firefighters get ahead | Inside Higher Ed
"Aspiring fire chiefs take note -- you may need a master’s degree to get that job. In the past a firefighter could climb career rungs through experience and training. A degree wasn’t important. But that has changed over the last decade, experts say, as the fire safety industry has followed the lead of corporations and other government agencies, where virtually all top executives hold bachelor's degrees, and many have advanced degrees."
and more:

Bucking the trend toward more dependence on higher education in firefighting is Ron Rogers, who was recently named chief of Hillsborough County Fire and Rescue, a large fire department in Florida. Rogers has 29 years of experience, but only a high school diploma. County administrators waived the chief’s job requirement for a bachelor’s degree, with a master’s degree preferred, to hire Rogers, who had served as interim chief. 
Kudos to Hillsborough, though Rogers has extensive certifications as well as his years on the force. Note that they are not firefighters, they are part of the fire safety industry. 

And I have written before about how government jobs that require a BA and do not provide a free path to that for citizens, are a new thing in the US. It means that  even the government will not accept nor employ the lower classes.  Citizens must find the resources to pay for extensive additional training for almost all jobs except those that do not pay a living wage. This is how the education industrial complex helps create the underclass in order to maintain itself. Change the industrial model and you will change the institution.

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