Is Money Enough?

One of the great appeals of merchant shipping is lifestyle design, where people with wanderlust could take extended trips unthinkable to those working a 50-week-a year grind. The other appeal is paying off student loans in 5 years or less. Use Mom and Dad as a mailing address, and sleep and eat on the employer’s dime. Port visits are open again, but seeing the recent difficulties for recruiting and retention in the maritime field, something else is going on. We are a decade past “peak college”; enrollment is declining in both absolute numbers and percentage. Where maritime academies burst at their seams ten years ago with students hopeful for solid employment, today, there is more space in the dorms and hallways. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I’ve seen posters from the 1920’s proclaiming the need for more education. Slacking students in the 1980’s (see “A Nation at Risk”) were a threat to national security and economic prosperity. In the post-NAFTA era, education would be the lifeline for workers displaced from uncompetitive industries and outdated factories. Populists like Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump countered this assertion with a more authoritative model: the government could pay for infrastructure programs and subsidize the construction of new factories for the titans of industry. The construction of new oceangoing training ships under recent Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, the first of which launched last year as the “T/S Empire State VII”, is an icon of this model. Yet, more recently under President Biden and his state-level allies have accomplished the same populist improvement through a different model, by raising the minimum wage and tipping the scales of arbitration towards labor. With the floor as high as $20 per hour in California, or $15 per hour elsewhere ($30,000 per year), entry-level workers without college degrees are earning similarly to college graduates five years ago, who would accept subsistence wages to get a foot in the door. Likewise, entry level shipboard jobs can pay close to what newly-graduated officers earn. Traditionally, many seafarers hailed from high cost-of-living areas such as New York and Boston; today, recruiting focuses on the lower-cost Coastal South, and not requiring municipal services much of the year, many experienced mariners establish residence in states without an income tax, predominately in Florida and Texas. There is less pressure to become an officer for the higher pay, or to dedicate a career to a field where Sundays are often spent at work, rather than at church. For now, higher education has lost its end-all, final-word status as an economic proposal. But as I have stated before, the growth of understanding is still essential to the modern mariner.