When people raise concerns about dead-end jobs, someone will often say that the right thing to do is to get more people in college.

College may be a great solution for some. Though it isn't always affordable, it doesn't always pay for itself, not even at the high end, and a person can get living wage employment without a degree. Even if college were free, for a number of reasons, not everyone would even want to go.

Faced with that reality, it's all too rare for someone to ask, as Mark Gimein does, why there are so many dead-end jobs:

One question these numbers [on women in blue-collar industries] raise is why women get tracked into jobs that suck. But that raises an even bigger issue: Do so many jobs have to suck in the first place? Is changing a workplace culture like Wal-Mart's just about giving more of the "better" jobs to women, or is it about improving the workplace for everyone?

Gimein discusses how Wal-Mart's promotion system, which requires moving from store to store, isn't only unnecessary for success in business, but would be hard on even many employees willing to get ahead that way. Just because men are more willing to be uprooted for work doesn't mean they're happy about it.

Working parents, especially working mothers, may be hardest impacted by inflexible work requirements or the lack of good part-time work . They may even lose their jobs because they can't get affordable child care, as noted in a recent edition of the New York Times as mentioned by Sarah Francis at MomsRising.org.

... As cash-strapped states slash funding for programs that help families afford child care, moms are often caught in a terrible bind - many can't find work that pays enough to afford safe care for their kids, and they can't work at all without safe care. ...

When a mother goes home to take care of her children, the impact on the whole family is often caricatured and minimized. As Simon Firth wrote:

...[A] report by the Center For American Progress ... found that "fully 90 percent of American mothers and 95 percent of American fathers report work-family conflict."

Little wonder, really, given that American mothers and fathers are expected to occupy a "workplace perfectly designed for the workforce of 1960," according to the CAP report.

... When it comes to discussing work/life balance, American policy makers and the US media have focused on two interesting, but extremely small groups: "professional mothers praised for staying at home" (the so called 'opt out' generation), and "poor mothers criticized for doing so" (the much demonized 'welfare queens'). ...

It isn't, in short, that working fathers want to have work run roughshod all over their private lives. Even individuals without children may be stressed when work demands prevent them from meeting family obligations or forming healthy social ties.

Poverty, too, is its own source of damaging stress, for both adults and children. Why is it that people can be employed, work hard, and still be so poor that they're constantly in jeopardy of losing everything?

So those tracked into dead-end jobs, which are usually also jobs paying at or below poverty wages, never catch a break. People who are doing their best to support themselves and be productive members of society, perhaps trying to raise children, shouldn't be rewarded with constant stress and desperate poverty.

Sending more people to college won't fix that.

Why should any honest work be a path to poverty or loneliness? Why should supporting a family be incompatible with participating in family life? In a just and humane society where all individuals were respected, the only possible answer is that it shouldn't.

All workers, all families, need a chance at a decent life. Whether or not anyone in the household has gone to college.