<p>When the national unemployment rate is at 9%, and 18% of those lacking a HS degree are looking for work, college grad unemployment is a mere 5% according to the latest stats:</p>
<p>Landing</a> a job: It's about location and education - Business - Eye on the Economy - msnbc.com</p>
<p>So, if you are Bill Gates or Michael Dell, feel free to bail out early or skip college altogether; otherwise, get that degree!</p>
<p>It deserves a bump…</p>
<p>how many are underemployed?</p>
<p>What about incomes? I am not an economist, but some of the college grads I know are now under-employed. They have a job, but one they are overqualified for. College is now what high school used to be 50 years ago, a semi-mandatory requirement. Also, these statistics ignore the problem of college debt.</p>
<p>"If you’re looking for a job with state and local government — think teachers, police officers, sanitation workers, etc. — your prospects continue to worsen. Budget cuts eliminated another 30,000 state and local government jobs in February. Since peaking in Sept., 2008, local governments have cut 377,000 more jobs than they created. "</p>
<p>I love how backwards our nation is.</p>
<p>My older d graduated in 2007 and has a Masters degree in her field which is a terminal degree in her field. My younger d graduated in 2010. With the exception of those in MA/PhD programs or in law school, med school or now in nursing school, the only ones who have jobs in which they are not underemployed are nurses or in finance/investment banking. My older d is an adjunct faculty at the school where she received her graduate degree and is the youngest adjunct in the history of the school. She works p/t a a cultural institution at an Ivy League University in the same city. She can just about support herself for rent and food and not much beyond that-there are no benefits with either job except perhaps library privileges. My younger d had an internship in her field where she earned $100 a week. She along with all her friends are either babysitting, waitressing, working in bookstores, coffee shops, health clubs, yoga studios and so on…not one with any jobs with benefits other than those working in parent’s businesses. …</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I wasn’t alive half a century ago, but after reading the following article a few days ago</p>
<p>[CUNY</a> Adjusts Amid Tide of Remedial Students](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/nyregion/04remedial.html]CUNY”>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/nyregion/04remedial.html)</p>
<p>I agree. Maybe we shouldn’t be focused on getting more students into college. Maybe we should be focused on making high school more rigorous.</p>
<p>Same problem the world over. High school degrees/diplomas are becoming useless…</p>
<p>Idiosyncra3y,</p>
<p>Well, taken alone, yeah, but you need one to be admitted to college 
(unless you’re opting for early college, etc…) </p>
<p>Of course, whether or not high school is necessary is debatable.</p>
<p>Definitely one of the 5%. I know a lot of people working at stores/shops/restaurants after a degree. THAT is not employment.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>[How</a> the Government Measures Unemployment](<a href=“http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm]How”>http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm)</p>
<p>I suspect a lot of recent graduates will be “not in the labor force” if their parents answered for them, or if they are not experienced with looking for employment as a full-time job.</p>
<p>I also agree that under-employment is probably a lot higher among the youth because unlike for workers with families, it is still profitable to take low-wage work. Older workers with children at home actually lose with some of those jobs because of the cost of child-care and commuting. Only people without child care costs can do it.</p>
<p>Bachelor’s degrees are becoming what a high school diploma was 35 years ago, just a starting point, nothing special. A BS or BA is now like going to Grade 13, 14, 15, 16 and doing four more years of high school. If you are not absolutely certain to get a Master’s degree, I don’t recommend going to university at all. It’s a bloody waste of time, effort and money.</p>
<p>There are a lot of generalizations being made here, and there a lot of people with master’s degrees that have low paying jobs too. Yeah, there are situations where going to college may not pay off, but there are still situations where it definitely will. This would be my hierarchy of options:</p>
<p>1) Go to an Ivy League school and study anything you want
2) Go to a flagship state school and study engineering
3) Go to a flagship state school and study finance/accounting/information systems. Or hard sciences/maths.
4) Go to a good non Ivy private university and study the subjects listed above. This option is better if you can avoid taking out too many loans.
5) Go to a flagship state school and study liberal arts</p>
<p>If you don’t do any of those things-you choose an expensive school, one without a great reputation, take out loans to pay for it, and study something that doesn’t teach you a specialized skill–then yeah, you’re gonna have trouble finding a job.</p>
<p>I think that an Ivy League education is overrated in many regards. The major advantage, in terms of career prospects, that an Ivy League school has is in the financial services industry. Investment banks simply don’t recruit from the majority of undergraduate business schools and instead focus on Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, etc. </p>
<p>I think that your major and what you study are much more important than where you study. Look at the survey reports for the major universities. Approximately 20-30% of Princeton and Columbia students are unemployed. Investment Banking/Consulting/Teach for America are the most active employers. The Ivy League is a feeder for the financial services but are lousy at engineering. There are huge benefits for top students in terms of medical school and law school admission, but the average Ivy League student may have been better off being a big fish in a small pond, as the saying goes.</p>
<p>My personal ranking for employability would be:
<p>I think that studying the liberals arts is a waste of society’s resources. During the financial crisis, the most toxic asset class was student loans. A college education is becoming more of a commodity and the difference between a secretary who studied Russian and a secretary who only graduated high school is marginal, and not worth 4 years of time and thousands of dollars in loans. College is more of a signalling mechanism to potential employers rather than a training ground. However, a college education is beneficial in non-quantifiable respects but the question is whether the government (i.e. taxpayer) should be footing the bill.</p>
<p>Colleges are very deceptive about those numbers. At first, my college considered me “employed” because I managed to get a temp job over the summer.</p>
<p>I completely disagree about the liberal arts. I wrote this article for College Thrive a while back, but I think it is worth reading:</p>
<p>[Why</a> the Liberal Arts are Not Such a Bad Investment CollegeThrive](<a href=“collegethrive.com”>collegethrive.com)</p>
<p>willmingtonwave, I agree that a liberal arts education or any education at that rate will train the mind better and improve one’s intellectual capacity. That said, I don’t know if it translates into a happier life or that much more of a well-informed citizen. Anyways, shouldn’t the public education system be taking care of brain…er…educating the public about government and history? Teaching us all that good stuff such as a bicameral legislature being the best form of legislative body, especially when you need to allocate pork to some senators in Wyoming to buy their vote. I digress.</p>
<p>My argument is whether government (tax payer)-backed student loans should be used to finance an education, especially when many students enter college because they don’t know what they want to pursue in their lives. No offense, studying a language or English for most people isn’t going to give them that much direction, more so buy some time to explore. </p>
<p>In an ideal world, all students would go to college, we citizens all get free healthcare, and work 20 hours a week, living in a beach front house. The question is whether society has the resources to pay for this. Since the private market for student loans has collapsed, it’s time to question whether the benefits of an education are worth the costs. </p>
<p>I’m a big fan of pragmatism. I’m all for a well-informed citizen with intellectual curiosity, but is 4 years of college going to change 12 years of public education? More importantly, is the education going to put food on the table and pay for the costs incurred during 4 years of college?</p>
<p>I think the incentive system for employment and the government’s approach towards education is wrong.</p>
<p>1) A college education serves as a signalling mechanism for employers. Since college is the norm and everyone’s doing it, do I want to make myself look like the bottom x% by not attending?</p>
<p>2) The cost of college for employers is 0. It probably even helps for them to contact a career center to set up interviews and marketing.</p>
<p>3) The government takes this as a cue that employers are increasingly looking to build a knowledge based economy so we need to finance 10,000 English majors to meet the skill gap and boost our global competitiveness against China and India. </p>
<p>This is a more chicken and egg scenario because it begs the question, how did college get so important in the first place? The commoditization of physical labor, the increasing reliance on technology, the fact that ideas are more valuable than labor. However, I still don’t think objective benefits outweigh the costs of education.</p>
<p>I think we are on the same page. We need to be practical in our approach to higher education. I think that the liberal arts are very valuable, but should we be allowing students to go 80-100k in debt to be philosophy majors? Absolutely not. </p>
<p>The thing is that loans should be viewed as an investment on part of an organization/government/etc. instead of a handout or something that we should come to expect.</p>
<p>This is why I also think that vocational schools/trade schools get such a bad reputation. Green energy is an especially valuable area where those schools could help folks specialize and help our country. At this point, we need more solar panel technicians and less lawyers.</p>
<p>There are even a lot of underemployed engineers, a field which is said to be in such high demand. S is one of the few kids I know who had a job which he got in Feb before he graduated. He will not be able to start actually working until JUNE, a little over a year after he graduated due to security clearance and their scheduling! Still, he is grateful to be employed and in his field, tho he is relocating for the privilege from CA to DC/VA.</p>
<p>Didn’t Harvard just come out with a study encouraging people to NOT go to college? It suggested that people who have less than stellar academic records but strong skills in certain fields (to toot my own horn, this is something I have pushed for years) would be better served to attend trade or technical schools, allowing them to avoid wasting time and money on things they have no interest in (seriously, I don’t know why I had to take a psychology class to graduate college. It had absolutely no meaning to me, and my C in the class showed for it!).</p>
<p>Another idea that is apparently catching on is highly skilled factory labor. Whereas 50 years ago, factory work could be done by anyone with two hands, a strong back and a pair of work boots, today’s factories often require refined skills. Apprenticeships are making a return, and some companies are sponsoring college level training courses on how to properly operate complex machinery designed to manufacture things like wind turbines.</p>
<p>Just sayin’, we should really stop looking down on people who choose not to go to college.</p>