Compared to other countries, the US has over-credentialed its job requirements. A physical therapist in most places is a 3 year post high school certificate, not a 7 year doctoral journey. The same is true for many occupations here although there is now push back by companies and government agencies against college degree requirements. Commercial pilots, for example, no longer require a degree at many airlines.
Itâs not that people look down on teachers, (teacher here) itâs that you canât make a living wage being a teacher anymore. Who wants a career where they have to live in their parentsâ spare room? A lot more college aged kids would want to be teachers if they could support themselves doing so. How many CS degree holders do we need? Weâve created an untenable situation as a society. In my parentsâ generation, you could support a family well without a college degree. My mother in law was a stay at home mom, my father in law was a restaurant manager, and the owned a nice home in the suburbs of Southern California. Those days are gone.
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Thatâs one fieldâŠ
Computers are still sort of similar today. If one has really good computer capability a degree isnât always necessary.
But most students arenât that capable with finance or computers from high school.
From what Iâve learned via exchange students, European high schools track their students more appropriately too, which helps.
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Weâre on the same page. Teachers are vastly underpaid and underappreciated, IMO.
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The way some older colleagues describe life back then, it seems pretty different to today.
It was much more of a club atmosphere as opposed to today. It used to be much more dinners and drinks as opposed to getting in before the market opens and going home after the market closes.
When I interned at a bank a few years ago, the MD I spoke to said it was very common for people to go for drinks at lunch when he was a young man. He remarked that you canât really do that today. Nor can you smoke on the trade floor which was common back then.
So you didnât need a degree, you got to enjoy a country club work lifestyle and you earnt good money. That sounds like the life to me.
You just lost me.
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I lost you, how out of curiosity?
Thereâs a great book that talks about this as well.
I was pretty skeptical like you that financial services was like that 50 years ago too but the book seemed to corroborate what the MD said.
I guess my complaint has two points:
- needing a degree wasnât necessary
- the lifestyle was much better than today
These are very different things. People who are in their early 60s now were born in the 1960s.
Also some stats about percentage of population with college degrees:
Ages 55-64: UK 35%, US 41%
Ages 25-34: UK 49%, US 46%
I thought you were arguing in favor of more efficiency in the job market place. I didnât realize your template was a romanticized version of the British class system.
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Also some stats about percentage of population with college degrees:
This stat is for people with tertiary educations, not people with college degrees.
You took this stat from the above link.
Iâve had this argument before.
Having a tertiary education isnât the same as having a degree. Until the early 1990s, you could get tertiary educations in the UK without needing to go to university - doing applied and practical qualifications counted as tertiary educations.
Those banking apprenticeships I talked about, those were tertiary education level apprenticeships without ever needing to have gone to university. Youâd get some applied qualification at the end of them.
I know a lot about UK policy and US policy because Iâve spent a long time debating this stuff.
It also used to be your pedigree that got you the job, not a random application from someone wanting âthe good life.â
Needless to say, that was frowned upon by many - so companies changed. Then too, they found out if employees worked more they made more money. And plenty complained about having to be subject to secondhand smoke.
Requiring things like a college degree helped even the playing field in a way. (Granted, itâs not utopia.)
ETA: For many generations kids did what their parents did. Itâs only relatively recently that this has changed in developed nations. Education has allowed it to change.
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Thatâs just me venting.
My point is that life was much more slow many years ago.
Even my parents talk about life being much more relaxed in the 1980s and early 1990s without the internet.
Youâd get off work and nobody would contact you. Productivity would be lower but you wouldnât need to work anywhere as hard at work.
The office was a much better place. Youâd have a mail room thatâs how much slower life moved. That âslownessâ includes not having degree requirements for every single job.
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Ask your parents. Iâm pretty sure they would agree that being over-qualified for your job was part and parcel of the more relaxed vibe of the 80s and early 90s. Today I tell all my younger friends that if they want to be home in time to have dinner with their families - donât fall for the trap of âbecoming managementâ.
I think only about 30% of those 55 + have a BA. Itâs higher among younger people â around 41%.
There were a lot more factory and hands on jobs in the âgood old days.â Degrees werenât needed. Automation and the development of big machines that could pick crops, pave roads, and build things put a lot of those workers out of jobs. Then too, a lot moved overseas.
Fewer non-degree jobs led to more people heading toward getting degrees if they were capable of doing so, esp once pedigree mattered less.
Ok, so I looked at the US census data for bachelors, masters, professional, and doctoral degrees:
Ages 25-29: 39%
Ages 60-64: 33%
Donât have time to check ONS for UK data.
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According to this, 7.7% of the US population had a degree in the 1960s.
Even in the 1970s, between 10-16% of the population had a degree.
That means that employers couldnât require a degree for most jobs otherwise theyâd never fill them. Just because young people back then got degrees, the rest of the population was much more uneducated.
Thereâs a difference between degree attainment and degree requirements. Youâre talking about degree attainment, Iâm talking about requiring a degree. Heck, when my parents were my age, only 20% of the US population had a degree.
Today, that figure is 38%. If you have 38% of the population with a degree, thatâs an incredibly large pool of labor so employers can afford to put degree requirements on jobs that donât require them.
In the US, some people go get a degree after 30 so the attainment age 25-29 increases which explains the difference between 33% and 38%.
Again, you seem very confused. Are you talking about people who are in their 60s today who were born 1953-63 or people who were mid-career in the 1960s (born in the 1920s)? Very different demographics.
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The jobs available for the masses in the '70s are quite different from those available now, esp if one wants to be self-sustaining.
Back then people got degrees if they wanted the jobs associated with needing one. They still do today for the most part and itâs not due to âall jobs require degrees.â There likely are some that donât really need one, but itâs not the majority.
My Civil Engineer H wasnât going to get his job without the info he learned getting his degree. My boy in finance learned a lot from his business degree. My doctor learned enough to get into med school. Only my farmer isnât using his degree (in International Relations), but he doesnât regret getting it. He had jobs offered. He just wanted to go his own path.
ETA: You arenât going to go into a factory and find tons of people working the lines with degrees. In my county only 24% of those age 25 and higher have degrees. We still have factories, farming, and tourism that employ several. No degree needed.
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Youâre slightly confused.
Iâm saying that it doesnât matter what the young person attainment rate was at that time if the general population including those born in the 1920s were much less likely to have a degree.
If the overall education level is low, employers cannot set a very high education requirement even if young people are more educated than the population as a whole. If more senior jobs wouldnât have many applicants if they required a degree, senior jobs donât have degree requirements placed on them. Therefore, even entry-level jobs donât have degree requirements because senior level jobs donât have degree requirements.
The entire labor dynamic changes when 38% of the entire population has a degree compared with 7%.
Employers can see that and put degree requirements on jobs because they can do so. When more senior jobs require a degree, employers can put degree requirements on entry-level jobs.