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Unemployment among recent graduates has soared; so has part-time work, presumably reflecting the inability of graduates to find full-time jobs. Perhaps most telling, earnings have plunged even among those graduates working full time a sign that many have been forced to take jobs that make no use of their education.</p>
<p>College graduates, then, are taking it on the chin thanks to the weak economy. And research tells us that the price isnt temporary: students who graduate into a bad economy never recover the lost ground. Instead, their earnings are depressed for life.
<p>Eh, it’s not like people going into jobs unrelated to their major is anything new. That’s been going on since before the recession.</p>
<p>And if the economy recovers and demand for a particular skillset goes up again, wages should follow soon enough. This is an editorial, not an outright report of a study’s findings.</p>
<p>In any case, I’d suggest that potential earnings aren’t necessarily tied to whether one finds a job within one’s area of study. Whether you can give a proper analysis of some literary work doesn’t necessarily make you competent (or preclude competence) in some unrelated field, especially ones that rely on problem solving and human interaction.</p>
<p>The editorial also gives examples from Europe, and fails to address the possibility that the recovery might end up stemming from other parts of the world. Brazil springs to mind–I hear they’re reporting professional shortages, and on top of that, there’s that new(ish) oil field offshore.</p>
<p>there’s always canada and mexico. in fact, more mexicans are leaving the US than entering. they’d rather be terrorized by drug cartels than the US government</p>
<p>Take a look at demographic trends. Our generation is tiny compared to the baby-boomers who occupy pretty much all of the current middle/upper level professional positions. Once the boomers retire (very soon), there will be a huge vacuum for professionals at all levels.</p>
<p>Also, the myth of college is to blame. It’s a joke that society has conditioned us to think that a 4-year degree is the only path to success. The vast majority of the 3 million annual graduating hs seniors are not cut out for sustained intellectual work. They would be better off going to trade school where they could make great money as a plumber, electrician, welder, etc. Instead they b.s. their way through college as a “______ studies” major and are left stunned and confused when the only job they’re qualified for upon graduation is a barista. It’s not their fault, the system takes advantage of them. But everyone has to have a college degree.</p>
<p>Skyrocketing tuition, useless majors, and student loans all feedback to create a vicious cycle. As long as student loans (sorry, “financial aid”) are so readily available, colleges have zero incentive to stop jacking up tuition at many times the rate of inflation. They don’t give a s**t about the crushing debt that they’re burdening students with. They then create useless majors to help offset the cost of STEM labs and equipment because they know the kids who aren’t cut out for college yet go anyway due to social pressures will gravitate towards those (useless) majors. They pay the same tuition for no skills in return and the school doesn’t have to pay for anything other than a few adjuncts to supplement the soft majors.</p>
<p>^^I couldn’t have said it better myself! I have so many friends who are in a lot of these useless majors and I’m always telling them they’d be better dropping out instead of paying all this money. I mean come on everyone knows a degree in psychology doesn’t mean crap unless you at the very least get a masters. Same with a business degree unless you have a specialization. (my friend and her boyfriend both have the generic business degree) I also have two friends (who I would consider very bright people) who graduated last year (did running start) with a degree in anthropology and a degree in woman’s studies. One still works at old country buffet and the other works at a bookstore with both still living with parents.</p>
<p>^^An anthropology degree isn’t useless. Most undergrad degrees are just a key to get in to (hopefully) grad/med/law/dent school. That doesn’t make them useless, just a pathway to get to something better. Most undergrad degrees are “useless”, by that definition.</p>
<p>And I don’t mean “useless” to society. We obviously need anthropologists but how many new anthropology positions are opening up every year? Can you tell me what the going rate is nowadays for a sociologist without a PhD? How about a feminist scholar? The overwhelming majority of soft majors do not go to medical or law or grad school. They instead are left to flounder in a brutal job market with no tangible skills and massive debt. </p>
<p>You will likely argue that the knowledge learned in undergrad doesn’t correspond to what you end up doing for a living. Those days are long gone. The days where merely having an A.B. in Classics or English signified that you had the critical thinking skills for almost any job are finished. Now you need hard skills unless you’re planning on getting a PhD or JD. Doesn’t have to be STEM (although they are doing well, relatively speaking) but you need to be able to do something.</p>
<p>Cailbottle or whatever is right. People want to hold on to the classical ideal of the university, the problem is that we have a massive <em>oversupply</em> of this institution, and a massive oversupply of its graduates in the workforce. The job skills that employers want and the skills being supplied are completely out of whack, and the continued subsidization of the current university system by the Federal government is preventing the market from correcting itself. The full penalty of getting a “worthless” degree is not falling on the degree-holder (not yet), it’s falling largely on the tax-payer, on the employer who can’t find the skilled workers he needs, industry becomes less efficient and our standard of living is lower than what it otherwise be, meanwhile people who took out loans to pay for these worthless degrees are on the verge of being allowed to discharge this debt onto the tax-payer.</p>
<p>To say nothing of a decades-long trend of the most economically well-position women delaying childbirth until they are established in the workforce and have ten or fifteen fewer years of fertility ahead of them. The creation of new families is a major driver in the economy, and while it’s not nice to point this out, women are probably the biggest consumer of “worthless majors.” Women are relatively rare in STEM, though abundant in medical, a silver lining.</p>
<p>As long as the government continues to subsidize this dysfunctional lifestyle through artificially low-interest loans on junk diplomas (and the grants and whatnot that keep the Buttscratch Studies department’s lights on), the market won’t correct itself, <em>society</em> won’t correct itself, until it becomes truly unsustainable (even for the government) and the university bubble pops.</p>
<p>I’m not saying there shouldn’t be anthropology departments, or <blank> history departments, or art colleges, I believe in scholarship for scholarship’s sake, but what I’m saying is that <em>there are too many of them</em>. To show I’m fair, I happen to believe that we are also over-producing engineers and scientists (although if science funding were wholly in the private sectors hands then things could change), but not nearly at the same rate as we are over-producing classics majors or early childhood education majors or comparative religion majors. Let things go back to how they used to be, where scholars who were producing work that had no immediate market value were relying primarily on private sector grants. This wouldn’t be a step backwards, it would be a step forwards as far as I’m concerned. I’d much rather wealthy benefactors who were spending their <em>own</em> money than government bureaucrats spending other peoples’ money. Who would you trust to spend the money the wisest?</blank></p>
<p>can someone explain to me how the growing “university bubble” would burst and what effect that would have on the middle class? I see the correlation with the housing bubble, but what does that mean for college students and graduates entering the work force?</p>
<p>as far as I’m concerned, this idea of a worthless college degree will soon catch on, and society will readjust itself in its ideals about the necessity of a college degree</p>
<p>What exactly are the job skills employers want, Tom? You do realize that there are exceedingly few jobs that require a specific degree and Hummanities degrees especially are in my opinion some of the best for learning the critical thinking skills necessary to succeed. (There is a reason that study of the Classics was (and should be again) the cornerstone of western education). The fact you see some degrees as worthless shows a remarkable lack of understanding and perspective on your part, as well as a misunderstanding of what the value of a college education is. A college degree is not meant to correlate with a specific job (vocational schools are for that), and the fact that a college diploma is seen only as a means to a financial end is quite saddening. You need to stop seeing the world only in terms of “market value.”</p>
<p>The problem is not that there are lack of skilled workers, the problem is a lack of jobs caused by the selfishness of the private sector and their constant outsourcing of jobs and putting their bottom line over all else. Relying on the private sector for education would be a MONSTROUS step backwards; promoting the education of the citizenry and the arts and humanities is the hallmark of any civilized and healthy society, not profit at the expense of all else. So who would I trust to spend the money? The government by a long shot. The private sector has already proven that it is completely unable to regulate itself and that it cannot be trusted to act in the interest of the collective good.</p>
<p>I personally believe we should start a world war. That would create jobs and induce population control, and eventually, by the end of it, will become fertile ground to build w new economy on.</p>
<p>Paul Krugman = Keynesian
Keynesian easy money policy got us into this mess.
With that being said. The worst part is that the first job young graduates get USUALLY sets the tone for their career. Especially in degrees reliant heavily on the economy like business degrees ect.</p>
<p>On the other hand, women exhibit higher graduation rates than do men. Whether that’s because that’s because they choose easier majors is difficult to say. But it’s also irrelevant. At the end of the day, they have the degree that respectable employers nowadays want. In contrast, plenty of men waste time and money in college yet leave without the degree that was the whole reason for their choosing to attend college in the first place. </p>
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<p>Sure, but who then is going to volunteer to be the first to shrink the market by removing themselves? Most respectable employers now prefer - sometimes even require - college degrees from applicants before they’ll even deign to grant an interview. Given the long-standing overabundance of college graduates that you cite, such a requirement is effectively costless to the employer. Will you dare to spend the rest of your life competing for those jobs without a degree, when your competitors will have degrees? As an analogy, if you’re an athlete in a professional sport where steroid use was pervasive, could you realistically choose not to partake? </p>
<p>We therefore have the classic prisoner’s dilemma: nobody dares to be the first not to obtain a degree for fear that others won’t follow. With only a few notable exceptions such as entrepreneurship and entertainment, most industries view the lack of a degree as a negative signal. </p>
<p>Besides, sternly pronouncing that the government should therefore stop subsidizing college degrees and therefore allow the labor markets to equilibrate to a lower educational level in the long run - even if such a prescription was correct - is surely of no help to anybody in the labor markets right now. In the long run, we’re all dead. People need jobs to put food on the table right now. Even if too many people are obtaining degrees, that doesn’t mean that you can realistically choose not to do the same, on pain of not being hired. </p>
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<p>To be fair to the private sector, it’s not as if they’ve instantly become selfish and greedy just in the last 5 years alone. Let’s face it - the private sector has always been selfish. It was selfish during the mid-2000’s when the economy was booming, the unemployment rate dipped below 5%, and boatloads of people were being hired by the mortgage brokerage and real estate industries for eye-popping pay. {I know one guy who quit his job as an engineer to become a real-estate agent during the early 2000’s and made more money in his first year than during any of his years as an engineer.} The private sector was selfish during the late 90’s tech boom when anybody who could even spell TCP/IP was being offered near-6-figure salaries. </p>
<p>While I agree with you that the private sector is untrustworthy and unable to regulate itself, it seems that that’s exactly what we want…on the upside. Ever since the 90’s, everybody in the tech industry has been praying for another irrational dotcom boom (and indeed I suspect we may be experiencing one). I certainly don’t remember any 90’s-era Web developers and IT people complaining that they were being ‘irrationally overpaid’, just as I suspect that not too many mortgage brokers and real-estate agents of the mid 2000’s were complaining of being ‘irrationally overpaid’.</p>