<p>Pretty amazing but that’s in line with the statistics out there.</p>
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<p>I think that this is like talking about university graduates with
great jobs - it’s anecdotal. I’m sure that there are many that went
the training and apprenticeship route that are also struggling. Not
having any debt, though, is a big plus.</p>
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<p>If you have a hot major where graduates get employed at good paying
jobs - those graduates are far more likely to contribute to the
university with their earnings. Seems like they are shooting
themselves in the foot.</p>
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<p>I had a variety of jobs as a teenager and worked in consulting for a
few years so I was exposed to a lot of different kinds of jobs. I
think that I could enjoy any of them, including accounting and
finance. There are interesting aspects to any job.</p>
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<p>I think that part of the job picture is the people that you work with.</p>
<p>Well, part of it is the people. I would not know as I’ve had the same manager for 14 years (he has refused several promotions because he likes what he’s doing) and the same set of coworkers for also 14 years… If the guy asks us to jump off the corporate HQ building our response is likely to be “head first or feet first”. He is THAT good. </p>
<p>But Mrs. Turbo the IT consultant has worked numerous gigs over the years and she seems very good at running into every bozo in the industry. She is finally working from home for the mother of all IT consulting firms and very happy that she keeps the bozo interactions to a minimum…</p>
<p>On a tangent, having a work-from-home parent is catastrophic for returning home for summer college students :). Mrs. Turbo gets into Amy Chua mode if household chores are not done…</p>
<p>I’ve worked with a great set of people since the mid-1980s. But I can understand that some work in great companies with great compensation but a few bad coworkers or a bad manager can make things feel like hell. This is why we put candidates through the ringer - we want a good fit as a bad fit can make life harder for everyone around them.</p>
<p>As far as working from home goes, my home office is in the basement so I’m relatively shielded from anyone else. One of the keys to a good home office is isolation. The main downside is that my wife brings me food.</p>
<p>Samiami - I would think that at least the Dartmouth, Duke and U Mich graduates would be able to get something, and the business, engineering, finance graduates would be able to get something, especially if there is overlap between these groups. Otherwise, all is really lost.</p>
<p>About the rationing of IT slots at a public college. If we cut out the H1B visas, we’ll see a lot more corporate training, etc. In my day, when I road a dinasoar to work, computer programmers were so in demand that companies would give college grads in fields like philosophy and math, computer aptitude tests and spend 6 months to a year training them in house. I was paid a decent salary and just went to class for 6 months at an insurance company.</p>
<p>That was a scary post from my perspective. Another aspect is that these students started last fall looking for work and that they didn’t get a lot of interviews. I’d guess that employers recruited at the three schools mentioned but maybe they didn’t have a lot of recruiters or a lot of positions. There were a lot of recruiters at my son’s school last fall - more than I ever recall doing on-campus interviews and presentations. I had read that things were better this year than last year but maybe that’s turning.</p>
<p>What was kind of scary in retrospect was that of people that we know (not a very large sample) it seems like the kids were interviewing for the same couple of companies and jobs. My daughter was offered a job and her friend at a different college ended up taking that job (they hired a bunch of people). She also interviewed at a different company and a kid from her school and our friend’s daughter at a different school ended up in that training program.</p>
<p>My daughter applied for an internship a couple of summers ago and now my friend’s son at a different school is applying for that same internship.</p>
<p>It seems like even if you get interviews, they are interviewing so many kids for the few jobs, or else it’s just a big coincidence. But these kids we know are from a wide variety of majors and schools. You also really have to know your stuff to get hired. They have group interviews and you have to be sharp and impressive.</p>
<p>Michigan/Duke Engineers, sure. But those three campuses have plenty of (unemployable) liberal arts majors. Despite what some career services may imply (liberal arts = critical thinking skills, as if engineering and finance have none), employers are just not clamoring for French Lit majors.</p>
<p>We’ve also seen the case where a company interviews candidates and just don’t hire if they can’t find someone that meets their parameters. Son had an interview at one place and the interview went perfectly. They then asked him what he was looking for - he gave them the median number and they said that they were looking to pay about half of that. “See ya”. They still have the same openings a year later. I told him that he did the correct thing. Would you want to work at a place where your coworkers were getting paid far less than industry norms? Basically there are companies out there looking to get cheap labor in tough times. I think that this is a poor strategy as the good people will be out the door once the economy recovers.</p>
<p>This is what my kids did. One majored in computer science, the other in economics. Both liked their majors. Both now (at ages 26 and 22) have jobs that pay enough to live on and that are related to their long-term career interests. </p>
<p>My husband and I did not push them into these majors. They figured it out on their own – and probably better than we could have.</p>
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<p>Econ is liberal arts. Math is liberal arts. Kids in those majors get jobs. Ask Oldfort. Her older daughter double majored in those two subjects and is now making money hand over fist.</p>
<p>I agree, BCEagle. I hate the attitude that we’re supposed to be grateful for any job – even a job where it’s obviously vastly underpaid with no benefits. Employers don’t have to pay that little - many of them are sitting on lots of cash with no plans to spend it. They do it because they can get away with it.</p>
<p>I’m older and have more financial responsibilities than a college graduate. So when I was layed off in 2009, I had to take a 22% cut to get a new job. But as you said - the pathetic salary they provided assured that I had no plans to stay with them. Two years later, I got a new job that pays better. And that’s how it will go when you’re only trying to take advantage of employees instead of paying them what they are worth.</p>
<p>They call it a labor market for a reason. See Econ 1.</p>
<p>What many new college grads think they are “worth” is clearly not being borne out by the datapoints. There is a reason that plastic surgeons earn more than nursery school teachers even though we may all agree that the people who take care of young children provide an invaluable service and they should be “worth” more than they are.</p>
<p>But that’s how a market works. If you object to what your skills are “worth” you have options- you can either get more valuable skills, you can move somewhere to take advantage of geographic inefficiencies in the labor markets, you can grit your teeth and take less than you think you are worth until you’ve bolstered your skills (as Sans Serif did above) and can make more money elsewhere.</p>
<p>But complaining about how employers are taking advantage of their employees isn’t all that productive. Slavery was outlawed by an amendment to the Constitution. If you don’t like the salary being offered then don’t take it. But if you have 5 job offers, all of which are offering you a salary “less than I am worth” then perhaps the market is sending you a signal about the value of your skills.</p>
<p>I don’t see how that’s inconsistent with what I posted.</p>
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<p>Son was going by median 2011 graduate salaries survey. They aren’t
getting nibbles for their jobs. How is that not what you learn in
econ? There is little to no supply at that price.</p>
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<p>You can also just keep looking. He only ran into one place out of
something like 25 that did this.</p>
<p>BC, I was not referring to you, I was commenting on Sans Serif’s experience with the “pathetic salary” he earned until he could find something that paid more.</p>
<p>Clearly, one place out of 25 validates the market-- at the salary they were offering, there were zero qualified takers. That’s how salaries rise in a particular industry, function, or geography. I worked for a company back in the dark ages that had a facility in Seattle. We had to pay top dollar to get people to relocate from Chicago or St. Louis or Minneapolis. Fast forward- Seattle is “cool”; I’m sure the salary differential has been erased long ago.</p>
<p>I think the whole elite schools/liberal arts/critical thinking paradigm is wrong on many levels. It’s pushing kids into graduate school where they learn what they could have learned as undergrads. All the business/engineering programs at elite schools are the absolute hardest schools to get into - Wharton at Penn, business at Cornell, NYU-Stern. That’s what students and employers want but the schools don’t want to give it to them. I think if Dartmouth offered business that would be a very popular major for students and employers.</p>
<p>In Europe you study for 3 years - you can become a doctor or a lawyer in 3 years total. No teams, no frats, no climbing walls, no debt.</p>
<p>I told a college counselor that I was paying for that I didn’t want my son going to a school that didn’t have “practical” majors. She said, “He can always go to law school or get an MBA”. They’re so cavalier with $200-$300,000 of our money. That’s including the opportunity cost of not working for 2 - 3 years.</p>
<p>Amazon, my company has several roles where we require a BA (or enrollment in a part time program) where once we hired HS graduates. Credential Creep is everywhere. We interview college graduates who can’t write an email without grammatical errors. I get cover letters all the time which look like they were written by a third grader. Bad syntax, no organization, run-on sentences-- hey kids, proof read your cover letter!</p>
<p>I think finding capable writers-- regardless of the job function- is the hardest part of our hiring process. You don’t need to be Faulkner. You need to know how to use verbs and adjectives, how to write a topic sentence, and how to look at a chart and summarize in words what is going on.</p>
<p>Show me evidence that kids can start coming out of college with degrees in leisure studies and recreational management who are also strong writers and users of language and we can agree to disagree on the importance of critical thinking. But my company’s experience is that when you hire a kid from Williams who majored in Art History, the one thing we don’t worry about is whether he or she can write. And frankly, when we hire from MIT we don’t have to worry about that either. Yes we are elitists. But we are pragmatic elitists.</p>
<p>Most big companies spend tens of millions of dollars a year on training. We can teach almost anything, but we can’t (or won’t) teach math or writing. You either walk through the door with the ability to compute, use numbers and graphs, assess trends expressed numerically, etc. (so what is that- 11th grade math?) and the ability to write (again, probably at a high school level) - or you don’t get the job no matter how many graduate degrees you have.</p>
<p>Blossom, I’ve been working for almost 30 years. I have a very good idea of what my position is worth. It wasn’t until this economic crisis that salaries in my field (and, I’m sure, many others) went down the tubes. I’ve seen companies that I know are in good financial shape stop giving raises and start offering the kind of salaries that they paid in 1990. It wasn’t that I (or anyone) was suddenly worth less or didn’t know what the market rate was. It was a case of companies taking advantage of a bad economy.</p>
<p>As for the general question of “what are you worth?” Of course that is driven by supply and demand - for example, pro athletes make what they do because so very few people can do what they do at that level. And of course, what they do is highly profitable for the team owners. An engineer may offer a valuable skill - but there are many more of them than pro athletes and there isn’t as much money available to pay them. So they won’t be paid as much, even if an engineer is “worth” more than a pro athlete. I get that. But let’s say that an engineer with 10 year’s experience is paid $125,000 (picking a number at random). If the economy stinks, and some companies start to offer $80,000 to that same engineer who was earning $125,000, that sucks. If there were enough unemployed and desparate engineers around, they’d get away with it. Doesn’t make it right. </p>
<p>I don’t know why a company would rather hire an Art History major from Williams than a Business major from Cornell. Everyone coming out of a top 25 school is taking liberal arts courses, writing courses, math courses. They’ve all had AP courses in high school. But the business majors already know how to read a spreadsheet, they’ve done case studies for 2 to 4 years, they’ve had at least one course in finance, accounting, marketing, human resources, etc. Your company is wasting a lot of money fitting round pegs into square holes and you can’t make up for 2 - 4 years of schooling in on the job training. My guess is many of these people will end up going for MBAs at some point to make up for their educational debits. </p>
<p>Why would you assume that an Art History major can write business communications better than a business major with comparable credentials? Business students are actually writing the kinds of things that they would be writing in business - case studies, marketing proposals, etc.</p>
I’ve seen this posted on CC before but it doesn’t make sense to me that it’s really limited to such a small number of slots.</p>
<p>I checked UW’s website and as I expected it’s not 30-35 slots at all but rather, around 160, which sounds about right to me. Are you sure you weren’t looking at the grad school CS program? And the 160 number is ‘graduates’ which means the number admitted to the program is likely 25%-35% higher since there’s usually a fair amount of attrition in CS programs.</p>
<p>I think you’re probably right, GladGradDad, I was shocked when I pulled that number up. Those numbers sounded crazy, but actually not that surprising, since when my older son was looking into in that three years ago, the number was 80 graduates in CS per year. The 160 number, is for both CS and Computer Engineering. There was an article recently about over 1,000 students applying, some with 4.0GPA’s applying and getting rejected repetitively. Those are still dismal numbers. When you have such extremely high demand at a public school like that, where local employers are crying for qualified employees, I just don’t see any excuse not to offer more slots.</p>