Posted on 05/30/2016 9:19:41 AM PDT by Lorianne
We don’t send our young into the wilderness for a vision quest as a rite of passage. There are few things in modern society that signify a transition into adulthood. Going to college is one of them. And in debt addicted America, it is no surprise that for many, college debt is the first debt they will take on. Getting a college education is supposed to give someone a well rounded view of the world and a potential skill set. Some argue that college is not about vocational training. That to some degree is true but when students are going into $50,000 or $100,000 of student debt, then what is this modern day life quest really teaching and why is the price tag so incredibly high? As college graduation season comes into full bloom, many are left with the prospect of having no job lined up. It is also startling to see how many recent college graduates are working in jobs that really don’t require a college degree (so clearly the vocational piece doesn’t matter here).
The chronically underemployed college graduate
There are over 5,300 colleges and universities across this country from Harvard to beauty schools. The market is enormous and students now carry $1.3 trillion in debt, the biggest debt sector only behind mortgage debt.
Many recent college graduates are severely underemployed and this is for the lucky group that actually finds work:
Nearly 50 percent of recent college graduates are working in jobs where a college education isn’t typically required. So that life quest was indeed an expensive one, more so than taking drugs and roaming around in the forest. And the bills are coming due since student loans normally start being sent to graduates six months after graduation.
The underemployment rate is troubling because as the cost of a college education soars beyond the typical inflation rate, the yield in the marketplace isn’t very observable. College tuition is up 145% since 2000:
[snip]
Companies today use the college degree as a filter to reduce the number of applicants. No degree, application goes into the trash.
This is true even for jobs that shouldn’t require a degree.
I can remember someone at AT&T a couple of decades ago telling me that the company had changed its policy and would no longer hire anyone into a management position who did not have a degree. The degree itself didn’t matter. They just had to have a degree of some kind from some college.
What needs to happen is someone with a Basket Weaving degree should combine it with an MBA. Once they figure out how to market millions of baskets, with a basket in every home, they’ve got it made.
“And another large percentage cannot find jobs, even with degrees in science and engineering.”
The unemployment rate for engineers is less than 2%.
The worst thing I heard is that some tech companies are advertising for interns among new graduates and using them to assist H-1B hires who may be weak on English and/or the subject. There is no chance for the graduate to get a job (because they would not work for peanuts) and they are traded for the next year's crop of graduates.
I knew someone who was using a barely-legal scam service to get a ‘degree’ because without one he couldn’t get any offers besides fast food and didn’t report him after seeing HUNDREDS of companies doing this. It’s high time we hit back.
You are describing the old economy, where people worked their way up through a company. The world hasn’t worked that way in 20 years.
We’re in the gig economy.
Companies don’t want to develop employees. They want to hire someone to solve a problem they have today, and when the problem is solved they let the person go.
Contract work, H1-B visa, layoffs, and job hopping are today’s career reality. Companies have no loyalty to employees, and employees have no loyalty to companies.
The most common way for people to get a pay raise today is to find a job at a different company.
Accomplishments matter, along with evidence of increasing responsibilities and steady job growth in one’s chosen field. Degrees are nice to have but they’re no substitute for demonstrated skills and experience.
And another large percentage cannot find jobs, even with degrees in science and engineering.
++++
Can you show us some data to support that? Engineering salaries for engineering graduates are pretty high and are on the increase.
My grandfather was a professor at Notre Dame and he once mentioned to me “The purpose of a Liberal Arts Education is to improve the quality of your life and to make you a better person.” It wasn’t meant to find you a job. That’s what a vocational or a professional school is for. Of course, things have changed since my grandfather taught many, many decades ago.
Basket weaving? That’s passé, lots of those around. Now if you had a degree in Underwater Basket Weaving...
It is ok. Probably 3/4 of them are illiterate anyway
Not working in a degree field? I’d like to know if that number is anything unusual, historically. Bet it’s not and has been worse.
Degrees aren’t everything. From what I’ve seen lately, a lot of grads simply do not know how to think, use logic or have reasoning skills.
Gets you a well-paying government job persecuting the white males at any university of your choice. 8<)
Once you PROTEST and RIOT to demand a well=paying permanent university job specializing in black-lesbian-transgender studies, that is.
I will relate two stories here.
1. I had to go into a small town airport in 2011, and ended up late at night with the rental car manager (the staff had gone home for the night). She had to complete some paperwork and we chatted for ten minutes. The thing is...she was young (maybe 23) and the manager. I noted that in the past....it was older guys who managed these offices and she noted that she’d just finished college the year before. This was the only job she could latch onto....that paid something decent ($28,000 a year). I didn’t say much after that, but it just struck me as odd...this was always a older guy with a high school diploma who managed these shops before. And now? We are hustling some 23-year-old into the job, with zero chance of promotion or better pay?
2. In the early 80’s, I ended up in military intelligence as a profession (enlisted). What I noticed after five years of being around....there were a lot of officers and the ratio was roughly 1 officer to every 2 enlisted. I noted by the late 80s (I had my bachelors degree by that point)....that a fair number of NCOs (between the 6th and 15th year)....had a minimum of associate degrees and something like eighty-percent had a bachelor’s degree done by the 20th year. The profession had the most educated enlisted people around....yet still pumped a high rate of officers into the field when it wasn’t necessary. The impression I got was that in the 1960s...this all made perfect sense. But with the money pumped into education funds...they had a highly educated manpower force, but no idea of how to use it.
I think the general public has become the same way....all these people around with a vast amount of education, and just no idea by leadership or management on how to make good use of it.
Add to that they have been coddled and are lazy since everything has been handed to them.
I’m worried my son will be one of these. He’s graduating in August and he’s done nothing to get a job. He hasn’t been to the career center. He only worked 1 summer on a job my husband got him.
He should have a 3.0, but he should have higher.
He plays way too many video games.
Time for some togh live come August. The money train is over, and he will not be living at home without a job.
I ask for every resume unfiltered. I don’t care if 1000 people send me resumes. My screening approach is easy. No one from Ivy League schools. No one with liberal degrees. I take certification and experience first, experience second and companies worked for prior who I can contact third.
Well, I graduated from Harvard and Princeton. My Harvard degree is in Sub-Saharan Gay Architecture and my Princeton degree is heavy on liberal arts with a slant toward unjust business. I have experience but all the companies I’ve worked for have gone out of business. You can call my brother. He’ll vouch for me.
When do I start and how much pay and vacation time do I get?
“And many of the others are jobs that don’t require a college degree to perform, the employers just use it as a sorting mechanism (of dubious value IMO). “
Well it’s exactly a sorting mechanism and I can tell you how it started.
Employers, including large corporations, used to be willing to hire people without college degrees. They would give you tests, intelligence tests, tests for general knowledge, and decide whether or not to hire you. This provided an entre for smart people who didn’t want or couldn’t afford college.
But whites tended to do better on tests of this sort. One of the results of the Civil Rights Act was that it gave the federal government the power to sue companies because the civil rights enforcers could accuse them of racism. It didn’t matter whether or not the tests had the slightest racial bias or not, the accusations tied up the companies in lengthy and expensive defenses. So in the early 70s companies began dropping their testing policies.
They still needed a sorting mechanism to keep out deadbeats and flakes. The option that they fell on was to let colleges do the sorting for them. All that the college degree had to do was insure that the prospective hire could show up often enough to get a grade, could sign his name. The student didn’t have to know squat. It was just a pricey 2 to 4 year sorting device, because the government’s thought policing on racial issues had closed out the old method that had once provided opportunity to so many.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.