Posted on 01/16/2021 9:17:45 PM PST by SeekAndFind
You can’t be serious, Dude.
There was a time in the US when you could get a great job if you earned a bachelor’s degree in “anything.”
The catch is that JFK was president at the time.
Most parents (and their students) are oblivious to how college really works today.
In some ways it is hard to blame them. Colleges and universities have a powerful public relations team, pushing the message 24/7 that "college is for all."
The team is made up of educators, guidance counselors, financial aid officers, politicians, pop culture, special interest groups--like the College Board, and college administrators—who are the biggest beneficiaries. Their influence is everywhere.
Many, many years ago, my “anything” degree, Philosophy, was from a state university in fly-over country, better known for its football team than scholarship. (As I vaguely remember, my GPA wasn’t that robust either.)
However, I had a successful career in IT, and retired as an executive from a Fortune 100 company.
The bad news is that college doesn’t work that way anymore.
Years ago very few high school grads (7%) went on to college. (They tended to be the “smart kids.”) If you graduated with a degree in anything, i.e. English, Gender Studies, Comp-lit, Philosophy, etc., you could get a good job.
Over the years a greater and greater portion of high school grads answered the call,
“You have to go to college!”
We are now at 45%. Probably half these teenagers don’t have the “academic firepower” to handle a serious, marketable major.
Back in the day having a college degree was a big deal. By the year 2000, the quality of a college education had deteriorated significantly, and college grads were a-dime-a-dozen. There were too many graduates, but not enough suitable jobs.
Then we got hit with the Great Recession of 2008.
In the US almost anyone can find a college or university that will accept them and their parent’s money.
You might even manage to graduate with some degree or another.
The problem comes when you try to find a real job. Employers aren’t stupid. They are going to sort through that gigantic stack of resumes and find the smart kids.
Today college is a competition for a relatively few (1,100,000) well-paying, professional jobs. Every year colleges and universities churn out 1,900,000 graduates with shiny new bachelor’s degrees. We don’t know the exact number, but a heck of a lot of minimum wage jobs are held by young people with college degrees in stuff like English, Gender Studies, Comp-lit, Philosophy, etc.
Given the high cost of college, that just doesn’t make any economic sense.
PS
The “Anything” Degree
Two decades ago in his book, Another Way To Win, Dr. Kenneth Gray coined the term “one way to win.” He described the OWTW strategy widely followed in the US as:
* Graduate from high school.
* Matriculate at a four-year college.
* Graduate with a degree in anything.
* Become employed in a professional job.”
Dr. Gray’s message to the then “academic middle” was that this was unlikely to be a successful strategy in the future. The succeeding twenty years have proven him inordinately prescient and not just for the “academic middle.”
The simple explanation is that it comes down to “supply” (graduates) and “demand” (suitable jobs).
Fifty years ago only seven percent of high school graduates went on to college. In post-WW II America our economy was booming while the economies of many European and Asian countries were--only slowly--being rebuilt. The “Law of Supply and Demand” strongly favored the freshly minted college graduate.
Parents and students noticed how college really paid off, and the “great gold rush” to the halls of higher learning began.
Today my local, Midwest run-of-the-mill high school sends eighty percent of their graduates on to college.
Most of them are going to be very disappointed.
I would say the competition is not just on a national scale but on a global scale. You can hire a programmer in India for $4/hr. You get what you pay for but for some low-level work, it may probably adequate. I agree that the competition will get alot worse.
I got the ultimate anything degree, Sociology. Then I went to work for myself in fields completely unrelated to Sociology, I thought. Turned out I was wrong. Many of the things I learned applied to how people behaved at certain ages, what they consumed, etc.
Sociology applied quite well to selling, investing in and developing real estate.
Dumb luck.
Because pimping for nneonnettle or game7blog or newrushunplugged or mensrec or any of the other blogs spammed on FreeRepublic every day only pays slightly better, I suppose.
This ties in with the Global Elites drive to give "everyone" a fair shot for work. In other words they want the best workers for the least pay regardless of the country they're from.
One of my cousins became a veterinarian, which he practiced unitl he retired, but he made his fortune in real estate. I don't think I see any relationship between those fields. ;o)
If there is no demand for jobs in a particular field why choose to get a degree in that discipline? Why not choose a field that is growing, like health care or engineering or construction management?
That’s a good point as well.
My son finished his Associate’s degree, took a semester off to volunteer for the Trump campaign, and is returning to college next week to work towards his Bachelor’s. One of the requirements was an English class.
He got the syllabus. This semester they were focusing on fatphobia in literature.
I kid you not.
He immediately withdrew from that class and moved to another English class. When asked why, he told them he wanted to study the great works of the literary world and not waste his time and money on social justice nonsense.
If more students took a stand against this garbage, the professors would stop teaching it.
#41 when the company I work for hired someone from India in a higher level of management, they fired or pushed out the 3 positions below them within 2 years. We switched to Office 365 and Oracle software. Many people lost their jobs that had been with the company for many many years. Both Microsoft and Oracle use people in India.
The Help Desk I am at has hired last august 8 out of 28 people that work in India and several more from another global company that hires people for 30/hrs here in the US. We are now limited to 10 min average time on a call, get berated by email for calls that go above and get points against us in reviews if we transfer calls to other depts as we are forced to because of the call time.
We had 3 new hires this past year, 2 of 3 found other jobs in recent months, none lasted a year. We have had 6 people fired or quit in 6 months where we did not have that kind of turnover before. The management is pushing full timers out for 30/hr a week people or lower cost if in India. Pushing chat over calls as the Indians do not speak english so well.
The manager spends too much time looking for people with degrees when we are being dumb down to password resets.....
“I have a niece who is 34 years old and has been taking college courses since she was 20. She says she wants to get a PhD in Spanish literature. That will take her at least another five years. At best, she might find a low-paying part-time “adjunct professor” job.”
Next time you talk to her, ask her how you say “Would you like fries with that?” in Old Castillian:)
If people were financially able to retire, they would.
I’m in that position.
I figure I have at least 10-15 years more. I’m retirement eligible now.
I believe the problem is that universities are putting out a product that there is no demand for.I believe it's a three-fold issue.
The causes for #1 are two-fold:
- The job market isn't paying the salaries.
- The students aren't pursuing the marketable degrees.
- The universities are cranking out graduates without regard to whether the job market is there for the graduates. In other words, they are graduating buggy whips.
The causes for #2 are two-fold:
- The jobs are being off-shored to lower-cost geographies.
- The cheaper workers are being imported via H-1B visas and are displacing our graduates.
The causes for #3 are two-fold:
- The students are choosing social-justice degrees with no anchoring in reality.
- The K-12 schools are socially promoting students who either aren't ready for college or are better suited to trade studies.
I believe that if there is a market balance between supply and demand then the price paid will equal the cost plus profit. If the universities were balancing the supply of graduates with the demand for graduates, this would mean that the graduates were being paid a salary that allowed them to pay off their loans plus their living expenses.
- The students have been socially indoctrinated to believe the only way to succeed is with a college degree, so everyone must now go to college.
- The change to government-sponsored student loans has made it easy for universities to pad their enrollments in order to get the funding to sustain their tenures and research programs.
The fact is that the university degree market is completely unbalanced and out of whack. Young students may be making good decisions to pursue a degree, but many are too uninformed at that age to understand that the universities are glutting the market right now. The universities have built up a capital investment in professors and manufactured an inventory of graduates that can't be sold.
The university result will eventually be the same as a business selling unwanted products: their inventory of unsold graduates will lose their value (in terms of alumni donations, university brand reputation, etc.), and the university might eventually go out of business if they can't get new student enrollments because the word is out that their graduates are unemployable.
Is all of this the fault of the student loan scam? Is it the result of students making bad career decisions? Is it the fault of businesses that are looking for cheaper workers or exporting jobs? Is it the fault of universities hungry for students flush with loan cash that they keep taking them in regardless of the ability of the job market to absorb the graduates?
-PJ
Those Boomers, who are still working, are producing goods and services. That adds to the economy, and ultimately leads to greater demand for whatever goods or services you could produce.
As I said, I wasn’t blaming them. I was simply pointing out that their mass filling in positions is helping to keep younger generations out of the employment, because there are only so many positions, of all positions, that are available in any given economy.
I got my degree in IT and worked six years in enterprise IT operations for a large alcohol beverage company in Louisville Kentucky. Some of the things you mentioned in your post started happening… It was the worst time of my life as I didn’t like the people I worked with as they were more back room IT cynical type personalities and a total drag to be around but the more concerning issue was how the hell was I going to fix this.
I was very interested in healthcare and actually had some prerequisites that would apply. Long story short, got a degree in Nuclear Medicine and practiced for a while but ultimately merged my IT background with my clinical background. This opened up other opportunities within medical imaging systems administration otherwise known as PACS Administration. Also work with Epic quite a bit which is the industry standard for EMR. These two areas are the most lucrative within healthcare information technology that usually require a clinical background.
It was actually on free republic where I was lurking about 15, 16 years ago when I was in limbo and came across a thread that was going on about H1B visa‘s and just basically people disenchanted with their IT careers in general. Someone posted that they quit their IT job and went back to radiology school to get their MRI degree and will never have to worry about living with that level of uncertainty again. I was enrolled in human anatomy and physiology along with organic chemistry within the next 10 days!
Did Epic pretty much replace McKesson in most hospitals? Or is the latter still going strong?
The number of positions available, in any free-enterprise economy, is not fixed. Working seniors aren’t just filling positions — they are producing goods and services that add to the GDP. They are also spending their earnings, which creates demand for more goods and services, which creates more jobs.
Colleges are little more then job programs for unemployable leftist tyrants who got degrees in useless subjects.
Yup. Like a major in trams-gender lesbian dance theory. 😄
It’s a racket. Feds and states guarantee money to colleges...college create degrees in obscure niches to secure the largesse. Like dramatic art, or specific languages..stuff many smart people learn on their own.
Public pays for crap degrees...person comes out with little marketable skill..colleges get rich...public a bit poorer...teachers brainwash students to continue the govrrnment money grab...explains the college mindset of entitlement...we need to defund by 50% or so...most liberal arts colleges..
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