I asked a father today about his son’s post-graduation plans. The kid had every advantage that a loving family could bestow, including 12 years of private school at approximately $30,000 per year and four years of a prestigious liberal arts college at more than $50,000 per year. The kid has the following advantages:
- more than half a million dollars and 16 years of education
- the boundless energy and perfect health of youth
- a lively interest in commerce and making money
- native speaker of the world’s most practical language (English)
- willing to work for minimum wage (and would be willing to work for less if it were not illegal)
One would think that employers would be tripping over each other to hire this kid. What are his summer plans? Like most of his classmates, he couldn’t find a job and will be moving back home to live with mom and dad.
It seems odd to me that folks who run schools and colleges feel confident that they are doing a great job and that their graduates are superbly educated while simultaneously employers don’t think that they can make a profit by hiring the Class of 2010 at the prevailing low wages.
In the current economic climate, I think it is a good time to look into running a business of one’s own instead of working for someone else and being dependent on them or on anyone else.Even mowing lawns for a while beats waiting until a job comes along.
My cousins who have recently graduated with degrees in the humanities (one in Philosophy, the other in Linguistics) are teaching English in Korea. It seems to be a good way to make a buck for the moment.
That kid had his entire education on a controlled environment (private school), which is far from the reality. Can he adapt to real life? Does he know how average people live?
Kid needs to take time off and go to Asia to learn how people live in the world before joining the work force. I am sure his dad can afford that.
You leave out a sorta’ important factor: the kid’s area of study.
If it’s in, say, medieval studies, which employers do you envision tripping over themselves to hire him? You put out an opening for heli instructors… why don’t you hire him?
Or does his area of study have perhaps some relevance to whether you would hire him, and if so, is it surprising that it has relevance for other employers?
(In my limited experience as a hiring manager, I never cared about the degree, I cared about the person’s skills. I would think this is more prevalent a situation the higher you go up the skill ladder, even for new grads. If the person’s skills don’t matter, then probably neither does the degree… I don’t think McDonald’s cares about either for manning the drive-up window.)
I don’t mean to make any comment about the specific young man in your post… just suggesting that there’s a big factor missing from your analysis.
Is this a case of not being able to find a job, or not being able to find a job one finds acceptable or interesting. Dunkin Donuts is hiring. Home Depot is hiring. School Departments are hiring teachers for areas like special ed and science and mathematics. I bet there are some environmental cleanup companies in the Gulf area that are hiring due to BP’s gift of free oil. The first job I had after graduating from college was at Cumberland Farms. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it paid my rent and gave me an opportunity to look around for something I’d rather do for a living. When the Internet revolution hit, it was suddenly easy to get a job for a lot of money after learning 5 or 6 html tags, so I did that (working for a startup whose very successful owner dropped out of college when he decided that college wasn’t worth the money!) until the bubble burst. I think today’s graduates have to be adaptable more than anything else. Amphibians have advantages. Stories about people like Obama’s aunt are driving me nuts, though. It seems like a lot of people are getting handouts that we can ill-afford to offer our own citizens, let alone parasites from elsewhere.
I’ve long thought colleges were more interested in making money than educating young people, now I’m convinced of it. I work at a place were almost every employee has at least one degree. On April 19th (Patriots Day), I heard a 20-something UMass grad guy say to a couple of same aged gals, “Why do they call it Patriots Day, when they don’t even have a game scheduled.?”
My oldest daughter is graduating with qualifications to teach high school English and history. All the jobs she’s looking at in the Northeast have a starting salary in the low $30’s. She was offered a job in China to teach English there for $40k/yr. Her living accomodations are included in the package. China!
My youngest daughter attends UNH at $22k a year (in state). A good friend at work was shocked when I told him this. When he graduated from UNH twelve years ago his in state tuition was $10.5k – and he knows what Patriots Day is…
Jeffrey: As it happens, this kid interned in the corporate world and did not major in medieval studies or the equivalent. But even if he had… in the 1950s and 1960s, someone graduating with a straight liberal arts degree was eminently employable by Corporate America. I don’t think big companies were more interested in poetry back then; they somehow had a way to make money by hiring the poetry major that they no longer have. Either economic conditions have changed drastically or something about the graduates has changed.
Clay Shirky summed up my long-held opinion on colleges (and many other organizations) rather succinctly: Institutions will seek to perpetuate the problem to which they are the solution. I know at least one person who, in response to not being able to find a job, went back to school to get his PhD so he could teach.
Hopefully he’ll fight his way through the glut of PhDs out there to actually find one of those coveted jobs, and I suspect that in a few years kids will catch on and there’ll be a dearth of university professors in a decade or two.
Seems like the best thing this kid could do is get out and swing a hammer towards his General Contractor’s license, or do something else that takes him out into the real world where he can look for needs that need to get filled with the intent of starting a business to fill them. The era of “get a college degree, get a job, work through to your retirement” looks like it’s only reasonable if you have the temperament for and can get a civil service gig.
I think the latter part of the post is the main point Phil is trying to make. How are colleges justifying their value to prospective students and parents? I think there are lots of answers, but ones that come to mind:
1. They do not. This explains the tremendous growth of U.Phoenix and DeVry and the like.
2. Going to these schools is not about knowledge but “proof of achievement”. 20 years from now this kid still would have graduated from a top school, even if he forgot or never used anything he learned there. But he is still going to be “smart” for going to that school.
3. Colleges (esp. liberal arts) are still thinking of themselves as preparing a well-rounded person, not an employable one
4. Right now he is competing with 60-80% of his age-peers who have college degrees. In 50’s it would have been a 10-20%. Moreover, the investment one would make in a new hire is different from 50s when you could expect to stay 30 years with a company to now where they might fire your whole class before you even start.
5. Not all schools/kids have these problems. I recruit for our mid-sized IT consulting firm at my alma-mater and we have trouble competing with bigger firms for the relatively few graduates. Few – when compared to the size of the economy and firms doing the hiring. And yes – we do make offers to English and Philosophy majors (esp. philosophy majors).
thanks.
Same problem in Spain, France, Germany… in Europe. I don’t think it’s education the problem, but that wealth is not here anymore. People with great ideas and (most important) growth oportunities are in the «third-world» countries.
Education is not the answer, and most people know it. This is why they are pushing a full generation into entrepreneurship, but I think this is an exit, not a solution. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Normal people wants a good job, and a family, and normal relations. To take a beers after a hard work day.
While first-world countries are living in a plastic world of social networks, internet, and stupid things, people in countries like Morocco are creating companies that can growth and generate wealth where never before was.
I don’t know how this will end. Oportunity is more important than education in generating money and employment. Research is a black hole that generate innovations at a random pace (like many biotech has discovered), and Internet is not a replacement for real economy.
30 years ago you can access to a position in a University with your degree and god qualifications. In Span now you have to work for free for years, then a few years on the minimum salary and then … maybe then, you will get a position. And, of course, you need your Phd and (this is a new tendence) another degree, one or two Masters…
Overqualification is what happens when middle-class believe that only hard work and study can make them success. There is no linearity in success and effort.
I don’t believe it’s necessarily a fair or logical determination to measure the quality of someone’s education based on whether or not he or she can obtain employment after a specific course of study. A student failing to obtain employment does not directly correspond to a college having improperly educated him or her.
For the sake of simplification, if we classify a college education into three categories: purely for intellectual/personal enrichment, purely for employment training, and some mix of the two categories, common sense would have to prevail in at least _acknowledging_ that a student whose motivation is based on actually obtaining employment (as opposed to purely intellectual enrichment) would have a greater probability of realizing that goal.
So, even if the student in question dedicated four years to wildlife study and could give you the estimated airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, he or she may _still_ have difficulty obtaining employment 😀
Just my .02
Bob: “intellectual/personal enrichment” sounds good, but most 22-year-olds would prefer to have a job, I think, rather than to sponge off their parents indefinitely. Personal enrichment also makes sense as a motivation for going to the library or engaging in a hobby that is reasonably inexpensive. Except for a Wall Street bailout bonus collector’s child, I don’t think a $500,000+ expenditure can reasonably be justified for “intellectual enrichment”, especially as most of these 22-year-olds do not emerge from their 16 years of education with a formidable command of any discipline.
An article somewhat tangential to this topic was in the Times this week, and is well worth a read: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/weekinreview/16steinberg.html
Phil, you said, “Either economic conditions have changed drastically or something about the graduates has changed.” While the latter is likely true to an extent, I think the more dominant factor here is the former. The economy today is drastically different than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, finishing high school was enough to get you a low-level job in corporate America, where if you were tenacious you could work your way up from the mailroom to the boardroom over the course of a long career. That is no longer true–a high school degree is useless for white collar employment today. Also back then if your family could afford it, then you could go to college and study whatever you want, and on the way out you could secure solidly middle class employment, either through family connections or just from the signal on your resume of having gotten a college degree.
As S.F. said, that is sustainable when only 10%-20% of the population is going to college. Over the next few decades, conventional wisdom became that going to college is all that is needed to achieve middle class employment, so more and more people started going to college. Which would be fine if there were enough jobs to support the increased number of grads, but there aren’t. So then you get the new phenomenon that started about a decade ago. When I graduated undergrad in 2002, everyone who was not burned out and who had the time/money to do so went on to get Masters degrees. Why? Because when you are at a job fair, finishing with a Bachelors was no longer special, so it was another way to stand out among the crowd. As a result, the Masters is now what the Bachelors degree was 50 years ago.
I think all of this is not a reflection of the quality of education, but the steady rise of the minimum qualifications needed for employment in a society where more people are following the prescribed path, but the jobs picture is not expanding at the same rate. I didn’t see this trend happening when I was in high school, but I pursued an engineering degree partially due to uneasiness of graduating a $120k institution without having learned a trade of some sort. That ended up being a pretty good decision, fortunately. If I was going to college today, I wouldn’t even consider pursuing the liberal arts. Anyone who is paying $200k today for 4 years of liberal arts education who also thinks that they will be employable afterward should blame themselves before the institution that sends them the bill. Maybe as more people realize this, college prices will come down to more closely reflect the expected outcome for their students, or even better, degrees will be priced in correlation with outgoing grads’ salaries.
Mike: How’s South Korea working out for him?
This seems just another example of the “transitional period” our society is in, where the old social contract has been torn apart with nothing on the horizon to replace it. But what advice could we give a teenager who is beginning to consider career plans?
If you’re after old-fashioned certainty of lifetime secure employment, the answer would seem to lie in the only recession-proof growth industry that exists in this country. Get a degree in criminal justice, penology, or whatever it’s actually called, and then go to work either for the government or a private company that builds and operates prisons. Between the endless Wars on Drugs and Terror, the prison-industrial complex will continue to burgeon as the world’s highest incarceration rate only increases. Prisons are the only industry that can’t be outsourced– at least until someone (probably an executive at a private prison corporation) figures out that sending prisoners to places like Syria or Turkey would be much more cost-effective than complying with all the labor and constitutional requirements in this country.
Alternatively, we might reconsider the stigma currently attached to skilled trades like welding, plumbing, or auto mechanics. Those trades have a continuing need and can’t readily be outsourced to India no matter how clever the MBAs might be. My nice Jewish mother invariably reacted to my less-than-perfect grades with “So you’ll be a plumber instead of a doctor.” I ended up as neither, but I didn’t have the foresight to respond by reminding her that plumbers make good money, have steady work, and don’t have to answer to clerks in insurance company cubicles.
You might also like this elderly professor decrying the shift in universities from places of higher learning to places of higher tution fess
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/17/improbable-research-canadian-law-education
I am a member of this generation with some bad job prospects. I don’t mind working some low jobs, been doing that for awhile. I’ve scrapped my share of poop from floors. I can acknowledge the realities of today and not get too mad that I’m competing for jobs at the grocery store with some old baby boomers.
What I can’t take and especially after reading this piece in the New Yorker (http://laughingsquid.com/the-new-yorker-boomerang-generation-cover-by-daniel-clowes/) is this idea that we are all a bunch of lazy morons. A lot of us worked very hard to get through college, pulled part time jobs and took on some monster debts. It’s very embarrassing for a lot of my friends to be in a heap of debt, working a minimum wage job and getting harassed by Sallie Mae because they can’t make a payment that month. Maybe renewing our car registration so we can still drive to work was important that month? It’s bad enough that the rich kids get drunk at some frat parties and make the rest of us look bad. Many of us were scrapping by in college, taking the bus and bunking with three other roommates. Not to mention our cup-o-noodle diet.
It’s not possible for many us to live on our own like we thought and work crazy hours to move up the corporate ladder. We have to move home so we can pay off those debts. It’s simply the responsible thing to do.
People say were lucky because we have cell phones. Well, I have to have a cell phone or else an employer wont bother calling back after missing a call on a land line, plenty of other applicants have cell phones. Computers and cell phones have improved our lives, but it has also made them incredibly competitive. Information is so cheap, anyone can learn what used to be valuable skills (web design, programming, etc.) and even obtain bachelor degrees online!
We don’t live in the cold war era where China was going through the people’s revolution and India was in the midst of Fabian socialism. We don’t live in the 90’s either where they were just figuring out the whole capitalism thing. They are fierce competitors now, even jobs in science that require high levels of intelligence are dead ends because of the massive competition.
What am I asking here? For the older generation to have some patience. There have been been 1.5 billion people added to the world in the past 20 years. It’s competitive out there. We gotta search for WMDs that don’t exist. Pay for expensive educations with jobs that don’t require one. Pay off all these government boondoggles. Go through dizzying arrays of bureaucracy just to get a license to babysit. And let us smoke some kush at the end of the week damnit.
Mow lawns. As a “contractor”, you can even charge less than minimum wage if you wish.
The 1960s were a golden age of employment for almost every group whereas today there is a tough employment market for almost everyone including new college graduates. While everyone is suffering in this recession, it’s also true that college graduates as a group are suffering the least. Their unemployment rate is significantly below that of every other group. And my guess is that new college graduates have a significantly lower unemployment rate than new high school graduates. Both of these facts suggest that there is, in fact, considerable value to a college education.
College grad: You are right, of course, that those without a college degree are unemployed right now in much larger numbers. On the other hand, it is rather shocking to find that a $500,000+ investment in education does not yield better results. Whether public or private, we have the world’s most expensive schools. Our young people have as much health and energy as young people anywhere else. I would expect nearly 100 percent of new college graduates to have at least one job offer (even if the number of workers isn’t growing, an employer should still be better off shedding some of its older workers in favor of the young, assuming the young had as good an education as the older workers got 30 years ago).
Was there a reason he had to study necessarily in the USA? It is not a cheap destination. I had graduated from one of the good engineering universities in India and a 4 year program costs about $4000 and they have Foreign nationals quota as well which is expensive but not by that much.
I subsequently came to USA, got my MBA from a premium University during which I worked two jobs, got to be a teaching assistant, lived frugally and did not accumulate any debt.
Why were these not options for this young one? What is it about young Americans that make them look to American Colleges when they charge an arm and a leg to study liberal arts?
Why wasn’t financial prudence the driver of his choices? I am not proposing that he fore-go his education but attain it in places that suit his (and his families) finances. If he had US$ 200K to plonk on his undergrad he should not be complaining. My head spins with options that are open to him at the best universities of the world at 200K price point. Why did he not take them?
After 500k in education he/she should be able to think for themselves.
There are LOTS of jobs available. Ok they may not be in an attractive field but there is work out there. Live for a year on what you can make and you will soon realize that when you graduate and enter the workforce you have to prove yourself all over again.
Is getting a job the ultimate purpose of a true education?
Chapter 1 of Think on These Things by Jiddu Krishnamurti (PDF): http://www.brockwood.org.uk/pdf/think_on_these_things.pdf
The whole thing can be read online here, too (PDF as well, and best to ignore the silly title of the website:): http://www.messagefrommasters.com/Ebooks/Jiddu-Krishnamurti-Books/Think_on_these_Things.pdf
Simon: Thanks for the links. I’m familiar with Krishnamurti’s writing. The life of the philosopher is not that appealing to the average American, as best evidenced by the hundreds of millions of people who say that they are Christian yet do not try to live the way that Jesus did. Krishnamurti’s question “And should not education help you to find out what you really love to do so that from the beginning to the end of your life you are working at something which you feel is worth while and which for you has deep significance?” does not seem applicable to American society. We need to keep more than 2 million people in prison, apparently, which means that we need hundreds of thousands of prison guards. These are good steady government jobs, but I don’t think the folks working as guards would say that it was their first choice of career or that it is something they “really love to do”.