'Malemployment' on the Rise
thetakeaway.org
thetakeaway.org
This sounds a lot like the underwater mortgage issue. Maybe people are overpaying for college because of easy government-backed credit?
So am I overqualified or underqualified? Or both?
The worst thing about this situation is the sense of helplessness and having been lied to it instills in young people. We have been told by our parents, rightly or wrongly, for the first two decades of our lives that if we simply work hard in our education we will land well paid, secure jobs. This was the reward for all the hard work at school, and for all the debt uni now requires. Now these kids are graduating, and finding that their £30000 of debt and three years of hard work might get them a job in macdonalds, if they're lucky.
When you combine that with the fact that those responsible for this situation got all their education completely free and were given large grants to pay their way through, you end up with the events of last week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3IEKWu4rA
Edit: this was also due to the relatively smaller proportion of the population with degrees at that time.
The brutal truth is that you are either studying for a career or you are pursuing a hobby full time for 3 years.
I double majored in math and philosophy. I wouldn't say my studies were either career prep or a hobby. "Learning to learn" seems like a reasonable way to put it.
It has actually worked out great, career-wise. I am qualified for nothing, so I can seek employment doing whatever seems interesting.
Nevertheless my point stands: from the perspective of industry, there is no difference between an irrelevant degree and no degree at all, and the evidence for this is holders of those degrees having no advantage in the job market.
Related, I'm not sure what degree "product managers" are supposed to have. Every product manager I've worked with has had a very different educational background. Philosophy degree, MBA, art history degree, "American Studies," sociology degree, etc.
Of course, maybe good financial planning is helpful if students are graduating with $4000 of credit card debt... That is the nu mber I will never understand.
I'm not even talking about unskilled jobs - just jobs that require some other kind of training that academia.
20-24? A lot of students are taking more than four years for degrees these days. This statistic doesn't specify if it counts students enrolled in college working at a campus job or not.
At the beginning of this year, there were twice as many four-year college graduates working as waiters and bartenders as engineers.
Is the problem just that it's mostly expected that everyone moves on to college, whether or not they can pick a degree they care enough about to make a real effort in succeeding with?
Umm, maybe this is because 60% (or more) of college students studied the humanities rather than engineering?
+ In addition to my degree in making stuff, I have a degree in making stuff up, and one course was literally Manga As Literature. Nothing wrong with studying it on the side, but I know people who literally designed a course of study to focus on it, and the options for being a professional anime geek are rather constrained (particularly, cough, if you drop out of Japanese because "it is too hard").
"you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda’ got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library"
Do you mean no one should be paid to provide it?
OK, but if someone is paying for it then it's not free.
Whether "society" (whihc I'm guessing really means tax payers) should foot the bill is a different matter.
There's a good self-interest argument that one is better off in a society where more people are better educated, but the devil is in the details: Who gets funding, with what strings attached, and so on.
For example, if I start a company/business the school will help me out with resources and in return take some amount of equity. Thus, what happens is that you have a VC-esque institution that remains true to the objectives of a university; learning.
I think a job happiness index would be better. You could just ask, "From 1-10 how happy are you with your current job (1=couldn't be more unhappy, 10=couldn't be happier)," would be enough. If this score dipped, morale is lower overall, and productivity will suffer.
If some "over-educated" employees still happy and perhaps have substantially greater output than their "less-educated" counterparts, then there could be a significant enough ROI on their education to justify it. However, you can't differentiate those from the "over-educated" workers that are unhappy that would be more productive in other roles. This is why I think a work happiness index would be a better indicator of how well those that are employed are fairing.
Education / Unemployment Rate:
Didn't finish high school 15.3%
No college degree 10.1%
College Degree 4.7%
That looks like a solid ROI to me. I think this article is indicative of the fact that education + not much experience means you get left out in the cold when people with the same education and more experience are looking for work. Note that they talk about recent college grads in the low 20s - these typically aren't people with lots of degree-related work experience. You can also argue that not all degrees are created equal, in terms of employment. But hearing 'college is a ripoff' a lot (like, say, here) doesn't make it true.
I'm sure you can imagine that if somebody has the drive and mental capacity to finish a college degree, they also likely have the drive and mental capacity to land and keep a job. It is not the college degree that matters necessarily.
Using your own statistics, 89.9% of college dropouts have a job. And 95.3% of college grads have a job. Is four or five years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars worth a 5.4% increase? What if you were to dedicate those four years to personal study and lower job market experience and work your way up for four years instead? Can you be sure that the college route is the better solution, knowing that it only gives a 5.4% increase in those statistics?