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Comment by holdenc | Hacker News Reader

For some people a college degree can lead to a crippling level of entitlement, and unwillingness to do the kind of work they hoped to escape by attending college. A college degree doesn't preclude someone from waiting tables, cleaning up messes and answering phones. Though many graduates seem to be confused about this.

For unemployed colleges grads -- here's a rudimentary formula for success. Start a free website with Weebly and call it IWillMopItUp.com. And let people know that you will mop up their mess for $20 and hour. Pretty crappy right? Yes, but it epitomizes the can do attitude and whatever it takes mentality that matters in this difficult economy. The bottom line is that very hard working smart college grads still have opportunities, but the first step is them getting over the fact they went to college.

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You know close to 50% of new grads are unemployed right? This is millions of kids a year who were told to get educated and now have no job waiting for them when they do. Acting like millions of kids should just get a job mopping floors and drop the entitlement is super ignorant and borders on dangerous.

I would put a lot of this blame on the fact that tax cuts for the rich that were supposed to "raise demand for workers" have just transferred money from consumers to corporations. We ignored that the lower and middle class constitute the VAST majority of consumption (which actually does create jobs, unlike some rich guy just having more money) and now the upper class has such an imbalance of wealth there are millions less people who can afford to buy their product.

Deciding that millions of new graduates aren't getting jobs because they are lazy is one of the more ignorant and lazy arguments I've ever seen.

I think the OP's comment held a seed of wisdom, even though it wasn't properly expressed.

The point I got from his post was that recently graduated and unemployed kids should stop waiting to be offered jobs that obviously don't exist anymore, and bring out the entrepreneurial spirit that made this country great (a long time ago).

The point is not to mop floors for $20, but to create a website (essentially a business) that solves somebody else's pain. That is the essential idea. Find a pain, fix it, charge enough to make a profit and move on to the next pain point that needs fixing.

What's the success rate among entrepreneurs? Don't most small businesses tank within the first three years? Does this really help if "millions of kids a year" are entering the workforce?

That said, looking at my (much) younger cousins and their friends, it strikes me that the latest generation of 20-somethings are already impressively entrepreneurial. However, I don't see many of their businesses scaling enough to support a family, much less employ scads of others.

Most successful entrepreneurs failed at least once until they made it. I can only speak from experience, the startup founder that I worked for had three failed attempts before he made it (relatively) big.

My other point was exactly that. Most small businesses will fail, but the ones that succeed will be the job creators (I hate that buzzword!) and hire the ones that didn't make it.

After having worked for a startup myself for a while, I am now ready to try it on my own. If I fail, there's always other successful startups I could work for. If I succeed, I'll need good employees, and someone who tried and failed (but learned from the experience) would be a prime candidate.

Don't most kinds of business require some capital to start?

Less capital now than ever. Local service businesses like "Mop It Up" would cost almost nothing to operate. The barrier to entry is simply that the work is undesirable. This makes it valuable.

How large do you suppose the market for a $20 an hour cleaning service is in most cities? For comparison, how much do house cleaners charge?

I don't think your conclusion at the end is true. Most undesirable work is in fact not valuable, in the sense of being paid well or easy to get, because, at least if it's also unskilled, there is a large supply of labor relative to demand. Stuff like janitorial work does not pay well and has no shortage. Similarly with McDonald's: they typically get many more applications than open positions, and not because they're paying $20/hr.

There was a story (I think it was on reddit, not HN) of an entrepreneur who bootstrapped a local cleaning business in something like three months, by hiring his maid as his first employee. The guy does not mop up himself, but runs an incredibly successful business with a web-based reservation system. The rest of his job is people and asset management.

So even with janitorial work, an educated graduate can turn it into a profitable business, without actually doing the cleaning himself.

Edit: his site is http://www.maidsinblack.com/ and he does a great job of documenting his startup experience step by step on reddit. If I find the thread, I'll post it here.

That's one guy. There are millions of unemployed people.

Anyway, this kind of business would have been possible in the past with local newspaper ads and the Yellow Pages.

Well, I certainly hope you're right, but I have my reservations about small businesses, particularly those run by young, inexperienced people, scaling in order to employ others. I do think that the recent trend of staying "at home" longer may help with this. Also, if we can get more affordable housing in areas populated enough to support commerce, things might improve a lot.

This is a correct interpretation, and better expression of what I was trying to say -- essentially, there are still lots of basic problems that need fixing. A college graduate is well prepared to market themselves intelligently, in a trustworthy manner that can win confidence and work, even if the work is somewhat undesirable.

>Deciding that millions of new graduates aren't getting jobs because they are lazy is one of the more ignorant and lazy arguments I've ever seen.

How do you interpret the linked article then? "Mopping floors" doesn't literally mean mopping floors, it means settling for the jobs that are available, not the jobs you want.

Your presumption is that there are jobs available; according to the bureau of labor statistics, as of March 2012 there were 3.4 unemployed people for every job opening (roughly double the ratio at the start of the recession back in December 2007).

Statistics on job openings discount the option of working for yourself, which is what holdenc suggested with his "Mop It Up" business.

I don't know what the overall employment rate has to do with this.

The article looks at the relative employment rate of people who have attended college vs those who haven't. People who have attended college should be more qualified for more jobs than those who haven't. They should be more employed, but they aren't. The simplest explanation(and the one that matches what I've seen/experienced) is that people who have more education are too picky about the jobs and careers they are willing to consider and are therefore finding it harder to get a job.

People who have attended college should be more qualified for more jobs than those who haven't. They should be more employed, but they aren't.

In fact they are more employed, according to the article, if they actually graduated (as opposed to merely attending). The article gives, for people 25 and up, the following unemployment rates:

    Overall: 6.6% unemployed
    High school, no college: 7.7% unemployed
    Some college, no degree: 8% unemployed
    2-year college degree: 6.2% unemployed
    4-year college degree: 4% unemployed

So clearly the two "have degree" categories have lower unemployment rates than the no-degree categories do. The article seems to want to conflate people who did and didn't graduate into one "attended college" category.

"You know close to 50% of new grads are unemployed right?" No, I didn't know that, but the statistic itself is largely unhelpful without a demographic breakdown. I would be curious as to the distribution itself by degree. I would additionally hypothesize that degrees that are more "geared" towards entering the workforce (Engineering) would have significantly lower unemployment numbers than degrees that are primarily designed as an intellectual pursuit. While there is nothing wrong with intellectual pursuits, obtaining such as degree without the desire to ultimately enter academia is a strategically poor decision to make.

I imagine that re-stating this metric by degree will tell a very different story.

How does the major affect the sheer number of people whose best option is now starting a mopping business?

It matters when we are discussing to what extent an entitled attitude is justified or should be dropped.

An entitled attitude is never justified, despite how much the attitude holder believes it so.

Because I suspect that presenting the data this way masks the reality of why there are sheer number of people who can't find work. But even without major (which I was simply curious about), the data set is suspiciously aggregated.

For example, what if we were to drill down into the data and discover that in the metric "Some college or degree" that 99% of the individuals who could not find work were in the "some college" category and only 1% were in the "degree" category. That would paint an entirely different picture: having a college degree is incredibly useful, but attending college without completing the degree is not very useful in terms of being employable.

There are many things to blame for a lack of jobs. But the jobs are gone, many to other countries, and are not coming back soon. College graduates are facing a different reality than existed even 10 years ago. College experience counts for less now than possibly ever before. That's the new reality, and only way to live with that is get creative, determined and ready to go to work whatever is required.

> You know close to 50% of new grads are unemployed right?

I've been waiting for almost 20 years for the rush of jobs due to the Boomers retiring. I feel sorry for the kids these days.

That, and new Scooba models from iRobot (makers of Roomba), who mop the floor with efficiency similar to those Anthropology majors at fraction of the cost.

iRobots consumer products are kind of a joke. I got a "Looj" http://www.irobot.com/en/us/robots/home/looj.aspx gutter cleaning robot for my parents once; it was totally useless. An unemployed college graduate would have done a much better job in the sense that the robot didn't do the job at all.

I'd like to see a reference for that statistic.

I don't discredit the statistic, but I think it's bit misleading, because we're not able to dig into the data - even just a bit.

> Start a free website with Weebly and call it IWillMopItUp.com. And let people know that you will mop up their mess for $20 and hour.

Hahaha, where do you come from that you think a janitor gets payed $20/hr? And college grads are waiting tables everywhere; I know dozens doing just that. You are clueless.

> Hahaha, where do you come from that you think a janitor gets payed $20/hr?

This is the case in Australia

Maybe you live in a place that has a huge undersupply of janitorial labor, but most people do not and it has nothing to do with whether or not they went to college.

You missed the point, which is to make your own job if someone else isn't doing it for you.

To some extent, a college degree can preclude you from doing that kind of work. A BA in English won't stop you from working as a barista, but a PhD in it can actually hurt your job prospects. Even for service work where employees are pretty interchangeable, a lot of employers don't want to hire someone that they think (probably correctly) will jump ship at the first chance they get in the field they studied for.

Good call. Michael Ellsberg wrote a book with that same premise. Here's a review: http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/education-of-milli... (there's also a link to a related Mixergy interview there)

The book doesn't say how to provide jobs for everyone, for someone who needs a nudge in the right direction it could be very helpful, likely the same sort that would create a site like "IWillMopItUp.com".

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