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Comment by cadlin | Hacker News Reader

This comment (and article) are silly without comparing college graduates with "unemployable" degrees to people who only have a high school diploma.

If you look at minimum wage data (which would presumably filter out "high earning degrees"), you find that 7.3% of minimum wage employees have bachelor degrees or higher. This is certainly not zero, but it's evidence that unemployable degrees have some value. Unfortunately, there's not very good data on compensation by major.

65% of minimum wage employees have high school diplomas but not a bachelor's degree, and 27.7% don't have a high school diploma (this presumably includes high school students). Interestingly, there are about 1000 people in the country with a doctoral degree who work at a minimum wage job.

Source (page 8): http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2011.pdf

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"it's evidence that unemployable degrees have some value."

I see a different picture. Of those old enough to have obtained a degree, approximately 14% earn a minimum wage income, which is only a few points off the adult population at large. That indicates to me that minimum wage earners are fairly evenly distributed through the population, regardless of educational attainment.

You're reading the data wrong. 7.3% of minimum wage workers have a bachelor's degree or higher.

I assume you were looking at the number 13.5%, which is the percentage of minimum wage hours worked by those with bachelor degrees alone.

Another way of looking at this: 30.9% of Americans over the age of 25 have a bachelor's degree. There are 122 million Americans 25 or older. That means about 38 million of them have a bachelor's degree or higher. There are 279,000 Americans with bachelor degrees or higher that make minimum wage. That means a maximum of .73% of Americans with bachelor degrees make minimum wage. Adding younger people with degrees dilutes the number further.

56.7% of Americans over 25 are somewhere between a high school degree and a bachelor's. If we do the same math above, we get that there are 69 million Americans with a high school diploma but not a bachelor's. And 2.5 million of them make minimum wage. That's 3.6%, which is a difference of about a factor of 5.

Dealing with people between 18-25 probably skews the data towards a lower percentage of minimum wage workers more in favor of those without a bachelor's, but I think the point still stands. Unfortunately the BLS doesn't subdivide the data by both age and educational attainment.

Population by age: http://www.census.gov/population/age/ Educational attainment: http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/

"You're reading the data wrong."

I think you may have read my post wrong. According to the link, 1,933,000 people old enough to have a degree work a minimum wage job. Of them, 279,000 have a degree. That is 14.4%.

There are 1,933,000 people over the age of 25 who work at a minimum wage job. There are 279,000 people of all ages who have a bachelor's degree or higher. Any data linking the two has to be speculative (like the numbers I provided in my previous post).

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