The Growth of College Grads in Dead-End Jobs | Hacker News Reader

The Growth of College Grads in Dead-End Jobs

theatlantic.com

57 pointsgrej57 comments

Perhaps the problem is that people who are destined for a dead-end job are now going to college:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Educational_Attainment_in_...

In 1990 ~20% of the US had bachelors degrees. In 2009 ~25% did.

In the same period, the % of college grads in low wage jobs also went up by about 5% (according to the OP).

Caveats: 1) That second 5% is from the population of grads not the total population, so that second 5% is a lower number. 2) The 5% total attainment measures the full pool, not the delta in the pool as would be appropriate to use in comparison to the recent college grads numbers in the article.

A lot of this "college grads now worse off" seems like partial views of the statistics that ignore the meteoric rise in enrollment over the same period.

One stat I haven't yet seen, that would make a great paper for anyone still in college, is: What percent of these numbers can be explained by higher GI bill usage following the Iraq and Afghanistan wars?

Blaming the victim, favorite American pastime.

Look, I'm trying to understand what's happening and why. If you re-read what I wrote, I think you'll have a hard time finding any normative statements or any statements ascribing fault. I did use the term "dead end jobs" which is pejorative, but that's a term copied from the original article used as a reference not as a personal evaluation.

The only people I'm blaming for anything are the people writing these articles that leave out what I believe to be crucial and potentially explanatory information.

Any victim blaming you found into my comment was put there by you.

Another way of parsing the data, which is fully coherent with my prior point: society is making great progress, we're approaching the point where even our janitors are afforded the luxury of a college education.

You are using this phrase as if it would automatically mean that the people you refer to are not to blame, just because they are in a bad position. I disagree. I think that people need to take responsibility for their careers, and that frankly, if they end up in a dead-end job, it IS their fault.

Now, by saying this, I don't mean that we should settle for the status quo and that all is well. Just like with interfaces we should make systems that make it easy to choose right and hard to choose wrong.

In this case the victim is often responsible for making poor career choices.

The whole "I graduated, I'm entitled to a job" sentiment must go away, or we will end up with an army of hungry homeless history, women-study, art, philosophy graduates.

But it used to work that way.

A generation or two ago you had a bunch of guys with degrees in literature and art-history managing plants full guys with highschool diplomas. And they all were middle-class or higher.

The difference is now most job-seekers have a college degree, so just the mere fact of having a degree is no longer a differentiator.

They should learn skills that are desirable in the current economy. Not just programming, but also nursing, chemical engineering etc.

According to the BLS, the outlook for chemical engineers is only 4%, way below the average [1]. Other STEM fields, such as electrical engineering, are also in decline [2]. Software developers only increased by 19,000 jobs total. Students are graduating with the skills you list as desirable, but those skills aren't actually in demand.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/chemical... [2] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245494/What_STEM_sho...

Yes, I was referring to the second link there, based on the more recent data:

"The number of employed software developers, the largest IT occupation segment, increased by only 1.75%, to 1.1 million, a gain of 19,000. The unemployment rate for developers last year was 2.7%, which is still elevated, according to Hira."

Software developers are doing well, especially compared with some other STEM professions, it's just not huge in absolute terms because there's only about 1.1 million software developer jobs overall. Good for us programmers, but not for STEM careers in general.

Under your own link "Software developers, systems software" has THE best combination of the salary, projected number of jobs, and projected growth rate.

Software developers are indeed in demand.

Nursing has topped, the industry lost jobs last year.

So what do you recommend they do? We can't all be programmers.

There are only a few options I see for them

1) Give up and work for a shitty job, until it gets automated, then go homeless and hope the government keeps them alive

2) Learn new marketable skills and get a job. You're right, we can't all be programmers, but we can be nurses, car mechanics, accountants, pilots, welders, plumbers, farmers, etc.

3) Start a small business. Many successful small businesses are literally as stupid as "buy wholesale, sell retail". Many have very low barriers to entry, like making ice cream.

Your number 2 is silly and it makes it hard for me to take you seriously. If those are the jobs you think students should go towards, which exactly are the dead end jobs you speak of?

All the jobs I listed, apart from nursing, are well paid.

Nursing is more for people who like to help/save other people, and it's a noble profession in my mind.

IIRC farming is notoriously underpaid, but I believe you are right about the rest.

Well, there is "working on a farm", which is not paid well.

And then there's growing things and selling them, which is usually very profitable, and lands you all kinds of government subsidies, depending on where you are and what you're growing.

Really? This is your plan for grads? I'm somewhat underwhelmed by this grand solution, just saying ...

It's not a plan, it's an option, one of many.

I have two degrees in IT-related fields, and I'm fascinated by modern farming. If you're not familiar, I recommend checking it out.

The real problem is people studying bullshit that nobody really needs.

Young people got sold the idea that they can be anything they want to be, they they are all special snowflakes. The reality is quite a bit more brutal.

What we really need is mandatory career counseling, once a year, for every student. The counselors must be familiar with the state of the market, the market trends, technology trends, number of future graduate trends, etc.

There's also the problem across the aisle of employers looking for bullshit skills and experience that are almost completely irrelevant to the jobs they're offering. Graduating from college today and trying to move into the workforce feels like a lockout, like there's some sort of employer union to purposefully bar recent grads out of employment.

It really has nothing to do with studying "bullshit degrees", as so many of the graduates with "bullshit degrees" are incredibly competent and hard working, and would make better employees than the arbitrary person with "5 years experience", who may have 5 years experience being a terrible employee.

Counseling students of the trends of the market is stupid. You would get a ton of students with whatever degree was popular 2 years ago. You can't just switch your degree on the whims of the job market, and why would we want our college educated force to do so? There would be a stupid and obvious consequence: hordes of graduates all with the same single degree all still complaining about how college doesn't lead to a job.

Really the problem is that there just aren't enough jobs for college grads, and the jobs that are available, employers naively put bars of experience, completely ignoring a mass of very competent workers.

One thing I might be in support of is more of a compromise: cut out more of the atrociously poor general education in exchange for a policy of something like 1 career degree (Business, Science, Engineering), 1 arts degree (Everyone must double major). But this would likely have the drawback of students having to grind through a subject they're not interested in and are never going to apply in practice.

P.S. (I'm a few years out of college and have been employed the entire time, so this is not my personal anger at the job market, but more an observation of systemically poor hiring practices).

> "Really the problem is that there just aren't enough jobs for college grads, and the jobs that are available, employers naively put bars of experience, completely ignoring a mass of very competent workers."

If your premise is true and any employer with competitors did this systematically they would be subjecting themselves to a significant competitive disadvantage. You're postulating that employers in general voluntarily ignore their own best interests. Some companies may be this mismanaged, but suggesting that the market as a whole is this incompetent is quite a stretch.

Rather, it's likely that employers have some incentive to put up these seemingly arbitrary bars of experience. Perhaps they're mitigating risks (e.g. of high turnover) or they have trouble filtering the candidate pool to a manageable size with other qualifications.

There are companies that do a wide variety of nonsensical things and survive because of other qualities. How many of us long for sane managers that understand estimates, fighting the employee's corner - even if just so that they're a sustainable resources - and the basics of meaningful targets?

One aspect of competition is selection pressure, but the other is diversity. You're assured of reaching an asymptote with your threat environment in order to survive for any significant length of time, but it's perfectly possible for a majority of the market to do very stupid things if they all think much alike.

Heck, if the market were that adaptive, insane companies would be getting squished left and right.

>One thing I might be in support of is more of a compromise: cut out more of the atrociously poor general education in exchange for a policy of something like 1 career degree (Business, Science, Engineering), 1 arts degree (Everyone must double major). But this would likely have the drawback of students having to grind through a subject they're not interested in and are never going to apply in practice.

I would argue the opposite.

Learning how to write is essential for everyone. Of course, I would also argue that learning how to program is essential for everyone. Now, we aren't all going to be Knuth or Shakespeare, but... you are going to be at a severe disadvantage, really, no matter what field you choose, if you can't do those things at all.

You learn the basics of those two things? You are going to do okay, no matter what your degree was in.

You learn the basics of those two things? You are going to do okay, no matter what your degree was in.

A friend of mine didn't know what to study while in school so his dad told him to study English. He said no matter what, knowing how to read and write properly is a good thing. At this point my friend has worked in IT for years, and is now the CTO of a decently sized company.

Ironically, my dad's advice to me was that college-level English is completely useless, maybe even counterproductive, and I'd be better off doing almost anything else with my time. He had a master's in English and made his living doing training (ie, public speaking) and writing books (over 40 of them).

His take is that communication absolutely critical. But what college English courses teach you is not so much how to communicate as how to bludgeon readers with how terribly erudite you are by using longwinded, stilted, and dense verbiage. ie, they teach you the exact wrong way to write.

>His take is that communication absolutely critical. But what college English courses teach you is not so much how to communicate as how to bludgeon readers with how terribly erudite you are by using longwinded, stilted, and dense verbiage. ie, they teach you the exact wrong way to write.

Yeah, but I was talking about the "gen-ed" classes. I would expect gen-ed English to be, you know, basic. I would expect graduate courses in English to be more about writing as art, which is rather less generally useful.

Yeah. I think being able to write is one of those things that acts as a multiplier on your other skills; It's not worth all that much by itself, but knowing how to write and having some other skill is vastly more valuable than just having that other skill.

Right now? I think just programming pays pretty okay, even when you don't have much else... but I don't think that will last forever. I think in the future, having basic programming skills won't get you a good job by themselves, but basic programming skills plus something else will be vastly more valuable than just that other skill alone.

The presence of bullshit skill requirements is an indication of supply:demand mismatch. Employers only do that when there are too many qualified candidates and they need fast ways to reduce the potential pool.

You can re-state your point that "there aren't enough jobs for college grads" as "there are fewer jobs that require a college degree than people with college degrees"

Society needs: lawyers, janitors, computer programmers, bus drivers, etc.

There are other imbalances in the labor-training market: we're currently over-producing lawyers, and under producing programmers.

> as so many of the graduates with "bullshit degrees" are incredibly competent

A history graduate is competent in what exactly?

They aren't even competent at teaching history, which generally requires Masters or PhD.

> Counseling students of the trends of the market is stupid

I never said the students should counseled on the trends. But the counselors must be aware of them.

"A history graduate is competent in what exactly?"

Studying/researching problems.

Writing persuasive documents based on evidence.

Working collaboratively in teams doing research.

Or, at least, that's what I'd expect. I'd expect that almost anyone graduating with a 4 year degree in anything.

Sadly, I know it's not the case. > 20 years ago, I was taking a college course on 'intro to china'. It was definitely a 'blow off' class - a 2 credit class you had to take to fulfill some general ed requirement.

The class was 2 months, 1 (or maybe 2?) nights per week, and we had to write 4 'papers'. The 'papers' needed to be 1-2 pages on any topic of our choice relating to China - historical, modern, political, whatever. The instructor was a librarian by trade, and loved China, and taught the class.

First papers go back to the students, and 3-5 students in the back - 'non traditionals' by the look of it (all over 30 IIRC) started complaining - loudly - that they'd been marked down because of spelling and grammar mistakes. The instructor replied that this was a college class and they should be able to write basic English competently enough to avoid basic spelling and grammar mistakes - we should all know how to use semicolons, commas, periods, capitalization rules, possessive forms, etc.

One of the students shouted back "this isn't an English class - this is unfair bullshit that I'm being marked down like this". Sadly, a group of people all chimed in agreeing. The teacher was visibly shaken.

Of course, not arguing this is the state of every single college class out there, and it wasn't even the norm in my experience. I was just shocked at the time that it happened at all, but now it doesn't shock me any more. Just saddens me that people think like this. Those sorts of people shouldn't be going to college in the first place, but were sold the line "get a college degree and your life will be great". It's not true.

This unfortunately happens fairly routinely even at high level universities. Not always as publicly, though, but it does happen.

I'm a faculty brat (professorial parents) at one of the top public universities in the nation. There are always students that will complain to professors that things are too hard, or that grading schemes are unfair, or etc. with very little cause. Possibly worse is that sometimes people's /parents/ will call or email their professor to appeal a grade.

It does seem to be somewhat major dependent: I have /never/ seen it occur in a math class, for instance, whereas it apparently routinely occurs in my mother's English classes. (She's known for grading more stringently than many other English professors. Complaints also don't usually work.) However, I think that it's a mark of an experienced teacher that they don't let bullshit like that faze them: the one time I've seen it really affect how a class was taught, it definitely made the class worse as a learning experience. (Some vocal computer science majors thought that an algorithms course was too difficult, and the professor made it easier, which definitely was a net loss for everyone. I'm very glad that I wasn't enrolled in it.)

I think it's disgusting. Sometimes professors make mistakes: in class structure, or assignment load, or grading something, or the like, and bringing that up politely is appropriate. But if they know they are assigning hard, long assignments, or the grading is fair, or the like, then it's usually for a good reason. The professors who don't care about teaching usually also don't teach hard courses or grade harshly, because it means more work for them.

I agree that generally the people who do things like this are less likely to do well post-college. Either because their parents are hovering over them (see parental phone calls) and they won't ever learn self-discipline and reliance, or because they expect that if they complain, the world will magically bend itself to their will. I think some of it happens when people are taking courses they don't want to take for a requirement, but I agree that there are a good number of people who get sold on the "college degree -> good job and happiness and money."

Back in my undergrad I TA'd Comp Sci for a few years. That sort of stuff was rarer in upper level courses, but in the intro classes which were often largely filled with non-cs majors, it was rampant. The policies of the course were extremely lenient as well, and very explicitly spelled out in the syllabus.

For example, there was an assignment every single week, and 3 times during the semester, they were allowed to turn in an assignment up to a week late. This is by far the most lenient late policy I've ever seen in a course. And still, every semester, I had to deal with several kids angrily yelling at me because they found out they got a 0 on an assignment because for the 4th time they decided to turn in something late.

Cool insights. I don't think the 'helicopter parent' syndrome was alive and well in the late 80s, but it seems to be a 'thing' now. :/

In this particular case, the instructor was doing this out of a passion for sinology - she was a librarian who did this part-time. Perhaps full-time teaching would have helped her develop a thicker skin over the years. That said, she was already in her late 50s or early 60s at this point - not sure she'd encountered too many outright hostile students up to that point.

My Computer Languages (or whatever it was called) professor had mandatory attendance for his 8am MWF Friday class. I went to a big football school and we had a Thursday night game and that asshole didn't budge on his policy. He even dropped a pop quiz the day after the game.

I got the highest grades in his course out of any class that I took in college. I wish all my professors were as good as he was.

A history graduate learns how to analyze disparate sources of variable quality for a specific purpose and argue a conclusion. They should be masters of long form report, able to select relevant information from a huge library and be able to defend a position cogently. I think its some of the most transferable skills there is.

I'm not sure my comp sci degree was particularly useful. The vast majority of what I learnt turns out in retrospect to be "industry focused" aka completely obsolete now.

> A history graduate learns how to analyze disparate sources of variable quality for a specific purpose and argue a conclusion.

If you think that's how history is written, I have some bad news....

It is not how history is written, but how history is interpreted. Research and forming opinions is exactly what a history graduate should have learned while in school. This is why many lawyers study history in undergrad.

And people who studied bullshit that nobody really needs used to get jobs. Talk to a 50-year-old businessman about his degree and you'll find out he studied lit or philosophy.

It is not just young gullible kids but even experienced folks. Note the oncoming glut in the Phd market. If people who work towards doctorates in highly specialized fields cannot forsee the supply-demand mechanics then younger people surely can be excused for making similar mistakes!

Yes, we really need to make sure that there is a square hole for every peg to get hammered in to!

Or, better, we could try to figure out how to keep costs from spiraling so high that they prevent a "useless" degree-bearer from ever leaving their dead-end job.

Well, this isn't incompatible with the perception that a lot more college grads are stuck in dead-end jobs.

Let's imagine three tiers of college grads: winners, middling, and losers, depending on how employable they were when they graduated.

Before, the winners and middling grads got real jobs, and the losers went to Joe-jobs.

Now, the winners are still getting real jobs, the middling folks are now in Joe-jobs, and the losers are unemployed.

And nobody cares about losers because we're all callous that way, so all we've noticed is that people who used to get the real jobs are now stuck in the Joe-jobs.

I don't see how you draw that conclusion from the data.

A slightly larger percent of graduates are working the "Joe-jobs".

College graduates have increased as a percent of the population.

Everything looks to be in order here.

What a silly article. It ignores that you can get a college degree in anything. Do the analysis for art majors, literature majors, business majors, and various STEM majors. Look at 2 year degrees, 4 year degrees, and graduate degrees.

Sadly there are enough variation that you can almost make any statement technically true. You could say more people with college degrees are unemployed now than ever before in history. In absolute numbers sure, as a fraction of the available workforce not so much.

These graphs ignore the fact that from 1992 to 2009, the percentage of people over 25 with a college degree rose from ~20% to ~27%: http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-566.pdf (page 3). Meanwhile, the first chart in the article shows from 1990 to 2012, consistently just over 30% of college degree holders had a job that didn't require their degree. That means that in 1990, 0.7 * 0.2 = 14% of the population had a college degree and a job that required one, while in 2009, 0.7 * 0.27 = 19% of the population had a college degree and a job that required one.

I just had several friends who were Architects take menial jobs after the housing market busted. These were guys who were 2 years removed from college, thinking they had paid their dues and were in their chosen fields.

Two are still trying to catch on to another firm somewhere and another completely changed fields to find a job. I wonder if they're including these people in those stats?

We've had a few previous discussion on this and peripheral subjects. Here's a good one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6224982

I'd also invite you to read my comment on it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226836

The "studied the wrong subject" stuff has surprisingly come up in this thread, so I'll just sum up the answer to that one here:

'About the suggestions that these people studied useless subjects: true, many of them did. What, however, would happen if they all decided to go into STEM instead? Assuming they all did amazing, we'd wind up with a glut of people with degrees in "good" subjects, which does nothing to magically create jobs (having a STEM degree does NOT mean you're going to start a company!) - it only helps where there are shortages. Once those are filled, we're back where we started (and wages may get pushed down due to a talent glut.) That's the best case scenario, too. What would be worse? What would the reality likely be? If everyone did rush into STEM, a good portion would fail out (not everyone is cut out for it. Really, some people just do not have the attitude, mindset, demeanor, worldview, interest, etc.) and be left with no degree (or they'd switch to one of those useless ones) and still be debt - right back where we started again. For some real world examples, just look through some other discussions on HN about this subject about people in countries who DO exactly this and they're stuck with unemployed and underemployed STEM grads up the wazoo.'

You'd probably end up with a lot of people who have the degrees but, in practice, aren't very competent. I don't subscribe to the belief that anyone can do anything they chose as long as they try hard enough. Individuals have individual skill sets, and some simply aren't all that skilled.

My thought is that many of the people enrolling in college should actually be pursuing a career in skilled labor.

> (having a STEM degree does NOT mean you're going to start a company!)

Having studied STEM subjects sufficiently to get a degree increases the probability of you being able to serve as technical (co-)founder for a company in a technology related field.

It doesn't do anything magically, but there is plenty of reason to expect that, ceteris paribus, more-STEM graduates => more and better innovative technology companies.

I can not count the number of college students I met while I was in college (2001-20010ish) who did not have a clear vision of how they would pay off debt and maintain a living after graduation. Following your dream, being passionate, etc were the proverbs being lived by.

Not a realistic analysis of how they would survive in non-minimum wage jobs.

It should not surprise anyone that following your dream without counting the cost results in very high costs for most people - the penniless genius and starving artist is still a proverb.

The document one link down is really interesting: http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/HardTimes....

Apart from the usual suspects (sociology, anthropology, archeology) "Information Systems" doesn't fare well but CompSci is still ok and Math is good.

Many are by choice, aren't they?

I know a lot who studied "just anything" in college, because, well, I've gotta go to college, don't I? They didn't have a career path or anything planned out, just picked something, took some classes and graduated.

Then they decided what they picked wasn't anything they wanted to do for the rest of their life.

I know someone who studied business but soon realized she hates the business world, because you have to be cut throat to get ahead.

Find a pain and solve it. This can be applied to a college degree fairly easy. Do you want increase your value to potential employers after graduation? Be able to solve painful problems. Where are the painful problems? STEM.

For context: I spent my time across the arts and sciences at a top 20 school and graduated with a very high GPA — all without ever writing a paper longer than 12 pages. A lot of this was my fault, but it should not have been close to possible for me to graduate.

The problem to me is larger than which degree someone graduated in. It's that college isn't rigorous enough in general, and the only people who see the real benefits of education are people that study the sciences AND are curious and motivated. See, with science, business, and technology, the worst case scenario is that the teacher is terrible and the textbook takes over the responsibility of pedagogy. This, along with a motivated student, is enough to salvage an education.

In the humanities and the social 'sciences' (which, in my opinion aren't really science in how we tend to define it these days — and I say that as a great admirer of sociology, political science, psychology, and economics), motivation from the student isn't enough to save them from the worst case scenario: the student graduates underdeveloped, unfocused, and scattered with only the seeds of critical mind if the curriculum and teaching is poor. And that worst case scenario happens A LOT since, as previously mentioned, lack of rigor and inconsistent teaching quality is poor across all departments at the university level. With very few exceptions, my social science peers didn't have even a high level understanding of the alternatives to a intellectual framework like positivism. I doubt they would even know what I would mean by an intellectual framework or positivism. Technical students don't need to know this (though they should), but as a social science student, you can't do your most basic work without an understanding of such topics.

College has become a replacement for high school, because high school has become a daycare. University teaching is inconsistent because universities are confused on their role in society. This teaching problem is cross-discipline. However, with the sciences, the textbooks can more or less set an expectation of learning. Other subjects require a very disciplined teaching method to be valuable — the professor must direct the path. Humanities and social sciences require boldness and direction from its teachers, which they can't do because the university is a hostile environment for professors.

The only solution I see to this problem (on a personal level) is to encourage aspiring college students to choose the HARDEST college (the reading difficulty and writing quantity should terrify the applicant), which explicitly and forcefully values teaching, and has the highest level of prestige (for when it comes time to showing that resume around).

If you're a humanities or social science major, you should be reading at least a book every week (I'll give you 2 weeks for Das Capital ;) and always MULTIPLE books on any topic. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and money. I wish someone told me this, so I hope a high school or current college student comes across this comment and thinks about transferring to a serious institution.

I don't know quite what to make of this ... It almost sounds good. But then again, it almost sounds like elitist trifling ...

You're right, I made a mistake.

I should have pointed out that I didn't do anything of this stuff while in college. I didn't really know what positivism was. I didn't read Das Kapital (I didn't even spell it right!). I didn't know what an intellectual framework was.

But I've played catch-up since graduating. I hope to save someone else that dysfunction by just going to a proper institution that cares about disciplined learning.

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