Comment by zecho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zecho | Hacker News Reader

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Again, let's talk about a point of fact here, rather than a myth that it's humanities students who are worse off.

Since the 70s, the percentage of students with bachelor's degrees in the humanities has not increased. It's always been around 16-17% of total degrees earned.

Social science has been dropping as a percentage of students with earned degrees in those fields, but not by much.

Math and science has always hovered around 8% of total degrees earned.

Computer science (amazingly) has not grown as a percentage of total degrees earned since the 70s.

Business majors haven't grown as a percentage since the 80s.

Education majors have fallen dramatically each decade, taken up primarily by other fields.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.as...

And yet, here we are across the board, with low wages (comparatively to previous generations, comparatively to older workers, comparatively in almost every way measurable), massively increasing education costs and a really, really poor job outlook for young workers.

It's a canard, plain and simple.

> And yet, here we are across the board

This is your incorrect premise. Wages aren't low "across the board" and the job outlook isn't poor "across the board". They are low/poor for jobs that have high supply and/or low demand. What you've basically said is that the supply of various degree holders has remained the same. But that doesn't mean demand hasn't changed because of globalization/automation/[whatever]ation. You can call it a canard until you're blue in the face, but how do you argue with:

Unemployment for arts: 10%

Unemployment for engineering: 7%

Unemployment for medical/health services: 4% [0]

Also, see the recent "Downward Ramp" article on the NYT [1].

[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19/unemployment-colleg...

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/the-downward-ramp....

EDIT: BTW, I'm not saying the student loan/debt issue is not a problem. I definitely agree that it is.

Elsewhere in this thread I've addressed this. I'm not convinced that a mismatch in supply of majors and demand for recent grads of those majors can account for much of the boomerang phenomena. It's far too prevalent among under-30 to be reduced to this.

Also, my use of across the board was probably inappropriate. I agree. I should have said in general instead. There are some fields, primarily STEM and the service industry with high wages and/or good job outlook, but for the other sectors, this is not the case at all.

That's fair. And you're probably correct that there's more to it.

Another issue could be our unwillingness to push young people towards trades that will be in demand for the foreseeable future.

I know plumbing and painting contractors who make six figures. Yet, I rarely hear anyone say "Hey, have you considered a career owning your own plumbing business". Instead, it's "Study what you love and rack up some debt."

Speaking of plumbers, an anecdote. I had to have a plumber at my house a few months ago and I flat asked him why I had to pay him so much.

He looked at me (I'm 30, he was in his 60s) and said, "because people your age don't want to become plumbers."

I really do think the community and technical college system should be better utilized and promoted, but I'm not going to blame four-year college degree students for economic problems well outside their control.

So as the economy has changed dramatically people are going into the same majors in about the same percentages? Doesn't that seem like a problem on its face?

Maybe? There was a time in the recent past where any college degree could get you a good job in nearly any field. That is no longer the case. Also, one would expect that students move with the economy, but that doesn't appear to happen, either.

My gut says the problem can't be solved by changing the nature of students. If they go to school without regard for job prospects, and we continue to believe that education is important regardless of job prospects, then we should look for other solutions. Changing human nature doesn't seem to me the best way to go about that when there are many other issues at play accounting for boomerang twenty-somethings (high school debt, mostly government issued, appears to be the lowest hanging fruit).

>There was a time in the recent past where any college degree could get you a good job in nearly any field.

When was this? I graduated a long, long time ago and don't remember any such time.

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