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.
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 imagine that re-stating this metric by degree will tell a very different story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the case in Australia
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".
This problem should concern all of us.
When you apply for an Engineering license, the Engineering board doesn't care that you completed 100% of your Engineering courses but never received a degree because you forgot to take History 101.
Because of this, it's even worse in that it's a sunk cost. Better to go ahead and drop out earlier rather than later, because not only will you not have a degree, you'll have wasted that many years for no measurable improvement in hiring potential.
People would "flip" their college education for a high-paying job
Easy loans made it possible for everyone to participate
Education prices inflated faster than core inflation, setting a higher hurdle for students
There are fewer jobs at palatable salaries (various reasons)
Now we have boatloads of students saddled with an education that they can't pay off
Same thing applies here. You recruit a bunch of people who have no business being at college and certainly can't afford it, convince them that they NEED college and should take on student loans, they struggle, graduate and have no real marketable skills. Bank that made the loan hassles the student and when millions can't pay them back, I'm guessing we have another bailout on our hands. Glad we learn our lesson last time!
The people stuck with the debt at the bottom of the pile don't get bailouts.
Also the debt is written off after a certain number of years and the monthly payment is always calculated at a relatively modest amount compared to your earnings and deducted straight from your paycheck.
It's not counted as debt for the purposes of getting a loan or mortgage either, so essentially it's not something you really have to worry about as you will never get getting a court summons or baliffs through your door unless you have deliberately defrauded them.
How is it in the USA? Are you constantly chased for the debt regardless of your circumstances?
There are some exceptions, but generally student loans are something that you're stuck with. That's to say, you can't just shed them in bankruptcy proceedings.
Viewed in that light, you can see why so many people are very, very upset by all this. Politicians, the media, their parents, their friends have all told them "get a degree or you'll be a [metaphorical] fry cook" and now it's "get a degree if you want to be able to even get a job as a fry cook." Rephrased, it's "a bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma", and so it becomes about the fact that you got the degree at all that matters. If you don't, there are 199 people (who have the same (lack of) experience you do), but do have the degree. Theirs goes in the "scan again to filter for some other reason" pile, yours goes in the trash.
As far as the the ones who racked up debt AND didn't finish: they've got the worst of both worlds.
Forget about majors, forget about "putting in dues", and start thinking about a country and society (I'm talking about the US here) that tells you that you MUST go to college in order to get a job, forces you into debt to do so (not everyone is grant material - the recent stats say 90% of grads take on debt) and then tells you there aren't enough jobs for everyone (for the well known reasons, but I'd put automation at the top of the list these days. Recent stats say 3+ people are available for work for each job opening) and you'll understand why these people are mortified.
It's also clear where all this leads, to the dismay of many: a guaranteed income society. We'll be forced to accept that many, perhaps even MOST people will not be needed for work. There will be nothing for them to do, and nothing we can do about it. The people that do work will be the robot designers, maintainers, politicians, managers, personal service people, and some miscellaneous workers. Everyone else will be part of a "sports, arts, and leisure" society. That might be 50-100 years out, but it's coming, and no one should have any illusions about what that means. Our conception of our societies as defined by work will need to change, and we'll need to accept that people who do not work are not lazy, ne'er do wells or parasites, but that they are the result of the transition to post-work (and hopefully post-scarcity) societies. The calls for bringing back factory jobs, re-empowering unions, etc. are short-sighted and misguided; there's no turning back the tide, and we should adjust our thinking accordingly.
Finally, it should be clear that many right here on this site, and those that they work with are the ones helping to create this new world. An automated one, an easier one, and hopefully, a better one.
There is ALWAYS useful work to do sometimes there's just of shortage of funds or skilled workers to do it. Look at our aging infrastructure, fix our bridges, tunnels, roads, buildings, houses, etc. Care for our old and sick, learn art and design and make the world more beautiful, engineer spaceships, create amazing entertainment, etc. etc.
Don't confuse market inefficiency with a lack of useful things to do.
It's not Utopian horseshit. Please be less dismissive of ideas.
>>learn art and design and make the world more beautiful, engineer spaceships, create amazing entertainment
Lets not pretend that every human is capable of doing any of this if they only had the time. The people who are capable will do it, the rest won't.
Yep, the only problem is the amount of this work. Fixing or building a road or a bridge takes a lot less people than it used to. Trends in other fields are similar. You can argue that this can be compensated for by building more or better bridges, but at some point the society's appetite for useful bridges will hit a cost barrier.
This is an old game played by most societies known as the 'Debtors Game' (see the book Games People Play). It's a way to force younger people to work, which is ironic today, given there is no work to have so it's just creating a new lower class of those in servitude. It's the new serfdom.
I'd say the people working on robots and stuff would have no incentive to work. They would simply become part of the 'non-working' class.
Boredom. Hooking up with aliens. To get away from disliked family and hometown. Status. Desire for structure and order in their lives. Patriotism. Family tradition. Basically the reasons people join the military today.
It can't work. Leisured aristocracies become decadent, dysfunctional, hedonists. People on reservations with free food become violent drug addicts. The human animal can't cope with a struggle-less existence.
If automation leads to a society as you've described then automation will be stopped.
Only a fool would think that a degree in underwater basket weaving would provide the same employment prospects as a degree in any of the STEM fields, but fools are precisely the target market for institutions providing such courses.
But it's easy to blame the schools. In my experience, students don't really make career choices (like picking a major) by weighing the economic costs and benefits. Our current culture in college encourages students to take on massive amounts of debt regardless of their field. For many liberal arts degrees, this is probably a foolish financial decision. But for many college freshman, the apparent difficulty of a subject is considered thoroughly, while the job prospects of a career path are a secondary consideration.
Except Chemistry, biology, and biochemistry (massive R&D cuts by the pharmaceutical industry has flooded the market with experienced scientists).
Except CivEng (oops, not much new construction).
STEM degrees are often considered harder by employers, so for many jobs that don't strictly require them, they're used as signalling mechanisms in exactly the way that having a degree at all used to be a signal. That means there's a problem with encouraging more people to get such degrees because you flood the market with STEM degrees and repeat the process of devaluing the signal.
What does that leave? CS degrees are currently very much in demand, but will that remain the case for the next 10-20 years? Will it even be true next year? There were a lot of people who had employment trouble after the first bubble burst, I would hate to see that happen again. Not to mention that this is hardly a solution that will work on a large scale. The industry does not require a million new software engineers every year.
Would anyone have predicted ten years ago that going to law school would be a disastrous financial and career decision for many thousands of people? That was supposed to be one of those "safe" direct-to-career educations. Hasn't worked out that way.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/education/average-student-...
Until "official" degrees stop being an unspoken requirement when considering job applicants, startups such as Khan Academy will remain useful, but ultimately powerless to truly disrupt education.
This may have been exacerbated by stupid government targets to get, say, at least 50% of all pupils into university. And in at least some of those cases, you're only going because you're brainwashed into it.
I'm in my 30s, and I have quite a lot of various skills, but spotting areas of opportunity is still not among those skills.
When incentives aren't aligned with human nature, inefficiencies amplify and eventually break whichever system the government stepped in to fix.
This article helps explain why young people should be upset.
First, public educations are a crap shoot. A high school diploma is a joke, it doesn't even guarantee basic literacy or numeracy. This is a big reason why white collar jobs have increasingly been forced to rely on other credentials. Despite vastly increasing per student spending over the years the quality of education hasn't improved at all and by some measures has gotten worse.
Second, student loan debt is out of control. It's too easy for people to sign themselves up for huge amounts of debt regardless of their future job opportunities. This distorts the market and creates an education bubble.
Third, society has turned its back on "dirty jobs". It's becoming less and less common for folks, especially middle and upper middle class young adults, to aspire toward jobs that involve manual labor. There's nothing wrong with construction, welding, automotive repair, culinary arts, etc. Trade schools are faster and cheaper than a 4 year college, and they typically leave a graduate with very solid prospects at gaining a fairly well paying job just out of school. If more people made that choice unemployment would be a lot lower.
Fourth, "vanity degrees" are far too common these days, partly for the reasons listed above. If you need higher education to further your career then if you pursue a degree with very shaky career prospects and you go into massive debt to do so then quite frankly you made a very bad life choice, and all of the people who helped you do it (your family and friends, your counselors, your loan officers, etc.) are partly to blame as well. Yes there is value to studying history, or English literature, but you should never for even a single moment fool yourself into believing that you are doing anything other than digging your own financial grave when you are indulging in those majors.
Unfortunately for a lot of middle and upper middle class 18-25 year olds there has come to be a great deal of pressure behind taking the same "acceptable" educational and career track. High school -> 4 year arts & science degree at a prestigious school -> white collar job. If you are in high school or college right now I urge you to challenge this. Look at your career prospects and finances seriously. Consider becoming a STEM major if possible. If that's not feasible consider switching to a trade school. And try to get yourself into the job market early even while you are in school to build up your resume and your skills. It's far, far easier to study history and English lit as a hobby in your free time than it is to build a well paying career on such things.
Construction jobs, for example, are pretty much none to be had at the moment, and wages have been significantly falling in real terms for some decades. My grandfather made a middle-class wage as a carpenter working on house construction in the 1950s, but the crew that built my parents' recent-ish suburban home were all making minimum wage assembling factory-cut materials (and there's oversubscribed demand even for those jobs). Auto mechanic is not a particularly good job market at the moment, either. Skilled welding is indeed in demand, but it takes a substantial amount of time to build up the level of skill that's currently in demand (with the prevalence of machine welds, there's no longer a smooth on-the-job skills progression).
I'm not sure it's actually a better bet than getting an English BA and looking for an office job, though. Both have high unemployment rates currently, but blue-collar-worker unemployment rates are even higher than English-major unemployment rates.
It's also nonsense that unemployment would be lower if more people went to trade schools. That may be a solid choice for an individual to make, but if an extra 30,000 Americans a year chose to become licensed plumbers it would completely wash out the market. Unemployment is high in the US at the moment for demand side reasons.
Finally, trades jobs are cyclical with the construction industry and many tradespeople have spent the last 4-5 years underemployed because of the very sluggish construction industry.
You should get a degree if you can, period. Whether you work as a fry cook or not. Education is worth it. It has value, to you and to society, apart from its utility as a factor infiltering people for job positions.
No one wants to see the US become even more uneducated.If you want to get cynical about the job market (and young people dohave a right to be cynical about it), try thinking of it this way. Nodoubt most have heard the old adage, "You need to sell yourself." Anotherway to think of this is that "jobs" are really a question of convincingsomeone else (not necessarily an employer, but maybe a client) to pay you.That is always what it comes down to. This could be an elaborate processinvolving educational degrees, past accomplishments, recommendations,etc. or, in today's world, it might be something like the startupsdiscussed here on HN: You announce a bit of software and a website,and the thundering herd starts clicking. Some of the herd is willingto pay. If that percentage is large enough, you have a runaway success,something like Dropbox.Those who are paying you are not asking to see your resume. The onlypeople who cared that you graduated from MIT were the VC and their clientswho funded you. That is, if you were funded. Don't kid yourself. The mostimportant people you convinced to pay you werenot the investors. Theywere the customers. In the end what mattered is whether customers wereconvinced to pay you. How they arrived at that decision might actuallybe quite simple (and quite arbitrary).
Now, maybe using the web as your medium you manange to become wealthyovernight. But that does not reduce the long term value of your degreefrom MIT. The degree is not necessarily the cause of your success(e.g. maybe you cannot prove that it was). Wealth can be made withor without education. (That has always been true, otherwise smallbusiness, which is the majority of business in the US, would cease toexist.) Technology allows this to happen now in a way never before seenin history.
But...
Education has value to you and to society because education will makeyour life more interesting and an educated society is better than anuneducated one.These are tough times. But things go in cycles. If you skip education,and then years from now things get better, you may regret it. Get aneducation as early as possible (i.e. if you have the money, do it). Itwill benefit everyone in the long term.
Things go in cycles. It's hard to see this when you are young. This is because you have not yet lived through an economic cycle as a person of working age.
I fall into the "some college" category. I have no issue with mopping floors, unloading trucks, waiting tables, etc. What I have an issue with is the number of applications I've filled out without getting so much as an interview. Here's my view in a nutshell: I am not above being a dishwasher. I am, however, above begging to be a dishwasher. You can only fill out so many applications for employment at literally the lowest level before you start to wonder when stealing becomes justified.