I’m not feeling especially creative right now. The one cup of coffee I have had did little more to inspire me to click on a news site, and I chose the SF Chronicle only because earlier I perused Joel Kotkin’s WSJ piece about the “The Great California Exodus,” so as the Chuck Berry line goes, I had California on my mind.
But it seems that creativity is not rewarded in California as it once was. The creative classes (at least, the productive members of the creative classes) have learned that they can live a lot better in Salt Lake City than in San Francisco (to add insult to injury, the former is more gay-friendly than the latter). Not surprising; the San Francisco Bay Area is ridiculously overpriced and over–regulated, and not only are California income taxes insanely high, but as the squeezed productive classes depart, the taxes are raised even higher on the few who remain. Meaning that California will become a place inhabited by the very rich and the very poor.
OK, so none of this makes me feel creative, but since I raised the topic, what is a person who wants to make a living being creative supposed to do? Get a college degree? Maybe, but not in creative writing!
Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.
Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he got financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. “There is not much out there, it seems,” he said.
Hey, dental hygienists are much in demand, as are x-ray techs (“future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages”). But if you don’t want to work in a hospital setting, there is always welding. Not just in Jay Leno’s California, but even here in economically depressed Michigan, welding jobs go begging. Sure, you might have to come up with a few bucks for a community college program, but then again, you might not. There are grant programs available for which you don’t have to pay anything.
However, a creative writing degree is largely worthless in the real world. Even if you want to be a successful creative writer. In that field, no one cares whether you have a piece of paper; the world either likes your stuff or it doesn’t. And even if you’re good at it and the world loves your stuff, that does not necessarily translate into money. So a degree in something like creative writing not only is no good for finding a job either in the field of creative writing, or in anything else. The creative writing degree holder who brews coffee for a living is said to highlight what is called “a widening but little-discussed labor problem.” Little discussed? Phrases like that get my attention, because they often point to things that are in fact being widely discussed, but not by the people who are supposed to be be officially tasked with discussing them.
And guess what is “little-discussed”?
The Education Bubble!
His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having long-lasting financial impact.
“You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it’s not true for everybody,” says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. “If you’re not sure what you’re going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college.”
Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor’s degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes.
Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong stuff, but this issue — The Education Bubble — has been so widely discussed that I consider a post like this to be almost filler material. Sure, I have this blog, and I haven’t had my second cup of coffee and I am not feeling creative so this is neither new nor astounding. Just ugly factoids involving modern life. Ugh. Makes me glad to be getting older, glad I never had kids, etc. There’s a generation mired in debt that can never be discharged in bankruptcy or foreclosure because they were dumb enough to sign away their lives on the dotted line, in return for something worthless. Imagine how they must feel when they hit the real world and learn that the only jobs available to them are jobs they could have gotten with high school degrees only.
Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.
In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).
According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor’s degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren’t easily replaced by computers…
If I were a young person, I’d feel swindled. Most of all, I’d be angry at myself for having been suckered into such abject fraud. But unfortunately, people don’t get angry with themselves over their own mistakes. They blame those who encouraged them, and who created opportunities for mistake making. They even blame “society,” or “the system.” I guess they could go on food stamps or other public assistance and get even more resentful and blame the people who have to provide for their needs. No one likes being supported by others. Unlike regular parasites (whose practices are limited by the health and lives of the organisms they, um, occupy), human parasites tend to irrationally hate their hosts, and some of them even want to wage war against them. But for most people indebted over useless degrees, perhaps there’s something about human nature and dignity or something they don’t teach anymore, but fortunately they prefer to work at Starbucks or even the less cool McDonalds than go on public assistance. Personally I’d rather work on cars or weld, but that’s just me. What about those who are in debt for worthless degrees but can’t change a tire?
Honestly I wish I could offer a creative solution.
Hey, how about reeducation camps?
AFTERTHOUGHT: As to when obvious bubbles finally become “discussed” by those who helped create them, why, it’s only after they have burst. At that point, the “discussion” becomes who’s to blame for the problem, and as we all know, being in the ruling class means having the power to blame others for problems the ruling class created.
MORE: I like what Glenn Reynolds said about predatory lending in the name of “higher education”:
Any other industry that did this sort of thing would be denounced as predatory, but government and higher education get a pass.
Well, under the “predatory” home loan system, the victims might lose the asset they thought they were buying, but in return, they get to walk away from the debt. Unlike a house, there is no walking away from a worthless college degree.
So why not treat degrees like houses? Say, I’d be willing to bet that a lot of these kids would be willing to hand back their diplomas in return for having the student loan forgiven.
How about a slogan?
DON’T PAY, LOSE YOUR B.A.!
Comments
11 responses to “So who’s not “discussing” the “widening but little-discussed labor problem”?”
How to Pick a college Major:
Science-How does that work?
Engineering- How do I make one?
Economics- How do I build a successful business making/distributing those?
Liberal Arts- You want I should put it in a bag for you?
It is “undiscussed” because the three-letter media outlets and newspapers have not found it yet, and the politicians are not really willing to face up that federal money has done to academia what it has done to so many other things. And no one, but no one, wants to upset the ideological apple-cart that is academia in so many college departments right now. Anyway, the mainstream media has not been watching the reasons for undergrad underemployment until someone dug out the internet cluebat recently. Or so it seems to me.
It wasn’t always this way. Back in the economically depressed mid-1970’s, I was able to get an electrical engineering degree from a top 20 university with only $3000 in student loans, paid off in 5 years. From there I went on to a decent career in commercial satcom (nowadays the field might be dotcom, but I digress.) and retired 5 years ago debt free and with a decent prospect of a financially secure retirement. That’s all gone now.
Somethings gone awry, big time. My friend’s daughter is going into undergrad bio-med engineering at Carnegie Mellon for only $54000 per year, plus room and board. What sense does that make? If she were to borrow $220k for her Bachelor’s degree, what chance would she have to be able to live after graduation, even if she could find a job? The debt is comparable to what the boomer generation would need to incur to buy our final home.
Luckily her parents can afford it (both well paid professionals), but what does that say about the inflation of costs of a basic education after high school, and the willingness of government and anxious parents to pump up the higher ed bubble? This does not bode well for the future, I will venture to say. The high cost distorted by government subsidies is keeping the majority of qualified technical and scientific students from fulfilling their dreams, or burdening them with so much debt that they will not be able to contribute to the economy once they start working. Sigh.
Number One started at a company in Boise this month, designing memory.
Graduated last month, was hired before he completed that, his final, term. Electrical engineering and computer science is obviously in demand. The problem is, the “dear ones” who fail to see the need for math, logic and hard work.
Number Two is working for me, since he failed to pass one of the core requirements for graduation these days, Women’s Studies. The “F” led to a loss of scholarship funding, and destroyed his faith in the competence of those appointed to mentor him. He’s still “insensitive” when it comes to Womyn’s Issues, but is learning my business. And the curriculum I require is tougher than that of most undergraduate Business or Economics courses.
Number One had National Merit Scholar monies, as well as several other awards. So, basically a low debt load. Number Two got out before the numbers ran up. Losing his scholarships for failing WS was the icing on the cake.
I chuckled when I read that a creative writer failed to turn his craft into compensation. Guy sure seems creative.
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And the really crazy thing is, schools generally don’t make you get any practical experience while you’re there. Often you can get some if you go for it, and there are internship programs and the like, but students are not told that practical experience is as important if not more important to their post-graduation chances of getting a job as the degree itself is.
This, I suppose, is the natural consequence of the specialization of educators– they’re less and less likely to do anything else besides teach, they don’t have much to do with the practical side of things, and so they can’t pass real skills along. (Except, of course, how to succeed in academia.) And they’re not interested in encouraging internships that might decrease the value of the part of education that they offer.
In my opinion, internships should be absolutely mandatory in college.
This is off subject. I somehow stumbled on to your website and I noted the pix of Puff. So I clicked there because my wife and I like pits, and JoJo also lived to be 15 years of age. We too had her put down at the house because she always hated to go to the vets. Our vet did not offer the pre-sedation and in retrospect I would have asked for that had I known how the other med worked. As it was we were petting and talking to her here as the med hit, and it was over quickly. But, it would have been better this way for JoJo, and for us too. Thank you.
My advice to high school graduates is several.
1. Get a job right out of high school. A year working in the real economy will improve your attitude, improve your general knowledge, and greatly improve your chances of success in college, should you decide to go.
2. If you like working with your hands think about construction, skilled trades, machinist, plumber, electrician, electronic tech, truck driving, railroading, mining, etc. Senior tradesmen make more money than nearly all college grads. You start off without a crushing student loan, and you are doing work you like.
3. Join the armed forces. It’s good experience, well respected, and Uncle Sam will help pay your college tuition.
4. If you do go to college, major in something worthwhile. Engineering, chemistry, computer science, physics, biology. Don’t waste your time and money on gender studies, black studies, sociology, political science, art history, journalism, creative writing, business administration, education.
Giving a high school grad this book won’t hurt:
http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-ebook/dp/B006N0THIM
Our government always seems to finance or guarantee anything labeled a “Noble and Applaud-able Effort” while totally ignoring results.
Lazlo,
LOL!
The non-dischargability of student loan debt is not a law of nature. It is an amendment to the US bankruptcy Code, that was only enacted a few years ago. We could ask congress to change it.