Study Analyzes Recent Grads' Unemployment By Major

Hugh Pickens writes "A new report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce called 'Hard Times: College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings: Not All College Degrees Are Created Equal' analyzes unemployment by major. It shows that not enough students — and their families who are also taking on student loans — are asking what their college major is worth in the workforce. 'Too many students aren't sure what job they could get after four, five or even six years of studying a certain major and racking up education loans,' writes Singletary. 'Many aren't getting on-the-job training while they are in school or during their semester or summer breaks. As a result, questions about employment opportunities or what type of job they have the skills to attain are met with blank stares or the typical, "I don't know."' The reports found that the unemployment rate for recent graduates is highest in architecture (13.9 percent) because of the collapse of the construction and home-building industry and not surprisingly, unemployment rates are generally higher in non-technical majors (PDF), such as the arts (11.1 percent), humanities and liberal arts (9.4 percent), social science (8.9 percent) and law and public policy (8.1 percent)."

Comments

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[AmberBlackCat]

It's not that people think it's only good for a job. It's that you need to have some expectation of getting a return on the investment in order to justify what the education costs. Basically people can't afford to learn things.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[FoolishOwl]

I am.

I am also tired of a model of social organization that cannot cope with the implications of exponentially growing productivity. I am becoming increasingly convinced that most paid labor amounts to busywork.

Re:Degrees are about worthless

[DigiShaman]

But getting past the HR filters are in fact the most important part of getting a job in the first place. Fuck experience. That's just for nogotiating a salary in the last minute. Some companies these days think you can learn on the job depending on the industry. Some even prefer you do it their way only. Taking on massive debt is required just to get a living wage. For most, it's purely survival.

I got a well paying job now but plan on going back to college. I'm looking to upgrade my HR access badge. That's it. Pay now or pay later.

In some countries like Kenya, you need something of a masters just to clean toilets. It's that competitive. Getting a degree these days is a required scam for most.

Re:Degrees are about worthless

[trout007]

Here are two true stories.

I worked as a support contractor on a NASA center. A friend of mine was a PhD Chemist on the same contract and NASA wanted to hire him. They wrote a job description for what they needed which he was qualified for. He submitted his resume through the USAJOBS.gov website but didn't get through the HR filter. They actually didn't get any qualified applicants but it took 6 months to put the ad back up and by then they lost funding.

I saw a NASA job that was right up my alley and I knew the people who would be reviewing the resumes that got through the filter. I put my resume in and under the "other information" I copied and pasted the WHOLE job listing. I got through the HR filter and got the interview. The person I knew looked at my resume which included the copied and pasted job listing under "other information". When I interviewed he asked me about it and said it was a pretty clever way of bypassing the filter. I got the job.

Re:So, when did you go to school.

[exploder]

In this day and age, if you want to get through college in 4 -5 years, you need loans or rich parents - and that going to a cheap state school.

Not necessarily. I was getting paid pretty well as a code monkey in the late 90s/early 00s, but without a degree I knew my prospects were limited (and I just didn't want to do it anymore, either). I swallowed my pride and moved back in with my (not rich) parents and spent two years at the local CC taking gen-ed classes. With Pell grants and, after the first year, a merit-based SMART grant, I was able to afford books, tuition, a modest contribution to the household, and some spending money, without borrowing a dime. (I had not saved money during my previous employment--not something to be proud of, but relevant to my anecdote.)

I did borrow some after I transferred to the flagship state university to finish my BS, but we're talking maybe $10k over two years. I had a work-study position that didn't quite make ends meet, but essentially I was paid to sit behind a counter and spent 90% of that time studying. I made the choice to take on that debt rather than find a part-time job, but if it had been important to me not to borrow anything, I know I could have made that work.

From 2005 to present, I've done a BS, MS, and am about two years from a PhD, borrowing a total of $10k (the graduate work was all funded, including a stipend). I did get (crucial!) support from my parents when I was getting started, but it was room and board, not a huge wad of cash. I had to be willing to do my first years at the CC (since my parents don't live near a university), and I had to get my BS from an in-state public university (luckily mine was pretty good). And I am fortunate to be in a STEM field, which let me get that SMART grant and good funding for my graduate work.

Having said this, I feel like I need to add that I am 100% for student loans and especially grants. I'm just pointing out that if you're willing to work and compromise a bit, it's by no means impossible to get a degree (or several) without burying yourself in debt.

No, you can't

[rsilvergun]

to get your master earning 45 to 60k/yr then your bachelor's at $13k/yr. A 60 hour work week at $7.25/hr (current federal min wage) is $20,880 GROSS. If you don't have kids you pay about 12% of that in taxes just to state & fed, to say nothing of sales tax (Phoenix AZ taxes food you know).

You also probably had a supervisor happy to be supportive because he/she is looking forward to getting someone with a Masters Degree w/o having to engage HR. Oh, and my local University's science & engineering curriculum specifically states you should not be working even part time while trying to pass them. Try taking compilers or operating systems while working 60 hours a week. Yes, people do it. Rare geniuses for whom this stuff comes naturally. A certain percentage of the population is fully energized after a 4 hour sleep. These people have a natural edge. Maybe you're one of them. But if that's the case you're where you are today because of good fortune, dumb luck and the roll of the die. The other option is you went to a diploma mill that doesn't teach anything. I've got a few of those at my job. It's weird. Ask 'em what they learned and they can't tell you...

This is something I just can't get the right wing (who are the ones that bring this argument up the most) to get: The lives of People who make minimum wage are a never ending wave of problems. Life is different when you can't just fix stuff when it breaks, buy ice cream for your kid when they get hurt. You end up trying to make up for the lack of money with time and effort. If you're one of those rare people whose genetics makes it easy for you, well then bully for you. If you went to a diploma mill then all that happened is you got fleeced (wait till you get out of school with that 'Masters' degree. You think HR departments don't know a diploma mill when they see one :) ). It's like those stories about people cutting back and paying off $200k of debt in just a few years. They always neglect to tell you that the family that did it had $70 or $80 k/year coming in. You can only cut back so much before life becomes impossible. I don't care what Will Buckley's telling you...

Re:No, you can't

[Shining Celebi]

A 60 hour work week at $7.25/hr (current federal min wage) is $20,880 GROSS.

Time-and-a-half.

If you don't have kids you pay about 12% of that in taxes just to state & fed, to say nothing of sales tax (Phoenix AZ taxes food you know).

I don't remember how much I worked out that I paid in taxes - my state also taxes food, though - but you can deduct college expenses.

You also probably had a supervisor happy to be supportive because he/she is looking forward to getting someone with a Masters Degree w/o having to engage HR.

My primary job was working at a pizza place. I don't think he really cared about my computer science degree. The owner was very supportive, though - I didn't write my own schedule, but close enough to it. To some degree the owner was supportive of that in general since he mostly hired kids and to some degree I earned it by doing my best.

Later on I worked two jobs, the other one being an assistantship. Technically, you weren't supposed to have another job if you were given an assistantship, but I didn't tell.

One thing that did save me a significant amount of money in the long run was attending a community college for the first two years, though, and making sure that I was taking classes that would transfer and count towards my degree at the "real" university.

Try taking compilers or operating systems while working 60 hours a week.

I was only working 40 during school, and it went fine.

Maybe you're one of them. But if that's the case you're where you are today because of good fortune, dumb luck and the roll of the die. The other option is you went to a diploma mill that doesn't teach anything.

Well, I need 9-10 hours of sleep a night, personally, so I didn't luck out there. But yes, I got a lucky roll of the dice. I was born in America, and not North Korea. I won the genetic lottery to some degree. I was raised in an environment conducive to learning and education. But these are largely social issues that wouldn't be fixed if we could wave a magic wand and make college free.

And while I don't think my college was super-duper rigorous, it's definitely no diploma mill. It was maybe more theoretical than technical, but we still wrote compilers, and doing a "real" project for a client in industry or in the faculty was a prerequisite for graduation. The program was ABET accredited and declared a CAE by the NSA - though for all I know, diploma mills can get all that too, I just know they liked bragging about it. ;)

This is something I just can't get the right wing (who are the ones that bring this argument up the most) to get: The lives of People who make minimum wage are a never ending wave of problems. Life is different when you can't just fix stuff when it breaks, buy ice cream for your kid when they get hurt. You end up trying to make up for the lack of money with time and effort. If you're one of those rare people whose genetics makes it easy for you, well then bully for you.

I don't think anyone has ever suggested that I was right wing before. I'm a proud big-government tax-and-spend liberal.

I agree with what you're saying. If my parents had made minimum wage, chances are things would have worked out so that I never went to college, even though they didn't directly financially support my education. If I had been kicked out at 16, I likely would have never gone. Going to college is too hard and too expensive, and I think everyone should have a college education even if it has nothing to do with their job.

But the claim was that "nobody could pay for college without loans or wealthy parents" and that was flat-out wrong, because I did. Is it much harder than it needs to be? Yes. Does the difficulty and cost present a barrier to entry for huge swaths of the population?

Re:No, you can't

[drsquare]

You'll find that the top universities actually ban you from working because it will interfere with your studies. And it's pretty optimistic to think you can get 40 hours a week whenever you want them, when millions with degrees and work experience can't get any work, or only part time work.

Re:The sorted list

[PPH]

Journalism has a lower unemployment rate than engineering? Wow.

What happened to the 'story at eleven' meme?

Look at the list from the point of view of ease of outsourcing and it will start to make sense. Education, health, agriculture, natural resources and journalism are all thing you have to do on location. Engineering, computers and math can be done anywhere. And they command higher salaries, so the motivation to seek cheaper labor is higher.

College vs. Small Business/Trades

[Paul Fernhout]

Hard to say where might you be now by putting all that energy, intelligence, and creativity into your own small software business or an apprentiship in a trade instead of college?
http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/05/25/6717536-the-entrepreneur-whos-paying-kids-not-to-go-to-college

But either way is a roll fo the dice...

Make sure you get enough vitamin D, omega 3s, and vegetables to keep going at that pace.
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[FoolishOwl]

No rigorous study, but my experience of work, and what I have seen of friends and family.

For instance, for several years I worked for a company that printed blueprints. Typically, an order would involve many sets of prints, each set dozens of pages long or longer, the paper typically 42"x30" or 36"x24". We would take the paper off printers, straighten the pages, count them, staple them, and ship them. There would be half a dozen or a dozen sets. Most of the architects and construction firms involved were regular customers. So, for a particular building project, we'd ship to a particular set of people. And the next day, we'd print and ship revised copies of the same blueprints of the same project to the same people. For a particular project, this would be repeated for several days in a row; usually, after a week or two, there would be another several rounds of revised blueprints. And those same people would receive blueprints for many different projects on the same day. So, one person would be receiving several hundred sheets of large, highly detailed diagrams, each day, each only varying slightly from those received the previous day.

Eventually, it occurred to me that it was extremely implausible that any of the people receiving these documents was actually going through hundreds of pages of documents and comparing them, in detail, to practically identical documents received the previous day. To make things worse, the blueprints were printed from PDFs -- anyone could read them without special software. I've been on job sites, and seen well-thumbed sets of blueprints, but the foremen generally had laptops, and could view those blueprints as PDFs, without the trouble of printing them. They may have good reason to prefer physical prints, but even so, that wouldn't require a tenth the number of physical copies we produced. The only way I could understand it was that there were legal or contractual obligations to produce physical copies of blueprints whenever a change to the blueprints was made. As I later found out, the company I worked for was a relatively small one in a crowded field of blueprint production.

So, from what I could see, I was working hard, tending machines and assembling tangible products, but I was producing nothing useful; instead, it was a near total waste of resources.