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

education is only useful for jobs

[liamevo]

Anyone else sick of encountering this kind of thinking?

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[couchslug]

If you are rich enough to use it in furtherance of your hobbies, then by all means do so.

The problem is that schools SELL education and are not in the business of telling students that a particular major is a stupid choice if you want food, clothing, and shelter after graduation.

Once you have money, you have the power to pursue other interests. If you don't have money, you are, generally speaking, "fucked", and it's not out of line to remind potential education consumers of that.

MANY young people entering college have heads full of feathers and won't figure this out on their own.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[Will.Woodhull]

Collegiate neocolonialism is a more fitting term.

Catch the suckers while they are young, hook them with blue sky visions of grand careers. Milk them, but oh so gently so their tits don't get sore, with student loans that will put them in debt for years to come. What better way could there be to assure that your tenured nest is comfortably feathered? Of course you want to do this in such a way that not only will they pay and pay for their undergraduate years, but they will also desperately seek to continue the experience by doing post graduate studies, with yet more loans. Gee, if you structure it right, you can make sure that in order to avoid facing a debt they do not have the skills to pay down, they will need to keep learning all the stuff you do not mind teaching, and that they have no time left over to learn any of the stuff that would be useful in getting a real job.

A lot of employers really like the idea of having a pool of warm bodies to draw from when they need more help. A student with a B.S. or B.A. is a wonderful thing to hire, because they have demonstrated that they know how to be mushrooms (one hand washes the other, you have to go along to get along, etc) and they have these wonderfully huge debts to pay off so they cannot just walk away. It doesn't matter to the employer what the degree is in; all baccalaureates are interchangeable cogs as far as they are concerned. What matters is that college graduates have proven that they have what it takes to keep themselves in the dark and eat whatever sh*t is fed to them, and that they have fscking huge debts so that when you push them a little beyond their moral or ethical boundaries, they will go along with it rather than facing an unemployment line.

In the USA, it has taken more than 50 years for colleges, businesses, and government (student loan programs, etc) to develop this neocolonial system of eating its young. The system has not grown very fast, chiefly because it depends on a kind of doublethink blindness of what is really happening among its supporters, and you can never build things at speed when you need to keep one hand from knowing what the other is doing. But at this point the overwhelming majority of professors, business leaders, and civil servants who administer the programs are products of the system itself. That is, any tenured professor with less than 30 years in his c.v. is a product of the system itself and learned how to go along to get along, not to look too closely at what is happening around him, etc, etc. It lets them preserve the fantasy that they are really good people who are doing the best that can be done in a bad situation.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[toadlife]

College is not more expensive today. It's just that the state has subsidized less and less of the cost over the couple of decades, making it appear to cost more.

This what people 40 and older don't get when they bitch and moan about students not being able to work their way through college like *they did* when they went to state school. It'd be pretty damn easy to work your way through college if tuition were still around $1000 a semester, but it's not 1980 any more.

Banks, of course, have stepped in and filled the gap. I've seen a few prognosticators predict that the next financial bubble to pop will be student loans.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[bgeezus]

That's a rather uninformed point of view. Many graduate students go to school "for free" because it is part of their compensation for performing a job (research, teaching, etc.). Grad students who are being paid to do research are generally being paid out of faculty grants -- money that's coming from the federal government (i.e., taxpayers) or from private institutions, NOT from undergraduate tuition. Grad students who are being paid to teach or to grade assignments, etc., are playing an active role in your education. If the school doesn't have graduate students, then it has to hire someone else to perform those same duties. Not to say that there aren't advantages/disadvantages to going to a school without a graduate program, but it's quite myopic to think that most of your tuition was going to support grad students.

Re:education is only useful for jobs

[DogDude]

Wow. That's a pretty big chip on your shoulder. I'm not going to try to knock it off (not that I could), but I disagree completely. There's no organized system to create unemployed, in debt college graduates. You're taking a shortcut in that you're manipulating a very complex system in order to fit a story that only exists in your head that you have created out of your own anger and frustration. The requirements for being employed in this economy have changed, AND the US is in the middle of a big, permanent, unavoidable downward adjustment in standard of living. College educations are invaluable in teaching people how to reason and creating well-rounded human beings.

Re:Degrees are about worthless

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

err.

Sure, in IT.

You try to get a job in applied materials or life sciences or education.

Just try explaining to the nice HR person you like hanging around a lot of prepubescent boys as a "hobby."

Narrow education is the new stupid

[gestalt_n_pepper]

I see the results of "engineering-only" education every day. I see co-workers utterly lacking critical thinking skills or any curiosity, passively accepting whatever the mainstream media or the software vendors tell them, and who get insanely defensive when you poke holes in the wet toilet paper of their core political/cultural/technical/economic/religious beliefs. I see walking, living proof every day that technical competence != global intelligence.

Some of this is neurological, of course. I work in the software industry, an area filled with more than its share of mildly autistic souls. The rest, however, could have had their worldview drastically enhanced with a couple of courses in comparative cultural anthropology, a few philosophy courses discussing epistemology and some critical studies of human history, just as the liberal arts crew would benefit hugely from some significant study of math, physics and engineering.

Not surprising

[bmajik]

Having everyone go to college hasn't made Americans smarter.

It has made universities dumber.

Even though I had been coding since 5th grade, I didn't know what I wanted to go to university for until late into highschool, when ultimately it occured to me that I may as well get the paper that says I can do what I already enjoyed doing.

My dad called some larger IT and software employers' recruiting departments and asked what sort of degrees they screen for, and more importantly, what degree-issuing institutions they look for.

Their answer was, roughly, if you have a CS degree, it doesn't matter where its from (unless its from MIT :))

So I went through the Barrrons College guide and made a list of schools that had CS and separate compE programs; i ranked them by cost and by SAT score of average incoming class. I restricted my search to schools that were ranked above ... 50th or 100th? place in "engineering", however arbitrary that is.

Then I went and talked to those schools, got a rough idea of which ones would give me what kinds of academic scholarships, and then chose a subset of state universities to apply to.

Part of this process is being honest about yourself. I beleive that technically, I met all of the admission requirements to get into Caltech. I noted howeer, that their average incoming freshman had SAT and ACT scores around 5 to 10% higher than where I had tested. Additionally, tuition at that time was around $30k/year.

I figured that there was little sense in struggling to get into the bottom half of the Caltech freshman class, only to pay a six figure sum and to have to work my ass off just to keep my head above water and hopefully graduate. Certainly I expect I would have had a more rigorous experience, and networked with higher caliber professors and students, and perhaps had a better pick of employers for internships and eventual employment.

But honestly, while I have _some_ smarts and _some_ drive, there are obviously people who have more of _both_, and I see little reason to compete with them if I don't have to :)

I was accepted to UIUC (then a top 5 CS school), but they knew they were a competitive program and they offered me no financial incentives to attend.

Ultimately, I went to the University of Nebraska, which offered me a full ride, allowed me to coast in non-interesting courses, and allowed me plenty of 1:1 time with professors who were interesting. The more mid-pack freshman class allowed me to differentiate myself easily from my peers in areas where I excelled.

I left school with a good GPA, plenty of knowledge that I didn't have when I started, and a full time offer at a software company you may have heard of. And no student debt.

The point of this is that if we're not equipping American kids to do even a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis; if they have no idea why they are _going_ to a university... well, they probably have no business going, and it is abhorrent that US taxpayers are paying for them to go.

I am romantically in favor of the idea of the mysty eyed dreamer going to school for indian tribal botany or some other esoteric pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. That's actually probably closer to the original idea of the university. But that experience is something he or she needs to pay for privately -- asking me to help is ridiculous. Making it national policy and funding it at the federal level is suicidal.

The debt-treadmill of university is insidious. Making it easy to get the money to go means more people are going, and in response to the rising costs that are a natural consequence of more demand, the Feds loan out more money. And so the cycle continues, and we have more and more entrants with less and less ability to pay who have no idea what they are going to do once their 4-6 years of partying are over and they need to start paying off the debt they accured.

Re:Not surprising

[timeOday]

Even though I had been coding since 5th grade, I didn't know what I wanted to go to university for until late into highschool, when ultimately it occured to me that I may as well get the paper that says I can do what I already enjoyed doing.

Stop right there. People like me and you have conservative path to moderate success, which is a good thing for the bulk of the population to do. But based on the sentence I quoted, have you ever stopped to think how lucky you are to be born with an interest and talent that also happens to be one of the more reliable ways to make a living? Seriously... imagine if the biggest sector of the US economy was ballet. Would your rational process translated into success for you as a ballet dancer? Or might you struggle?

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...