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Value of University Degree Continues To Decline (www.cbc.ca)
BarbaraHudson writes: Following up from an earlier report from Statistics Canada (pdf), the Parliamentary Budget Officer warns that an increasing number of university graduates are overqualified for their jobs. The CBC reports: "Last year, 40 per cent of university graduates aged 25-34 were overqualified for their job. Five years ago, that percentage was only 36 per cent. In 1991, it hit a low of 32 per cent, or less than one out of every three university graduates. The problem is bigger than that, because those young workers spent money, time, and resources to get those qualifications.
"Everyone" says you'll go nowhere without a college degree. But guess what? This is neither what many kids want nor society needs.
Vocational schools need to amp up the sales pitch. Machinists of the Tools and Die variety make 40$ and 50$ an hour, and that ain't bad.
Some people just are not interested in the 4 year menu.
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University graduates were rare. There were far fewer universities and university places. Thus the intrinsic value of having a degree was higher, all other things being equal. And the difference in education between someone who had finished university and someone who had not was readily apparent. Nowadays the lines have become blurred. The sheer volume of graduates means that you are competing against many people who have exactly the same educational qualifications as you, whereas before it was a distinct advantage.
A degree is no longer a guarantee of a decent job in your field. In fact nowadays a Bachelor's is almost a minimum requirement for many jobs. On the other hand, NOT having a degree can be a disadvantage. It's up to the individual to weigh themselves carefully and judge whether the time and effort and debt required to receive higher education are worth it. A brilliant person will shine through even when covered in mud, and you can polish a turd as much as you want but it will remain a turd. So are you brilliant, or a turd? This should influence your decision.
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If so many people are overqualified, then why all the complaints about not being able to find qualified workers and why all the foreign workers in both Canada and the US.
It couldn't be because of the crappy wages being offered, could it?
In the context of the article, it seems to me "overqualified" means - you bought an education which you cannot use / do not need for your work.
E.g. having a university degree is "overqualified" for a barista job. Sadly, there are many (usually non STEM) degrees for which there is literally zero demand by employers. Where are the counselors on the front end of the university acceptance process? Hmm, seems like they just take students for the good of the school, not the needs of the student, or society.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I've seen multiple studies showing that in the longer run a degree more than pays for itself on average, even liberal arts.
This seems like a contradiction to TFA. One possible theory to reconcile this is that it takes time to find or become ready for positions that use education.
The idea that you'll be doing more than just grunt work out of college is perhaps unrealistic. Employers want educated AND experienced employees. It takes a while to get sufficient experience.
Even if you start in grunt work, learn what you can around you, pick up tidbits, listen and learn in meetings, go out of your way to do extra, read the policy & procedure manuals, practice your people skills, understand how your little corner of the work-load affects the rest of the org. Clues are all over the place. Education doesn't end out of college.
Table-ized A.I.
the job market is. Outsourcing + H1-Bs (insourcing? idk...) means it's hard to get a job in your field and you settle for something that pays less. This is what happens when countries swing so far right they stop protecting their working class.
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The U.S. is arguably the most capitalistic and market oriented country on the face of the earth yet amazingly we manage to produce vast swaths of the electorate that somehow think economy is some strange kind of magic run by dragons and fairies.
What did anyone think would happen if we produced more degrees without insuring there would be demand for them ?
On the one hand you had simple supply and demand hitting the prices http://www.wsj.com/articles/co...
Simplified tuition aid was mostly a handout to universities not students.
Then you have depressed pricing for the labor of people who earned a degree.
No.
Overqualified typically means ones technical training and qualifications would rightfully be deserving of higher pay than the employer wants to spend.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Maybe if asshole business people weren't importing cheap labor from overseas and hiring our own citizens for a living wage, we wouldn't have this problem. Subsequently we also wouldn't have the problem down the road of 'not having qualified applicants', which is their lame-ass excuse for importing cheap-ass labor from overseas on H1-B's in the first place! MEMO TO CORPORATE AMERICA: Stop shitting on our citizens!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
A "college degree" is a piece of paper. And from an employer's perspective, it is worthless. Pieces of paper do not solve problems. Employees solve problems. Employers have problems that need to be solved - that is the only reason they hire people - so if you want to get and keep a job, you have to be able to solve more problems than you create.
Lot of employers look for diploma's when evaluating potential hires, since there is a correlation between holding a diploma and being able to solve problems. But the correlation is less than 1.0 - much less than most college administrators, politicians, or social activists will admit. And the correlation is declining.
That's what this is about: Any value in a college diploma comes from its correlation to problem solving ability. And as that correlation declines, so does the value of the college degree.
Another way to say this: credentials!=capabilities. Employers want capabilities, but universities are in the business of selling credentials. Generating credentials is cheap - it costs perhaps $5 to print a diploma. But teaching capabilities is much harder. To increase their business, universities have found it expedient to decouple credentials from capabilities, so they can sell cheap credentials at huge markups, while using clever marketing to deceive customers (students) into thinking that credentials and capabilities are the same thing. Eventually markets will wise-up to this scam. We see that happening now with the "Value Of University Degree Continues To Decline."
If your goal is to improve your problem solving abilities, getting a university degree is still a good way to do that. But you must be deliberate in pursuing that goal. Problem-solving skills are not magically conferred by professors - they take discipline and practice. The classroom is a good place to learn problem-solving, but doing so is becoming more of an independent study. If you are just drifting through college, and doing the minimum needed to get buy, you will emerge from the university experience with no new skills but with a lot less money, and your diploma will be worthless.
Is higher education vocational training, or is it it how we instill the broad knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary for an informed population? Vocational training doesn't belong in universities. Of course, people learn useful skills and develop specialization while in college, but the real end goal for students is to emerge as critical thinkers who then pursue their career of choice. In some cases, that means an advanced degree, and in other cases it means the job market, with on-the-job training.
A major problem is that a lot of people go to college when really they just need job training. They don't care for, and don't receive, the real education that college degrees represent.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Stop complaining that the kids don't have business experience. They have an education. It's up to employers to give them business experience. You are what is wrong with corporate America/Canada
The real issue is that so many kids today take degrees that society does not need. How many journalists, philosophers, artists, any business item esp MBA, Law, etc does a society need? Basically, too many ppl are pursuing easy degrees. What is needed are things like engineering, nursing, medicine, computer science, etc.
And yes, at the same time, we need to add more to vocational. So does Canada.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The value of college degrees decline because we hand them out for free today. Everyone's a winner, hooray! And because precious snowflake MUST have a degree, we can't simply accept that anyone could simply be too stupid to warrant getting one. So degrees get dumbed down to the point where they become utterly pointless. When everyone has a lump of gold, gold is worthless.
Governments all over the globe have been pushing for more academics. We need more people with a degree! University degrees used to be something the upper 10% (if that) of people had. That's not enough, we need AT LEAST 25%! And lo and behold, we got them. Did we suddenly get so much smarter that more than twice the people could get one? Or is it more likely that it was dumbed down until a quarter of the population is good enough?
This of course affects the job market. Because we sure don't get more jobs to fill. The requirements for jobs went up in turn. Suddenly every job needs you to have a college degree, even if it's at best ridiculous to require one. But we can get a college educated person for the same price as someone without, so why not require it?
In turn, jobs that used to require college education now demand additional relevant certification. Which makes sense for top level positions and positions where a certain experience and additional training is a given, but we're talking entry level positions here. And no later than that we're getting to where your wallet becomes more a factor than your skill. Because in some fields the relevant certs cost money on par with another year of college. Or, depending on your country, even more.
Of course that devalues university degrees.
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