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.

Comments

Re:Back in the old days

[bzipitidoo]

A university degree wasn't supposed to be for only getting a better job. Education is its own reward. Education helps people understand themselves and the world, which helps avoid tragically wrong thinking and unwarranted harshness. It makes life better, it allows us to see more options. Speaking of the old days, what were WWI and WWII but completely unnecessary, senseless, and brutal events that could have been avoided if only the world leaders and peoples of those times weren't fools? We did not have an overpopulation problem, or mass starvation, or some other compelling reason. No, WWI ignited because of a lack of communication, fantasies of the glory of war and a sort of promise that the most powerful statement men can make concerning their worth is to serve in the military, and greed for the spoils, and fear and contempt of other peoples. Perhaps we did have a problem, mass stupidity, and it took a few wars to kill off the idiots. Now maybe we're drifting back into that problem, not having had any massive events capable of sorting out the idiots, handing out Darwin Awards en masse.

Everyone who is capable of earning a degree should have the opportunity to do so. Maybe, if most of the public had degrees, the world wars would have been impossible to start because the soldiers would have been unwilling to fight, and indeed it would have been tough to recruit soldiers because the people wouldn't hold them in much esteem and desire to become soldiers.

Thanks to my education, I can think intelligently about the problems. Why aren't there enough jobs? Has pay stagnated, and if so, why? Are universities not serving the purposes for which they exist? It's a complicated set of closely linked issues with a lot of different reasons, and possible answers. Despite the stagnation of pay, we in the West still live very well. Therefore places like India can easily undercut our workers. And yet, we also see that the superrich are hoarding the wealth, and gaming our system to do it. There is enough wealth for us all to live even better. So, why aren't we stopping the supperrich? We're not yet starving, that's why. Another factor is the advance of technology. We really need to rethink how education should be acquired. The high costs of textbooks is an excellent example of the corruption currently present in schools at all grade levels, from 1st grade to grad school. There is zero reason to subject students to the textbook racket, when our technology has empowered us to go entirely free, open and digital. Free and open publishing for textbooks is such an obviously superior model that there should be no question of whether to do it. Something else that technology makes more possible is telecommuting. We're not making full use of that either, and why? The MOOC is a challenge to organized education of the sort universities practice. Then there's the issue of automation. Will all menial work eventually be automated, leaving us with no manual labor to do so that education is even more important? It's a disruptive, exciting time to be alive.