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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?
...does "overqualified" mean "has a degree but can't be trusted to change a lightbulb"?
Because ya. Holy hell, ya.
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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 problem is not that most folks are overqualified with university degrees, BUT
corporation don't train their employees anymore for their job nor future needs via corporate strategy. Instead candidates must guess what the industry needs (via hype by marketing agencies and wall st) and go with the university degree since it guarantees some level of qualification--which is also what the universities advertise and push their high tuition costs (profit!).
If corporations provide a consistent and future proofing level of training to their employees, tuition costs would be lower, people would be qualified for their jobs, people & corporation would feel productive. Instead universities profit and corporate higher ups profit (due to the lack of training budget--and we know that's a big dent, just look at how much the gov't spends on training).
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.
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!
business, management and public administration
social and behavioural sciences and law
humanities.
No surprises there ...
The pdf also states:
Conversely, the lowest rates were found in education; architecture, engineering and related technologies; and health and related fields (with percentages varying between 9% and 13% in all three cases).
Those are the fields you should shoot for.
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I'm sure this varies with different fields, but it seems like many degrees involve spending a lot of money to learn copious amounts of extraneous material with no real world application to the career you are aiming for. I went to a technical college and had a couple of classmates who had previously been working on computer science degrees. They quit because they just plain weren't learning the skills that they needed for the IT careers they were pursuing. On top of that I have met people on several occasions who were flabbergasted to find out that I had obtained my current position with only an associates degree. I didn't have the heart to tell them about my co-workers who have nothing but their high school diplomas. Of course many of us have certifications as well. I dare someone to try and tell me those are a waste of money with this elephant in the room.
I am not at all surprised at the falling value of university degrees because, as you have stated, those who are coming out of school are simply not as good as their elder peers, but this phenomenon works only in developed nations, based on my own experience of having business in several continents
Many of the recent college graduates from developed nations (yes, even in Eastern Asian nations such as Korea and Japan) are seriously lacking the will to think
I don't know if they are lazy to think or if they are afraid to think, I simply don't know
Compare to them, the college graduates from 3rd world countries, particularly from those we used to call 'banana republics', while they are lacking in ttraining (their colleges are simply not as good as the one in developed nations) they made up with their eagerness to try out new stuffs, to explore and to think
My present and future plan is to sustain the number of employees in developed countries, to provide services to our existing clients (most of them are from developed nations) but for those so-called 'banana republics' I will be looking for more talents, and will provide them plenty of training to bring them up on par with their counterparts from developed nations - they deserve every single penny of training I invest on them because they are eager to improve themselves
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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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This.
Let brains be the decider, not money. If we make sure everyone can get into college, we can up the requirements in terms of skill and brain power and end up with the same amount of graduates but at a FAR higher skill level.
This is actually how it was in my country from the 1970s until about ten years ago. Around 1970 (forgot the exact year), our "socialist" government decided to make university free. You wouldn't BELIEVE the outcry. And of course the university were flooded with new students the next year, but the flood soon vanished as professors noticed that they have to weed out most of the students because there simply was not enough room to even educate them properly. This in turn meant that anyone who got a passing grade before because, well, we need doctors, would not stand a chance anymore. Only the upper sliver, the cream of the crop, went on. The rest was left in the dust.
What came out of our universities in the coming decades was pure gold. We, a small, insignificant country in Europe, had some of the most renowned universities on the planet. Free universities, too. Anyone could get in. Getting through, though, was a completely different matter. And that contributed in no small part to the reputation of the degrees. If you made it here, you'd have made it anywhere.
Things changed big time when politics changed in the early 2ks and they decided we really need more people with a university degree. And we got them. And HR is already catching on. You already get asked "You got your degree from $university before or after 2004?" when applying for a job. 2004 was pretty much the "cut" where we suddenly had a surprising leap in graduates...
Employers ain't dumb. They know what degrees are worthless. Just 'cause you can wave a sheet of paper means jack. What matters is what that sheet of paper means to your employer.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.