US College Grads See Slim-to-Nothing Wage Gains Since Recession (bloomberg.com)

The worth of a college degree is losing its luster in the US job market. From a report on Bloomberg: Wages for college graduates across many majors have fallen since the 2007-09 recession, according to an analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington using Census bureau figures. Young job-seekers appear to be the biggest losers. What you study matters for your salary, the data show. Chemical and computer engineering majors have held down some of the best earnings of at least $60,000 a year for entry level positions since the recession, while business and science graduates's paychecks have fallen. A biology major at the start of their career earned $31,000 on an annual average in 2015, down $4,000 from five years earlier. "It has been like this for the past five, six years now," said Ban Cheah, a research professor at Georgetown who compiled the data. "It's a little depressing."

Comments

Sounds like it's working as intended.

[Maritz]

Keep the next generation impoverished so they don't get too uppity/powerful.

Re: Sounds like it's working as intended.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because Democrats are known to want to keep wages low, and Republicans fight day and night to raise the earnings of the little guy... The bubble you live in must be incredibly opaque.

Re:Sounds like it's working as intended.

[Nidi62]

But their companies promised them those pensions!

What's depressing to me that, of the 5 other people in my immediate workgroup, who do the exact same job that I do(all of them also 20-30 years older than me), 4 of them have company pensions and will get to draw Social Security plus whatever whatever they've saved for retirement. The other will get his retirement and social security. I will probably just get my 401k.

This is of no surprise

[H3lldr0p]

Wage stagnation has taken the earnings of the middle class since the 70s. About the only thing keeping wages going up in that time has been union action and increases in the minimum wage. Since the min wage certainly has not been keeping up with inflation _and_ unions are at an all time low, none of this is a surprise.

For those of you who want the world to be better without a government acting as the means to corral all of us cats wandering around need to start showing us who think otherwise how that's going to work. Because the ideas you've espoused so far have failed. Profits as an end goal only promote avarice and greed as valued traits. This is where such thinking has lead us.

Re:This is of no surprise

[Kjella]

Do you want to just say that or do you want to put in the time to read Man, Economy, and State, The Road to Serfdom, On Human Action, Economics in One Lesson, and I, Pencil

When your first link is to a 1500 page treatise on economic principles with no clear reference you remind me of the nutters who link to two hour long YouTube videos and anyone who doesn't watch it lose the argument.

Inflation is not really the problem, if you get paid good money convert it to gold, property or other item of real value. The problem is that many people don't get a fair value for their work. But what's the solution? You can let the free market handle it, but the buyers aren't interested in giving you a fair value, they want it as cheap as possible. Or you can try to let society decide through some form of socialism, but in practice that leads to some being more equal than others. Or we can go back to self-sufficiency, losing all advantages of scale and complex economic ecosystems. Or go UBI and decide that what you do isn't important, have some free money anyway.

Re:As productivity raises

[alvinrod]

You're missing the backside that as productivity increases, so does supply which reduces costs. You could certainly have a government that gives everyone a job, whether they want it or not, but that typically means doing so by limiting productivity or creating jobs which do nothing productive. Work for the sake of work is pointless.

Also, we have to look at the rest of the world as globalization trends continue. China has seen massive growth of the middle class since moving to a mixed economy, but naturally that's going to come at our expense. The U.S. owes a lot of its success in the 50's to escaping from WWII with its infrastructure unscathed while other western nations had to rebuild along with the isolationist Communist bloc not competing against the American economy.

Europe has been able to fully rebuild and reduce barriers to doing business to become a major economic powerhouse and the former Communist states have either ditched it or moved towards mixed economies that have allowed them to become far more prosperous. When we have to compete with the rest of the world, it's little wonder that we don't look as strong relative to decades past.

Re:Degrees are primarily HR tick marks

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly.

I've seen self taught people waste time doing stuff that was covered in 101 courses. And when the college educated people point out the wasting of time, the self educated scream back that they know better. Then proceed to do it and it self destructs.

Not that you are totally wrong. A lot of the courses are just fluff, yes. And a lot of graduates come out with an entitled attitude of "Well, I have the degree so I must be worth a crap ton of money now." even though they can't do anything. To top it off, a lot of them then borrow tons of money to get into this questionable situation.

I see colleges as suffering from 3 problems.

1) Slow to change.
2) The thought that every idiot needs a degree. They don't.
3) The poor quality of the education system. So we need to cover stupid shit that people should already know. "This is how you turn on your computer"

Because of these problems... Ya. Degrees are questionable in a ton of instances. Worthless no. But we need to start taking out the crap.

Re:Degrees are primarily HR tick marks

[Gorobei]

It's pretty damn simple:

Most college degrees show that you are basically employable in a white-collar or pink-collar job entry-level job paying $40K/year or so: you have proven you can show up, follow simple instructions, get work done on time, understand written material, write a page of text that sort of makes sense, do basic arithmetic, etc.

That's about it for 99% of college graduates. Congrats, you get to sit in a chair at work, and we know you can do the simple job we need filled. Hell, do well, and we'll even promote you to where you can earn more and actually add more value.

You went to MIT or did STEM? Great, we figure you are smart, hard-working, and have an analytical mind. That's worth $80K. We really don't care what you majored in or what courses you took. It's still a fucking entry-level job.

20 year old autodidact? Sorry, just too much uncertainty. Come back when you have a track record or a Github repository that we like.

Re:As productivity raises

[Touvan]

Well then you are missing the way way back side. If productivity increases, and reduces the need for workers, fewer people have money to buy goods - even when they are cheaper (though that doesn't happen due to price stickiness and profit motive/greed). This causes a downward spiral that we've been living in for decades.

I'm so tired of market fundamentalism. It is a soulless religion.

China has seen an increase in their middle class because they use policy to build it. In the 40s through the 60s in the US rich people paid huge percentages of their income in taxes (and only the top 5% at first paid that), which was directly redistributed back to workers through public works and other programs. Wages and salaries were controlled with both floors and caps. This even lead directly to employer benefits such as health insurance - they couldn't pay more, so they needed to offer something else - and the economy was so good from these policies that there was a lot of demand for everything.

Europe and Japan acheived similar wonders with similar policy. We can look at those places today to see the countries where those redistributive policies are stronger, are weathering the shit-storm market fundamentalism brought us over the last decade, better than the free market states.