Slashdot Mirror
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."
To be fair, the baby boomers were led to believe in the American Dream and that they lived in a country with much opportunity, and that would afford them a comfortable lifestyle. There was never any implication that it would cost others anything. They took advantage of that. Only now is it looking like maybe the American Dream was a sham all along. The problem is that no one called out it was a sham before it was all sold out.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Good. College graduates rarely have the skill sets someone who has actually been working in the field an equivalent amount of time has. Education that is up to date is always more readily available on the net than it is in a stale college course. An autodidact is almost always far more valuable than someone who followed a canned path. This is not only because they've done more but because they have developed, and broadly demonstrate, the critical quality of self-motivation.
You know what most college degrees really say? That you were willing to let people waste your time on irrelevancies when you could have been out deep-diving into something. Or even worse, that you aren't capable of deep-diving into something.
I'm talking about degrees in useful subjects when I allow that some college graduates do manage to become useful during, and because of, college. Degrees in soft subjects aren't that. They're completely worthless. Not that history, philosophy and so forth are absolutely worthless; just that degrees in them are. You want to learn history (and you should) or dig into philosophy, just start reading.
You're almost always better off learning how to think for yourself than you are thinking the way someone else tells you to. Serious problem solving is not compatible with camp-following.
Salaries suck, because the US is still in a recession. With real unemployment well over 20%, comparable to economic powerhouses like Greece, Croatia and Botswana, it's no surprise that salaries are declining. Add in inflation, and they are declining even faster.
There is one overriding reason for the continuing recession: debt. Federal debt in the US is out of control - plus up to $200 trillion of unfunded obligations that everyone is carefully ignoring. If we also ignore those invisible (but inevitable) obligations, the US is still one of the top 20 most indebted nations.
Keynesian economics have been thoroughly debunked. Actually, there was never any evidence that they might be correct. But politicians love them, because they provide an excuse to buy votes by spending other people's money. All of this debt has been built up with promises that never would be fulfilled. But the politicians making those promises are now mostly millionaires, so that's ok.
What cannot go on forever will stop. Debt cannot be infinitely piled on, and countries like the US are reaching the limits of their ability to sell more debt. When this stops, the stopping is likely to be abrupt and unpleasant.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I think most of the stagnation is due to the fact that most college graduates are having to take lower-paying jobs. In the past, large companies were happy to take in new college graduates for entry-level jobs. Big companies paid relatively big salaries, and the recipient of that entry level job could either use it to rise in that company, or put it on their resume and move on to another.
These days, there's just not a lot of entry level work that pays well. Big companies are outsourcing and offshoring the stuff that new grads used to do, and the jobs that remain onshore are with service providers. Those providers squeeze every single penny out of every outsourcing deal they make, and one of the ways they do that is to pay workers less and give them crappy benefits. For those who aren't lucky enough to get one of these jobs, yes, Starbucks awaits. The early 90s had a similar problem -- large companies had just killed huge swaths of their employees because computers were starting to automate processes that would require tons of manual work. College grads who would have gotten some faceless cubicle job a generation prior and used it as a stepping stone to prosperity all of a sudden didn't have that option. I'm pretty sure that's where the word McJob came from -- educated people forced to take low-paying, low-skill work because there wasn't a demand for educated people.
I'm foolishly hoping that one day MBA schools will start teaching students that it's better overall to have everything done in-house with employees you control. Accounting rules and tax laws would have to change to incentivize hiring large staffs, but I definitely think everyone, including executives on down to the lowest level employee, were happier when everyone who made the investment in education had the chance to earn a good wage.
As I've watched American prosperity and society change over the last 30-40 years, I've come to believe the following are the cause of the economic stagnation/depression that just gets worse each decade:
- Americans went gung ho into promoting cultural and ethnic diversity wiping away the uniformity of the 50's/60's replacing it with gigantic mess where no one talks to each other any more because they have nothing in common. Many recent research studies suggest that culturally/ethnically diverse societies find it much more difficult to unify or agree on common values or solutions to national problems. Is diversity good? Yes.... Was it in the long run good for America, maybe not.
- Education became politicized and focused on test scores and indoctrinating rather than teaching thinking and self sufficiency, partly this is a result of the widespread adoption of public schools and the removal of educational choice for families...local communities used to determine educational standards and parents used to have the primary responsibility for teaching their kids, not lowest common denominator schools that politicians manipulate the educational standards to ensure future generations will be one gigantic monolothic low paid workforce that can't provide for itself and yet will continue to vote for the polticians ruining the education of their kids.
- Lawyers -- there is a reason everyone hates them, but 40-50 years ago there were much fewer of them....legal crap everywhere began to spread in the 80's and now nearly anyone in power has a law degree, a degree which trains them to think not as engineers/doers but in terms of win/lose where one's only responsibility is to take care of oneself and his/her client.
- population growth -- yes, there are many states in the country that are underpopulated...but the areas where everyone wants to live are vastly overcrowded and the resources/environment are suffering greatly....it's not healthy for the mind or body...constant stress and overworking. Back when things were much more rural and there was a smaller population, people naturally cooperated with each other more.
- Public Debt -- whatever you think about the threat of future fiscal collapse, every $ removed from the economy for debt or interest payments is one less $ that goes into the broader economy to stimulate business or invest in infrastructure. We're on collapsing spiral here on way or another.
So, short of everyone suddenly deciding to handle all these big issues much differently than we have the last 40 years, I don't have much hope of any significant improvement. Technology and productivity increases help...but we've been relying on them for too long and if the pace of technological improvement slows down - our economy will get much worse.