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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.
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.
It's not about teaching you how to think, it's about teaching you how to learn.
Most students fail to become life-long learners and stop learning after leaving school. That's the kiss of death in a technical career. I had friends who threw away being software engineers because they were unwilling to learn new technologies after the dot com bust and settled for being drug store clerks.
If you don't know how to learn by the time you're 18-20 and in college (excluding a few low income / opportunity cases) you probably won't benefit much from college...
I went to community college twice. Once as a young person trying to figure out my place in the world, exiting with an A.A. degree in General Education and mediocre grades. A decade later as an adult working 80 hours per week and taking two classes per semester for five years, exiting with A.S. in Computer Programming and a 4.0GPA in my major. Going back to school as an adult was a lot easier than as a young person. Some people aren't ready for college when they're young.