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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."
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.
were pulling in 60K a year in the early 90s
Aging demographic and the growing wealth gap are deflationary it's going to hurt when it happens
love is just extroverted narcissism
Demand for workers falls. Why is it people treat supply and demand as a never-ending cornucopia of benefit. Raw, unfettered capitalism has a downside. Who knew?
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"Without the ZIRP rates, the mortgages they lure people into, and the housing bubbles this creates, the amount of money circulating in our economies would shrink so much and so fast the whole shebang would fall to bits.
"That’s right: the survival of our economies today depends [on] the existence of housing bubbles. No bubble means no money creation means no functioning economy".
https://www.theautomaticearth....
"The US owes the world 453,000 tonnes of gold which is almost 3 times all the gold ever produced in history".
https://goldswitzerland.com/th...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I feel like this boils down to what skillsets you have and how willing you are to move to use them.
1. If you ignored the EVERYONE HAS TO COLLEGE advice of the 2000s and learned a skilled trade instead you'd be doing rather well right now. We have such a shortage of CNC operators that local companies have teamed up with the VocTech highschool to offer an adult education class. You earn your GED and CNC/welding certifications in 8 weeks (going 2 days a week) and walk out earning $50k/year. CNC have billboards everywhere. $25/hr with 401k, medical, dental and vision.
Even within engineering there are winners and losers. I just got poached on linked in for a 30% raise in another state. If you have the right words on your resume companies are looking. Just talking about my niche: Simulink, dSpace (Hardware-in-the loop), embedded, RTOS, etc are all doing very well across automotive and aerospace.
"Biology" is a great starter degree for pre-med or other advanced degree. A BS Bio on its own qualifies you to earn $31k a year.
2. Fewer Americans Moved Last Year Than At Any Time On Census Bureau Record. Since we followed food out of Africa humans have been migrating to earn a life. I see job postings around here that can't be filled because my college peers insist on living in location X. "I don't want to leave Seattle. It's so wonderful. I can't afford to go out. Live with 2 roommates but I'm 'living my dream'".
Don't forget to pay back the 20,30,40 THOUSANDS of dollars in college debt, for your worthless degree that pays 20-50,000 per year, while finding an apartment, transportation, food, mandatory health care, trying to have a social life. Trade schools are "worth" more than a liberal arts degree, but no one wants to have a discussion on the high price of "big college"...paying presidents, deans, sports coaches hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and some professors only working a few days a month. Nope, don't talk about that...just continue to rail on CEO's of big oil, big pharma etc.
Keep the next generation impoverished so they don't get too uppity/powerful.
It's really more "How do I keep my gravy train rolling so I can live the lifestyle I'm accustomed to" rather than "Screw the next guy". The early baby boomers pissed away the Social Security surplus through wasteful spending, while the rest of the generation have so much money tied up in stocks/401k/retirement that the only way to keep their money is to keep the stock market going up and up. In order to do this wages have to go down so that profits can go up (since other costs can only be reduced so much, and prices can only be raised so much), leaving new workers (younger generations) holding the bag.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Making those wages in a comfy office sure doesn't beat flipping burgers for a living.
For the most part, wages have been stagnant across the board for pretty much everyone in the middle class and below for quite some time.
http://www.epi.org/publication...
It isn't just limited to those with a college degree.
In addition, the price increase of a degree has far, Far, FAR outpaced wages and will eventually reach a point that you'll have to consider if getting a degree ( and the enormous amount of debt that will come with it ) will be worth it or not in the future job markets.
Seriously, lets blame the baby boomers for this. It's ALWAYS their fault. Just look at the dumbass from their age group they elected.
But don't they get credit for the dumbass from their age group that they didn't elect?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Be willing to change, locations and careers as necessary. Be flexible.
There ARE places and jobs in the grand old USA where wages are going up. If you don't get that raise you want where you are, start looking for a location and career that is in demand and JUMP. Sooner rather than later.
I've lived in 4 different states in my long career and I am willing to pull up the tent stakes and move if it means more money. I've also had multiple kinds of jobs, from Electronic Engineering to Network engineering to Software Development.... And last year I got one of the biggest raises of my life by changing jobs...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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.
The problem is that you don't make money by investing unless you can control your risk and make decisions from an understanding of how businesses work. This is a very specific skill set that is as complicated as programming. If you have someone else make the decisions for you, you are not getting a very big piece of the pie. If we are down to investing as truly the only way to profit, then the whole concept of 'having a career in a field' is gone. You might as well tell a developer to go mine some gold, as they are likely to have just as much luck finding a good vein in the earth.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The housing bubble has moved to an education bubble.
He said 8 years before that the dotcom bubble had moved to a real-estate bubble. ...
To his credit, he's actually paying people to leave college and start companies.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
Social Security has always been a premise of "collect money today from taxes based on promise of population growth and the assumption that those people too will pay taxes". The model breaks down when there isn't a steady stream of people, such as a large segment of the population simultaneously exits the job market (retiring).
Thirty four characters live here.
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.
It is good to see the Enlightenment hasn't left a mark on you.
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.
You're arguing that people have had consistently less since 1890?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
Well written, Anonymous. On this much we agree: A college diploma is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain useful skills. However, I think you overstate your case. College does not guarantee that you will become a problem solver, but if becoming a problem solver is your goal then college can be an effective method of achieving it.
Self-motivation and self-study are important, but not sufficient. In a functional college environment, you will be serendipitously exposed to ideas that you would not otherwise encounter, and would not know that you need to dig into. If you are motivated and want to learn, college is a great place to do that.
On the other hand, my thesis presumes a "functional" college environment. If you want to argue that many colleges these days are dysfunctional, I won't contradict you. It is entirely possible to get a college degree, even an advanced degree, and not learn anything useful. But just because it is possible to waste years and countless thousands of dollars on worthless degree programs does not mean that all college is worthless. You will get out of college in proportion to what you put in. I think even soft subjects, properly done, have value, though I agree with you that the soft subjects are not often properly done nowadays.
Society seems to have conflated the concepts of "credentials" and "capabilities" and assumes that having the first bestows the second. You cannot deny that the two are at least correlated, but the correlation is imperfect and even if it were perfect it would not imply causality. It would be good if more people, and especially policy makers, recognized this.
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.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The American dream worked quite well for baby boomers, and the post WWII generation. The only reason it doesn't work any more is because the systems we need in place to make it a real possibility for people have been systematically attacked and removed, because that system requires that we collectively pay for it. In a system geared toward the concentration of wealth (like all market driven economies), it starts to feel like a small group (people who are good at getting money into their pockets) are being picked on, and have to pay more than their fair share, and other forms of whining. In reality, the whole system has to work for any part to be stable. Keynes knew that, but modern neoliberals just want to believe they don't have to pay for a nice society - or they are just callous pricks who don't care. Either way, the American dream seems like a sham to those under 40 today, but it hasn't always been that way, and it doesn't always have to be that way. We just need to correct the system, just like we routinely have to do (check your older history books).
http://www.unfocus.com/
Yeah my dad went to one company and got a job and worked there for his entire life, and in return he gets a pension for the rest of his life. As a kid I just kind of watched what my parents were doing and assumed this is what life was like in my country and pretty much expected if I trained myself and did the right things I would get he same benefit. How different things ended up being for me.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
What pay employers will offer is a direct function of supply and demand.
All the big companies are complaining about a shortage of STEM workers, but the reality has to be that its just not the case, otherwise there would be more competition for thos workers which would directly translate into higher wages offered.
Clearly the complaints are a baseless dog-and-pony show, probably just to keep the H1Bs flowing, which is also presumably where most of the supply is coming from that is actually surpessing the demand (and therefore wages) for local talent.
It tends to be for those autodidacts and other weird cases (like young college dropouts or philosophy PhDs looking to write code.)
Then again, I am usually interviewing for $200K-$800K developers, so our experiences may differ.
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.