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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
http://www.unfocus.com/
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.