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In Some Bay Area Counties, College Grads Have Higher Unemployment (mercurynews.com)
Higher education is supposed to be the ticket to employment. But in some Bay Area counties, workers with a high school diploma have lower unemployment rates than those with bachelor's degrees or higher.
From a report: Experts suggested the Bay Area's backwards numbers, which run counter to the national trend, could be the result of too-few lower-wage workers, many of whom have been driven out by skyrocketing housing prices and the rising cost of living. "We have employers call us all the time (saying), 'I'm looking for low-wage, entry-level workers,'" said Kris Stadelman, director of NOVA Workforce Development in Sunnyvale. But there are few workers willing to take on those positions who don't already have jobs, she said.
In Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, the unemployment rate for workers with a high school degree is 3.3 percent, compared to a 3.6 percent rate for workers with a bachelor's degree or higher, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2017 American Community Survey, which measures unemployment by educational attainment for workers between 25 and 64 years old. The same situation exists in two other Bay Area counties -- Marin and Sonoma -- where workers with at least a bachelor's degree don't have the lowest unemployment rate.
The trend is starkest in Sonoma County, where workers without a high school degree have a 0.2 percent unemployment rate compared to a 4.4 percent rate for workers with a bachelor's degree or higher. Workers with a high school diploma in that county have an unemployment rate of 2.8 percent. Statewide, workers with a high school diploma have an unemployment rate of 6.2 percent, nearly double the 3.5 percent rate of those with a bachelor's or higher.
In Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, the unemployment rate for workers with a high school degree is 3.3 percent, compared to a 3.6 percent rate for workers with a bachelor's degree or higher, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2017 American Community Survey, which measures unemployment by educational attainment for workers between 25 and 64 years old. The same situation exists in two other Bay Area counties -- Marin and Sonoma -- where workers with at least a bachelor's degree don't have the lowest unemployment rate.
The trend is starkest in Sonoma County, where workers without a high school degree have a 0.2 percent unemployment rate compared to a 4.4 percent rate for workers with a bachelor's degree or higher. Workers with a high school diploma in that county have an unemployment rate of 2.8 percent. Statewide, workers with a high school diploma have an unemployment rate of 6.2 percent, nearly double the 3.5 percent rate of those with a bachelor's or higher.
Most college degrees have been worthless for 20 years, this is not news. Entering a trade right after high school and making money during your most productive years is MUCH better than spending that time going into six-figure debt for a worthless piece of paper. Higher education turned into a racket during the 1990's, probably before.
The housing prices are so high that you can't live there with a low-wage job. People just move to somewhere else.
Some of my friends that went to college are unemployed while I didn't go and I work in government IT.
I take public transit. A local bus take me down the street to pick up the express bus, the express bus drops me off in Palo Alto, and a local bus take me down the street to my job. An hour each way. Driving through Palo Alto during rush hour is insane. Since I work in government I.T., I start work at 7:00AM.
In the bay area the population is keen on intelligence. 3.6% is not very much. I feel certain it is on its way down just like the rest of the country
Low wage jobs are dead end jobs without future. No pay raises, no bonuses, most if the pay health care don't pay enough to cover the high deductibles and high copays of the coverage provided.
Low wage jobs are a dead end and everyone knows it. Who wants to be stuck in a dead end job never earning more money?
It is why the trades are suffering so. Everyone needs HVAC or plumber. However those jobs are basically mean food stamps for life unless you are the owner.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I think it's true just about everywhere. The old saying "More learnin', less earnin'," is truer now than it ever was.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
We're producing more with less workers, leaving more money at the top for the (literal) capitalists who own everything. Combine that with a lack of worker solidarity and a general war on the working class and yeah, folks are pretty boned.
On the plus side at least that shmuck in TFA is honest:
But let's face it, what he's really doing is posturing for more H2-Bs. He's gonna get 'em too. The President & Congress just doubled the allotment for next year.
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Pay more. This is a breakdown where employers aren’t willing to accept the supply demand curve they’re living in. If they could just bring themselves to pay a living wage, people with enough self respect and power to refuse working for less than a living wage would be happy to work for them.
Would be interested to know if those counties are still "backwards" when U-6 unemployment is used instead of U-3. Maybe.
If you cannot find employees at a given pay rate, then you are paying too little, plain and simple.
Palo Alto city IT department == rain man
The high-school grads that couldn't get a job without a college degree probably ended up going to college (which you can do relatively cheaply in CA thanks to socially liberal policies) and working work-study jobs (no longer unemployed).
It's not that "college education causes unemployment", it's that the high-school grads that aren't able to get a long-term job with only an HS education typically continue their education, thus removing themselves from the "HS grads only" group.
The article is sighting unemployment at 3.5%? Isn't 4% considered full employment? Wow we gotta complain about everything. Why was this even printed?
There is an alternative explanation. Specifically, the supply of labor by Indians (from South Asia) with H-1B visas is greater than the supply of labor by Hispanic illegal aliens, relative to the number of job openings for skilled labor and unskilled labor, respectively.
In 2016, Donald Trump promised to immediately suspend the program for H-1B visas upon his becoming president. He broke his promise.
There is more information about this issue.
Fine off the starboard bow, Cap'n!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is an alternative explanation. Specifically, the supply of labor by Indians (from South Asia) with H-1B visas is greater than the supply of labor by Hispanic illegal aliens, relative to the number of job openings for skilled labor and unskilled labor, respectively.
In 2016, Donald Trump promised to immediately suspend the program for H-1B visas upon his becoming president. He broke his promise.
There is more information about this issue.
but most of them don't pay anything close to a living wage in the Valley, or enough to bother commuting 100+ miles twice a day. Nothing wrong with having a job, but spending all day dealing with yuppie engineers and project managers and then not having enough to eat and sleeping in a car... why bother?
I wouldn't want to contribute to a statistic like that.
I'm not really surprised by this.. We have a glut of college educated people out there. Hiring those people for fields other than what they earned their degree in is.. risky at best.. If the job they are seeking, at the moment, is not what they have a degree in you can be fairly sure they are going to bounce when a more appropriate job comes along.
That means you're potentially wasting the training you may have to provide. Sure, you might get lucky and they stick around long enough that the training was still a good investment but your gain would be their loss, and that's not an ideal situation either.
The term for this phenomenon is "over qualified". Hiring a guy with a master's in math theory to do plumbing isn't gonna work out in the long term. That guy wants to do mathy stuff and he'll punch out the second he can. I don't fault him for that, of course, but if you're the potential employer that's a problem. Better to just spend the time training the guy with no degree who actually wants to be a plumber. Sure he might go work elsewhere for better wages, but that's at least something you can compensate for (pay more). No reasonable amount of $$ is going to make a math guy happy being a plumber.
Sonoma County is rural. Of course there are more jobs for people without degrees. You don't need that masters in CS degree to pick fucking grapes.
I'm not sure this phenomenon has anything to do with the value of a college education, or the number of H1B visas. It might just be a highly localized issue. Let's keep reading...
See what I mean?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Possibly. But it does bring up a good point. Labor markets are incredibly complicated, and comparing two different markets to one another without some form of control is nonsensical.
If you wanted to do a proper comparison, you'd want to compare to another tech-sector in another similar city, but that doesn't have a crazy housing market like SF. Then you'd at least get a sense of whether this is related to housing costs.
for Nursing. All told it's going to cost me about $140k for 4 years (tuition, books, room, board, the car I had to buy her because it's physically impossible to take a bus from her morning classes to her clinicals in time, etc). Starting salary will be between $50-$70k/yr depending on the job she takes and where she takes it.
A trade pays $9/hr to start, $15/hr after a few years and then tops out at $25/hr. I did a stint as an electrician's apprentice so I'm pretty familiar (cut those numbers by about 30% for inflation and you know where I was at). You're gonna top out around $50k/yr, which is where my kid _starts_. Over 40-60 years of work that will add up fast. Not to mention she will have much, much better benefits.
Heck, if you're a teacher in it for the money you can start around $40k/yr as long as you're willing to move and/or commute to a wealthy district (the way districts are funded means if you want to teach in a poor neighborhood because you grew up there plan on getting shafted).
I see a lot of folks saying a degree ain't worth it, but it always seems to be the kind of folks who don't want to pay for kids to go to school. It's expensive as hell ($140k in my case and I'm cutting corners) so I get where they're coming from, but this is why our country gets flooded with H1-Bs. It lets the companies go to Congress and say "Well, we wanted to hire American, but we just can't find anyone with the _skills_ we need".
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If you only have a high school education, you're almost bound to leave an area that's so expensive to live in, because you have ZERO chance of a high paying job. But if you have a degree, you've got some chance of being able to grab one, so you will not give up so quickly. Therefore unemployment among the educated will be higher.
Entry-level workers CAN'T AFFORD TO LIVE THERE! Of course there aren't enough of them, the only ones available are the ones still living with their parents!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Most of them are majoring in useless subjects anyway. What we need are more unskilled people with 9th-grade educations. There are a huge number of burger-flipping jobs available in my area that can't be filled. It's gotten so bad that businesses (mom-and-pops, mostly) are folding because they either can't find help or they can't afford the help that is available. Some of these joints were only able to operate because of the ready availability of cheap labor: without it, they aren't viable: you can only raise the price of a burger so high before people start expecting Kobe beef.
Largely by our former President, who told you, 'A college degree is the new high school diploma.' . That was a scam (college is big business and indoctrination ground, you see). A college degree has never, ever been a 'guarantee' of anything whatsoever. Your success in life does and always has depended on YOU. Additionally, unless you are referring to the legitmately poor, nobody gives a crap what is happening to people in the Bay.
World doesn't owe you a Living"
Perhaps that is true; if so, what -if anything- do you owe the world and ...why?
the CAPTCHA for this AC post is 'collapse' ; for some reason it seems oddly ...apropos.
...what do these unemployable graduates have degrees in?
Something useful that is a marketable skill that would lead to a decent job or a graduate degree in interpretive dance theory?
Most of those people are a part of the 1.5 billion dollars of student debt that is going to become the next financial crisis. Was is worth it? Probably not. They were all suckered into the academia complex. Educated, perhaps. But in the end they are dupes.
They're looking for more people to hire at a wage which is at or likely below the market clearing wage: ie they want to hire more people but not rate wages. You know employers are serious about hiring when they raise wages to get what they want. Until then, they're just looking to capture more rents.
Nice, so live adjacent to slum housing.
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The H1B1 visa program was a way to bring in cheap labour to replace more expensive American workers and it has worked!
A lot of guys I knew in the trade were laid off 2-3 months out of the year doing odd jobs to get by. The company I worked for kept us year round and found busy work, but they could only do that because they had a nice business contract. Most tradesmen have lean months and a tough time throughout the year as a result. The huge cutback on infrastructure spending and, as a result, construction hasn't helped matters either.
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Historically 3.3 or 3.6% unemployment is as close to full employment as you can get. Those last 3.3 or 3.6% that are still unemployed are mostly just unemployable. In the middle of 2018 there were more jobs than people looking for jobs in the US (the first time in history). I tried to hire an electrician and a plumber this year, and I could tell it was hard to get hold of anyone. They'd just ghost your, or you had to know someone personally to get them to come. If you're in the bay area with lots of people crowded in, there'd be a huge demand for things like plumbers, electricians, or even just general laborers slugging concrete around. Not so much for paper pushers. As ever though, if you can solve someone else's problems, you'll always be employable.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I'm 41 and I've never heard that phrase in my life. Hell, if you google the phrase you mostly find articles telling you how valuable a college degree is (with a few that mention it's less valuable if you grew up poor, but it's still more valuable than hitting the workforce after high school).
Maybe if you grew up in the 70s with a big, Unionized manufacturing plant down the street, but that was almost 50 years ago. Those days are gone. The only thing left to kids without degrees is Walmart, $18/hr jobs in HVAC and if you're lucky Daddy's money when he dies.
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You need them both. I think that some people get into computers, but their only interest is money. They have no natural talent, because their only interest in computers happens on Friday, on the way to the bank.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Who wants low wages. Pay people and they will come. Just like in public education.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This statistic is seriously flawed. It only counts those who can afford to stay despite being unemployed, which is unlikely if you worked at very low-wage job and had little or no savings.
Plumbing and electrical are not an art, they are a craft. That you don't know the difference between artistry and craftsmanship makes me wonder if you are all that serious about being an artist. There is nothing wrong with craftsmanship and pride in your work. But at the same time you must realize that even poorly constructed art can be very good art that speaks to the viewer.
What is it that you express when you finish up a junction box? The futility of human existence?
If Bay Area counties are paying college grads less or jobs are harder to find then...maybe consider leaving the Bay Area? ...not sure it takes a college degree to figure that out?
-Styopa
Turns out that if you want to get your venti half-caff low-fat caramel vanilla latte every morning, you're going to have to put up with people who live on coffee shop wages living in the same area code. Who knew?
0 1 - just my two bits
World doesn't owe you a Living"
Perhaps that is true; if so, what -if anything- do you owe the world and ...why?
Absolutely nothing. You are free to find a place to be alone, ask for and offer nothing to anyone. How does that affect the fact that the world owes you nothing?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Get out with a degree in engineering? CompSci? Law? Accounting? Something actually useful?
You can get (or create) a job.
Intersectional Dance Theory?
Lesbian Basket Weaving?
Art Appreciation?
Anything with the word "Studies" (code for "For Dummies") in it?
Yeah. You're going to have trouble getting a job (and holding it), even in Starschmucks or McWendysBurgerCastle.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
..for white people. Welcome to the party pal!
In WORTHLESS subjects....ancient languages, underwater basketweaving bla bla bla. Get a 2 year trade school degree. You'll be LESS in debt, and probably make more money than these "entry level" jobs in the first place. But...NO, can't do that. Kids are told from their youth, you have to have a four year degree. So, everyone goes for a four year degree, colleges & universities gouge them and they end up 50-100k or more IN DEBT and can't pay it back.