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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.
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?
You think the average plumber or HVAC guy is on food stamps? Holy fuck do you have some disconnect.
That's why you don't accumulate "things" and/or end up holding a giant Craigslist sale a week before a move. Other than a few sentimental items and my personal data on a few hard disks, I could sell everything tomorrow, move across the country or abroad, and not feel any loss.
They do pay well. Maybe not in comparison to other jobs in the Bay Area, but that's something those commies up there will have to deal with on their own. Once it's too expensive to live there, for trades people, the programmers and other IT goobers will find the cost of repairs is going to shoot up. You pay for the labor and you pay for the commute to get to the labor. Supply and Demand... If your supply of plumbers is zero and the demand is greater than zero....
In areas outside of Silicon Valley a plumber can still earn a very comfortable living. The prospects look even better for continued wage growth as the amount of people becoming plumbers is dwindling. Plumbing is one of those jobs that will be around forever.. If the available pool continues to shrink the wages will continue to rise in response. Same thing is happening with electricians.. A friend with a construction company said his average pay for electricians is about $45/hour right now. I know that doesn't sound like a whole lot to a Bay Area person but in the regular world that's pretty damn good. The median income for CA is $60,336/yearly. $45/hour puts you at about $93,600/year. That's over 50% higher than the median. So basically, anywhere besides San Fran, you're earning a very good living.
When things go awry a competent plumber is a whole lot more important, at that moment, than just about any tech type job.. If your shit won't go down the toilet, fixing that becomes about the most important job in the world...
The housing prices are so high that you can't live there with a low-wage job.
There are ways to live cheaply in Silicon Valley. I live in San Jose, and the house next to mine has 3 bedrooms with 22 Filipinos living in it. They have bunks stacked three high, and an RV parked in the driveway.
If you are working 80 hours a week, you aren't home much anyway.
Move south. They can't find enough workers. If you can pass a drug test even the most menial job at any of the plants pays $25/hr to start. My favorite example is "hole watch". Whenever they dig a hole for construction, etc, safety rules dictate they pay someone to stand by it to make sure nobody falls in it. I'm not making that up. Starting pay is $25/hr. You won't stay in that job for long before one of the other superintendents or foremen grab you up to train for a skilled trade, because #1 you passed the drug test, #2 you went through the safety classes to be allowed in the plant. Second favorite example is "fire watch". Another $25/hr entry level job to stand in one spot, look around and sound an alarm if the place catches on fire.
Both of those open any number of doors. Unlimited overtime. On-the-job training and experience in very high-demand fields.
I know a 20 y.o. diesel mechanic that cleared $220k in 2018 and just bought his 3rd property. He's not even old enough to drink. But by all means, go into massive debt to earn a degree in general studies and then spend the next 40 years paying back that loan.
Does this really surprise anyone? You have a bunch of self entitled millennials that have lied sheltered life and been fed a bunch of bullshit by these professors about how life should be. The come out of this indoctrination not having a clue how the real world actually works and with some bullshit degree in liberal arts. Where they think they are entitled to a job in whatever bullshit degree they got.
Then when reality sets in and its ether get a job waiting tables or starve they start bitch'n about some mythical fantasy about being entitled to something called a "living wage." Not realizing at the same time they have brought in low skilled undocumented workers that take the jobs that they think are beneath them and do turn them in to a "living wage." The undocumented do this by not living beyond the means the job provides.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
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.
One of those sentimental things in my case is my grandmother's piano that I inherited at age 26. And yes, both I and one of my kids play it.
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Spot on. Good to see there are still folks out there with common sense.
I feel for the kids getting those degrees who are also shouldering huge student loan debts because they were convinced that "learn now / pay later" is a reasonable path.. Back in the day you paid as you went.. Or you paid upfront if your parents had set up a college fund. i.e. when you left college you had either no debt at all or just a little bit (last semester owed maybe).
Right off the bat a person with a student loan is at a disadvantage.. They need a higher wage to break even than someone with the exact same degree who isn't dragging around $100K in debt. This makes them less able to compete for jobs.. As an employer (not now, but in the past) given a choice between two identical candidates, I'd hire the one who accepted the lowest wage.. That's not going to be the guy with the huge loans..
That isn't being cheap either, as I'm sure someone is going to accuse. The person with the huge loan is going to constantly be looking for higher paying jobs. Thus to hire them, even at the standard wage for a field, is highly risky. The risk that they will bounce makes training them a gamble at best.. They simply need more money to be comfortable than a person doing the same job who isn't making interest payments on his education.
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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There's a difference between sentimentality and practicality. Sure, I could sell/donate/trash my entire house worth of "stuff", move across the country, and re-buy everything that I need when I get there. But it's generally not practical, especially if there are more people involved, like a spouse and children.
Even getting rid of the non-necessities, which I'll admit I have a bunch of, still leaves a shit ton of "stuff". As I get older I have found that what I consider a non-necessity has changed as well. Is a nice big quality bed a necessity? Probably not for a single 20 year old, but it sure as hell is for a married (almost) 40 year old...
Then, talking about hobbies. As an adult, I need to do things besides work to keep my sanity. Whether it's gaming, woodworking, electronics, auto repair. All of those things require "stuff" to do. Yes, none of it is particularly sentimental, but I would take an absolute bath if I were to sell/donate all of it and replace it at my new destination. Not to mention all of the effort it would take to do so.
I stand pretty firmly in the camp of the GP. Moving as a 20 year old is WAY easier than it is as an "older" adult. I've moved a few times, it sucks more and more every time I do it.
Moving is expensive even if you don't have 20 years' worth of stuff. For a lot of places, you'll need a security deposit, first month's rent, possibly last month's rent, and deposits for utilities and such in addition to the actual expenses related to the move itself (truck, packing materials, etc.). You might get your security deposit back if you took care of your current place, but I've fought with more than one landlord about deductions even though the place was exactly as I received it. You need to have all of that money up front, and preferably a job lined up wherever it is you want to go. You also need to have the time to do it, which is time that you're not working/getting paid. Then on top of that, if the new job pays in arrears, you might need a couple of weeks' worth of money to live off of until the first paycheck comes in. For a lot of us, this isn't too much of a problem, but there are a lot of people that just don't have that kind of cash on-hand.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
We have around three bookshelves of books we would not be willing to give away. Electronic books aren't a substitute for the real thing, and we have every set because we make sure we bought it when the price was right. So yes, we have things like real books because that is the only economical way to do it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
...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?
Ship it, with the money from other items sold deemed less important than grandma's piano.
fuck you, you need to STFU before I do to you what I did to the guy that cut me off last week!
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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It's your fault for getting cut off. If there's less than 1 car length between your car and the car in front of you, no one can cut you off (or at least in the case of accident, they'll be at fault).
It's called defensive driving.
A lot of those "benefits" and "hard work" you think the older generations owe you came about because of war. To create the post war economy that you millennials think you are "entitled" to came about because millions of people died.
Millennials are living in a relative age of peace. You may not think you are, but you are. You know nothing of the hard times earlier generations had. None of you have faced conscription into the armed forces. None of you have faced war time shortages or rationing.
My generation was also grew up in a age of relative peace but where close enough to know of people that died in Vietnam. Even though that war was a generation before my time.
Every generation has been handed down what came before. Problem with millennials is they seem to like to bitch and whine about it more than any generation before. At least the hippies that I like to bitch so much about knew what they where about and made something of themselves. I don't agree with them on everything but at least they where honest in their bitch'n.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.