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Not everyone can be a plumber

January 8, 2012 By

Stop sneering at art history majors, writes Virginia Postrel on Bloomberg News. Pundits blame underemployed college graduates for picking impractical majors, she argues, citing Bill Frezza’s attack on the college entitlement mentality in Real Clear Politics.

“Many people that go to college lack the smarts and/or the tenacity to benefit in any real sense,” he wrote. “Many of these people would be much better off becoming plumbers — including financially. (No shame in that, who’re you gonna call when your pipes freeze in the middle of the night? An M.A. in Italian art?)”

Only 12 percent of college students major in the humanities, a tiny fraction in art history. The most popular major is business. Add in economics and STEM  (science, technology, engineering and math) and nearly half of graduates have practical majors.  ”The rest, however, aren’t sitting around discussing Aristotle and Foucault.”  Many are studying health, education and graphic design, fields they think will lead to a “practical, job-oriented credential.”

Nobody knows which subjects will turn out to be “right” in the coming decades, writes Postrel, who earned an English major in the late ’70s. Her practical skills — excellent typing and journalism — are now obsolete, or nearly so.

The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyze texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn’t that I didn’t learn Fortran, but that I didn’t study Dante.

Unfortunately, many college students don’t learn analysis or argumentation. They lack the broad knowledge that makes it possible to “figure out what you don’t know and build on what you do know to adapt to new situations and new problems.”  Frezza is talking about people who lack “smarts” and tenacity and practical skills. There are a lot of those folks out there, even if few of them studied Italian art history.

The argument that public policy should herd students into STEM fields is as wrong-headed as the notion that industrial policy should drive investment into manufacturing or “green” industries. It’s just the old technocratic central planning impulse in a new guise. It misses the complexity and diversity of occupations in a modern economy, forgets the dispersed knowledge of aptitudes, preferences and job requirements that makes labor markets work, and ignores the profound uncertainty about what skills will be valuable not just next year but decades in the future.

Pundits “can experiment on their children,” but the rest of the population is not “lab mice,” Postrel concludes.

One of my daughter’s friends majored in art history (on her parents’ dimes). She’s now supporting herself as a prop designer for independent movies. If she’d tried for a STEM major, she’d probably have flopped.

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , , ,

Smart people, stupid choices

January 8, 2012 By

Why Should Everyone Else Pay for Other People’s Dumb (and Hedonistic) Career Choices? asks Barry Rubin on PJ Media.

He starts with a hard-working 28-year-old man who is “puzzled and increasingly bitter that he cannot make a good living” with a degree in linguistics — to which he’s adding Oriental philosophy studies.

He cannot make a living because the market for people with degrees in linguistics and in Oriental philosophy is limited. He should have known that. Someone should have told him that. The calculation of practicality should have been made. It wasn’t.

Young people need to be taught “the world doesn’t owe them a living,” whatever politicians may say, Rubin writes.

If you have a profound passion for art, literature, or other such things, go for it. But be aware of what’s likely to happen afterward.

. . .  Studying the social sciences and humanities, not to mention all of the phony degree programs that have sprung up, does not make one employable, nor does a degree have written on it “hire this person at a high salary.” Even as they charge more, universities — especially certain departments in them — are creating neither qualified professionals nor serious intellectuals.

“Get a useful education, a job, and a hobby in that order,” Rubin concludes. “And don’t expect the hardworking people, who have had to make compromises in their own lives, to pay for you to do whatever you want.”

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , , , ,

Women leave workforce for college

January 2, 2012 By

While men tend to take whatever work they can find, more women are choosing college over a bad job. Will the ex-Starbucks barista be able to pay back $200,000 in student loans with a masters in strategic communications?

California’s Dream Act promises undocumented students college aid but no path to citizenship.

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Nursing graduates can’t find jobs

December 19, 2011 By

Health care is supposed to be the hot career field. But California nursing graduates are having trouble finding jobs.

A Texas business group’s billboards attack Dallas and Austin community colleges for low graduation rates.

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Why some college grads aren’t employable

December 18, 2011 By

Some college graduates aren’t prepared for work, recruiters tell Jeff Selingo. The top students at nearly any college and most students at top colleges are worth interviewing. But a surprising number of applicants “clearly were not ready to go to college in the first place, yet possess a degree.”

“The focus on access and completion has come at a real cost,” one recruiter told me (he didn’t want his company identified because he’s not allowed to speak on its behalf). “We’re encouraging students to go to college who should be considering other options, and then we’re pushing them through once there.”

In the past, college graduates have fared much better than less-educated workers. That may change for average graduates of average colleges with not-very-rigorous degrees. And that’s a large group.

Many graduates write poorly. “It’s clear they’re not learning basic grammar, usage, and style in K-12,” recruiters say.

While many graduates are hard workers, others skated by in college.

The recruiters complained about professors who clearly gave grades that were not deserved, allowed assignments to be skipped, and simply didn’t demand much from their students.

In addition, many young workers feel entitled to a job, recruiters say. They blame “parents obsessed with their kids’ happiness.”

Many employers have cut training and mentoring to save money, the recruiters admit. Employers want to hire well-educated people who are ready to work with minimal support.

 

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Poverty isn’t just about money

December 16, 2011 By
If I was a poor black kid, I’d work hard in school and use technology to succeed, writes Gene Marks, a middle-class white man, in a Forbes column that’s angered and annoyed  many people.
Being poor is a lot harder than middle-class people think, responds Megan McArdle in The Atlantic. She lists the many reasons why poor black kids don’t just work, study, log in to Google Scholar and get ahead.
Number 14 is that not everyone likes school. She quotes Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier:

The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.

People for whom school us fun have made “education a virtual pre-requisite for a stable and well paying job,”  McArdle writes. People who don’t like school and aren’t good at it can choose between a career as a fry cook or dealing drugs.

In another post, McArdle takes on the idea that more and better jobs would create “education parents” in low-income communities.

Poverty isn’t just about not having “the same stuff” as the middle class (education, a marriage license, a home), McArdle writes. It’s about the choices people make. And those choices are affected by generational poverty and by bad decisions made at a young age, such as unprotected sex with an unreliable male or dropping out of school. But they’re choices.

 A middle class parent after a long and crappy day at work struggles to deal with the kid’s school because other parents expect it, because they were raised to treasure education, and because people will work harder to avoid loss (a kid who drops out of the middle class) than to achieve gains (a kid who makes it into the middle class).  Also, that middle class job probably isn’t as miserable as changing diapers on Alzheimer’s patients, or cleaning houses, so you have more psychic energy to spare.

Or you can blame a “sick culture” or personal laziness, as some conservatives do–at some level, it doesn’t matter.  Poor people are actually choosing not to hassle with their kid’s school.  It’s a real choice that they have made.  There is no reason to assume that you will be able to override it if you just get the policy levers in the right position.

Higher-wage jobs enable people to earn more money, which solves some problems, she writes. But it’s not so easy to change people. And it would be “pretty creepy” if we could tweak a policy here and there to “remake people into something more to the liking of bourgeois taxpayers.”

 

Filed Under: Culture, Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , ,

‘Brain hubs’ create middle-skill jobs

December 8, 2011 By

“Brain hubs” with well-educated workers, such as Austin and Raleigh, also create middle-class jobs for middle-skill workers. Opportunity spills over — or, at least, trickles down. But, in most of the country, less-skilled workers face bleak job prospects.

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Where the jobs (and pay) will be

November 17, 2011 By

Where will the jobs (and middle-class wages) will be in the next few years for people without four-year college degrees? Retiring baby boomers will open up manufacturing jobs for male high school graduates. Women will need a certificate or associate degree — preferably in a health-care field — to have a shot at earning at least $35,000 a year.

Also on Community College Spotlight: To provide realistic training in restaurant work, a college culinary arts program has opened its own bistro.

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Declaration of dependence

November 3, 2011 By

Salon’s “New Declaration of Independence,” which calls for a “jubilee” to wipe out student debts, annoyed Matt Welch, who thinks adults are responsible for their choices.

The “99 percent” complain they’ve “played by the rules,” then learned the game was rigged. Salon writes:

For the young, higher education was said to be a ticket to class mobility, or at least a secure career. Instead, middle-class students have taken on billions of dollars of inescapable debt during a prolonged jobs crisis. Lower-income students are blatantly ripped off by usurious scam artists working for educationally dubious for-profit schools. Even those seeking to join the professional class, through medical school or law school, find themselves with mountains of debt and dwindling job prospects. The rapidly rising cost of higher education pushes bright students into lucrative but socially destructive fields, like finance. [...]

“Cradle-to-grave employment (at least outside the public sector) has been dead since at least the end of the Cold War,” Welch responds. English, Film, Sociology, Philosophy and similar degrees “have had debatable workplace utility” for a generation or more.  

Adult human beings have agency, the ability (even responsibility!) to run their own cost/benefit analyses and choose accordingly. You could go to a state school (or community college) instead of an over-inflated prestige mill. You could pay for a 10-year-old car in cash, instead of a new one on installments. . . .  offloading 100% of the blame for your own mountain of debt on a group of Greedy McBanksters who “forced” you to “play by the rules” is more than a little pathetic.

“A ‘debt jubilee’ will not be a party, unless your idea of a wild time is to eliminate consumer credit as we know it,”  adds Welch. No repayment? No new loans.

A “free” (completely taxpayer-funded) higher education system is likely to be much smaller. The taxpayers will be willing to fund bright students to train as engineers or nurses, I suspect, but balk at funding students interested in English, Film, Sociology, Philosophy or (see Florida) Anthropology.

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Dropouts are job creators

October 26, 2011 By

The U.S. education system trains students to follow the rules and collect degrees, writes Michael Ellsberg in a New York Times op-ed. Dropouts are the job creators who can save America, he argues.

I typed these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.

From kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, students learn few entrepreneurial skills or attitudes, Ellsberg writes. Students don’t learn about sales, unless they take a class on why sales and capitalism are evil. They don’t learn to network with others. Creativity is stifled. Worst of all, they don’t learn how failure can lead to success.

Our education system encourages students to play it safe and retreat at the first sign of failure (assuming that any failure will look bad on their college applications and résumés).

While some jobs require a college degree, many people find jobs in the informal market, where who you know and what you’ve done matter more than paper credentials, he writes.

Parents could refuse to pay for useless degrees, but most are ”caught up in outmoded mentalities about education forged in the stable economy of the 1950s (but profoundly misguided in today’s chaotic, entrepreneurial economy).”

Employers could overturn the system “if they explicitly offered routes to employment for those who didn’t get a degree because they were out building businesses.”

OK, for the exceptionally talented and self-educated few.  But most college dropouts aren’t Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.  And some people do learn useful things in college.

 

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