Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Under pressure from an online petition, Sallie Mae will stop charging a forbearance fee – $50 every three months per loan — to unemployed borrowers. Instead, what the private lender calls a “good faith deposit” will be applied to the balance of the loan.
Stop Sallie Mae’s unemployment penalty demands a Change petition.
Federal financial aid is geared to full-time, degree-seeking students, complained Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s audience at Tallahassee Community College. Colleges can’t train 2 million skilled workers without aid for people seeking short-term job training or part-timers who need literacy or English classes to qualify for a job.
“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.
Oldsters “ruined” the Occupy Wall Street Generation with very bad advice, writes John Cheese on Cracked.com. It starts by telling everyone to go to college to get a good job, implying that the good job is guaranteed so there’s no need to worry about about paying off student loans.
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“A master’s in psychology? Pretty impressive. How would you say that qualifies you to answer the phone?”
In 1950, less than 10 percent of adults had bachelor’s degrees and only half had completed high school, he writes. “College was something that smart kids and people with money did.” (When I was graduated from high school in 1970, it was above-average students and people with some money.) Now a bachelor’s is seen as the bare minimum. College graduates do much better in the workforce than people with only a high school diploma, but there’s no guarantee.
So when you finally take those first steps out of university life and enter the work field, it’s an absolute system shock to find out your $30,000 to $100,000+ bachelor’s degree doesn’t guarantee you a position in your field of study … possibly ever. At least 40 percent of you who get degrees will wind up in jobs that don’t require a degree at all. And the rest will wind up in jobs outside the field they studied.
Cheese adds other steps on the road to ruin, such as: Telling young people they’re too good for manual labor and adding another seven years to adolescence by telling young men it’s OK to live with your parents into your mid-20s.
A UCLA graduate in her mid-20s, working at an entry-level marketing job, told me she’s the envy of her former classmates. One is teaching English overseas; others are working at Starbucks or still seeking that poorly paid dead-end job. UCLA grads with three years at Starbucks believe they’re seen as losers when they apply for entry-level career jobs, she said. Employers prefer shiny new grads. And not working makes you an even bigger loser. These are not slackers with “me studies” degrees from Mediocre College. They are top students whose parents don’t have connections to get them started.
Which college majors lead to career success? A Wall Street Journal chart, based on 2010 Census data, looks at unemployment rates and pay for various majors. Nursing (2.2 percent unemployment, $60,000 median salary) and finance (4.5 percent unemployment, $65,000 median pay), tend to pay off for graduates, the Journal notes.
Education graduates have low unemployment rates and average $40,000 (elementary) to $47,000 (science and computer specialists) in median pay. Education psychologists do much worse and administrators do much better.
The arts category includes everything from visual and performing arts to liberal arts, geology and earth science (huh?) and cosmetology and culinary arts (lumped together), which rarely requires more than a certificate or associate degree. Still, those cosmetologists and cooks (unemployment is 7.3 percent, median pay is $41,000) do about as well as drama and theater arts majors.
Health-care degrees, sold as the ticket to a high-paying, high-demand job, are “a passport to the unemployment line” in some parts of the country.
Also on Community College Spotlight: “Reverse-transfer” programs are helping students earn associate degrees en route to a bachelor’s, while improving community college graduation rates.
Interns are worth what they’re (not) paid, argues legal blogger Josh Blackman in response to a New York Times story which blames colleges for “failing to inform young people of their rights or protect them from the miserly calculus of employers.”
There’s no protection from the law of supply and demand, writes Blackman.
College students with no experience are not particularly valuable. Usually, they are a liability, and require extensive training and supervision to make sure they don’t screw things up too bad. Were interns to demand a salary at minimum wage, employers would be better to not hire them in the first place.
Unpaid interns can’t afford apartments in expensive cities, the Times complains, quoting a Colgate student who crashed on “more than 20 floors and couches” for a summer. “It definitely hurt my confidence,” Will Batson told the Times.
Few summer jobs pay enough for a student to afford rent in New York City, notes Blackman.
What’s unfair, he writes, is charging students’ tuition for a summer spent working off campus. Thanks to labor law, students can’t qualify for an unpaid internship if they’re not earning credit and they can’t earn credit if they don’t pay up. Blackman’s college charged out-of-state tuition but “provided no guidance, no assessment, and simply made my boss fill out some annoying useless forms.” Still, it was worth it.
An unpaid internship is an investment in your future. When two college students graduate – with the exact same academic credentials, but one spent his summer interning at an industry leader, and the other worked as a lifeguard – which one do you think is more likely to get the job?
Paid work is hard to find these days, even for college graduates. Unemployment is 25.7 percent for teenagers and 15.7 percent for those 20 to 24 years old, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Recent college grads are despairing of landing anything above the fast-food counter, where they face stiff competition from millions of recent immigrants,” writes Robert Knight, a senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union, in the Washington Times.
If college graduates aren’t worth more to employers than recent immigrants . . . Well, let’s assume the unemployed grads earned low-value degrees from undemanding colleges — and never let themselves by exploited by a miserly employer.
‘More college’ won’t solve unemployment, editorializes the New York Times. While people with bachelor’s degree are more likely to be working, recent graduates aren’t doing very well.
Also on Community College Spotlight: 89 percent of recent college graduates say their two-year or four-year degree was worth the time and money, according to a survey.
On Community College Spotlight: To meet President Obama’s college-completion goal, Maryland will increase dramatically the number of students earning associate degrees, community college leaders pledge.
President Obama will talk about the rising unemployment rate on a visit to Forsyth Tech in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Also, graduation rates are falling at one third of four-year colleges and universities.
On Community College Spotlight: College graduates are much less likely to be unemployed than workers with only a high school diploma, but some question whether the college advantage is worth taking on debt.
Community colleges are reaching out to high-risk students — especially Hispanics — to get them from high school to community college to a four-year degree.
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