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Get a job, any job

July 19, 2010 By

You’ve graduated from a good college with a humanities or social sciences degree. You can’t find a good job, so you’re living at home and letting your parents pay your bills. What should you do?  Take any job you can find, writes Jason Fertig, assistant professor of management at Southern Indiana University, on the National Association of Scholars blog.

In American Dream is Elusive for New Generation, the New York Times told the story of a 2008 Colgate graduate, Scott Nicholson, who turned down a $40,000-a-year job as an insurance claim adjuster because it wasn’t a management trainee position.

Fertig shares his own experience as a college graduate in Management Information Systems. Hired in the boom as a technical consultant, he found himself preparing PowerPoint slides and other menial work, then laid off when the project ended. He found another job, ended up doing clerical work and let his discontent affect his job performance. When the company merged, he was considered expendable.

Unemployed for the second time in two years, he moved back in with his family.  After six months holding out for a “good job” in line with his training, he realized that college hadn’t trained him for a job.

Higher education is designed to develop the mind, which in turn allows the graduate to bring that developed mind to the workforce.  It does not, nor should it allow one to bypass the lower rungs of the corporate ladder.

. . . Knowing what I know now, I need to ask why you think a political science major with minimal job experience qualifies you for a mid-level management position at a large corporation.

Fertig worked at a gym for $10 per hour. “I learned that a career was about learning a business – it was about doing the work that others will not.”

Trust me, if you worked anywhere for these last two years, and you showed a work ethic that conveyed that you are not afraid to get your hands dirty, your stock would be exponentially higher than it is now.  Even if you worked in fast food, you would be able to show experience in dealing with pressure, working with difficult people, and learning a business from the ground floor.

. . . The longer you hold out, the longer you convey an entitled mentality and a high maintenance attitude to those organizations where you seek employment.

. . . Don’t leave the bat on your shoulder – swing it!  Just get out there and work, and you never know how your career will twist and turn.

Don’t expect to love your job, Fertig adds. Love your spouse. Lead a balanced life.

In my second job, as associate editor of a filmmaking magazine, I was responsible for taking out the garbage, which meant carrying the can down the steep steps of our Victorian, then retrieving it when it was emptied. When an advertising manager was placed in an office overlooking the street, I persuaded the publisher to put her in charge of bringing up the can as soon as it was emptied so the restaurant below us, the Noble Frankfurter, wouldn’t take it with their can. As a Stanford graduate in English and Creative Writing, I learned a lot in that job.

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , ,

Beware the law-school scam

June 17, 2010 By

Non-elite law schools are a scam, write unemployed law-school graduates on a growing number of web sites, including: Third Tier Reality, Esq. Never, Exposing the Law School Scam, Jobless Juris Doctor and Temporary Attorney: The Sweatshop Edition,.

Brian Tamanaha, a law professor at St. John’s University, is sympathetic.

Law schools advertise deceptively high rates of employment and misleading income figures. Many graduates can’t get jobs. Many graduates end up as temp attorneys working for $15 to $20 dollars an hour on two week gigs, with no benefits. The luckier graduates land jobs in government or small firms for maybe $45,000, with limited prospects for improvement. A handful of lottery winners score big firm jobs.

And for the opportunity to enter a saturated legal market with long odds against them, the tens of thousands newly minted lawyers who graduate each year from non-elite schools will have paid around $150,000 in tuition and living expenses, and given up three years of income. Many leave law school with well over $100,000 in non-dischargeable debt, obligated to pay $1,000 a month for thirty years.

It’s been going on for years, Tamanaha writes. The recession just made it worse, spreading the pain into the lower reaches of elite schools.

The law graduates posting on these sites know the score. They know that law schools pad their employment figures—96% employed—by counting as “employed” any job at all, legal or non-legal, including part time jobs, including unemployed graduates hired by the school as research assistants (or by excluding unemployed graduates “not currently seeking” a job, or by excluding graduates who do not supply employment information). They know that the gaudy salary numbers advertised on the career services page—“average starting salary $125,000 private full time employment”—are actually calculated based upon only about 25% of the graduating class (although you can’t easily figure this out from the information provided by the schools).

Law schools should be honest about the employment data for recent grads, he writes.

More crucially, law schools must shrink the number of graduates, and must hold the line on tuition increases. . . .  This will be painful: smaller raises (perhaps even salary reductions), smaller administrations, smaller faculties, more teaching, less money for research, travel, and conferences.

Instapundit, also a law professor, links to Tamanaha and runs a letter from a law graduate, who writes,  “There are simply no jobs.”

I myself graduated in May from a very competent, middle-of-the-road law school, and probably around 75% of my class is unemployed. . . .  they’re looking at 150-200k in student loans and no employment. When I say “no employment” I don’t mean a lack of big-law, 100k associate employment. I don’t even mean that we’re having trouble getting the clerkships and government jobs that the ivy league law schools so despise. I mean nothing – there are simply no jobs.

Four years ago, my daughter researched law schools — including reading sites by law grads who were temping — and concluded that she needed to go to a top-tier law school to make sure her degree would pay off.  As a 2009 graduate of University of Chicago Law School, she got one of the last seats on the gravy train.

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , ,

$200K in debt to deliver pizza

May 16, 2010 By

The Class of 2010 borrowed lots of money to attend expensive universities and graduate with skills the labor market doesn’t want, writes Joe Queenan in the Wall Street Journal.

Over the next few weeks, hundreds of thousands of Millennials will graduate from institutions of higher learning. They will celebrate for several days, perhaps several weeks. Then they will enter a labor force that neither wants nor needs them. They will enter an economy where roughly 17% of people aged 20 through 24 do not have a job, and where two million college graduates are unemployed. They will enter a world where they will compete tooth and nail for jobs as waitresses, pizza delivery men, file clerks, bouncers, trainee busboys, assistant baristas, interns at bodegas.

It will take five years to get back to the pre-recession level of jobs, economist say. This generation may never catch up with their parents’ generation.

There are three formidable obstacles confronting college graduates today. One, the economy, though improving at a glacial pace, is still a wreck. There are no jobs, and the jobs that do exist aren’t the kinds anyone in his right mind would have spent $100,000 to $200,000 to land. Two, nothing in most middle-class kids’ lives has prepared them emotionally for the world they are about to enter. Three, the legacy costs that society has imposed on young people will be a millstone around their necks for decades. Who’s going to pay for the health care bill? Gen Y. Who’s going to pay off the federal deficit? Gen Y. Who’s going to fund all those cops’ and teachers’ and firemen’s pensions? Gen Y. Who’s going to support Baby Boomers as they suck the Social Security System dry while wheezing around Tuscany? Gen Y.

Baby boomers with college degrees could move up the job ladder quickly, Queenan writes.

Today, even the idiots have college degrees. And the idiots have seniority.

Queenan’s son was graduated from college in 2009. After working as a bouncer, furniture mover and focus group participant, he’s planning to start law school in the fall.

Is college the key to success for all students?  Not necessarily.

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , ,

Drop out, go to prison

October 9, 2009 By

Ten percent of young male high school dropouts are in prison compared to three percent of high school graduates, estimates a Northeastern University study. reported in the New York Times.

The picture is even bleaker for African-Americans, with nearly one in four young black male dropouts incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized on an average day, the study said. That compares with about one in 14 young, male, white, Asian or Hispanic dropouts.

Each high school dropout costs about $292,000, the report estimated, including “lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime.”

Supporters want more money for dropout recovery programs offering GED and job training.

Here’s the problem: Dropping out by itself doesn’t trigger unemployment or criminal behavior. It’s the result of years of failure. Most dropouts haven’t developed the work habits and behaviors required by the working world; they’ve also failed to acquire minimal reading, writing and math skills. Some grow up and wise up when they see they’re unprepared for adult life, but most need a lot more than GED and job classes.

Filed Under: Careers, Education Tagged With: , , ,

Ain't no cure for the summertime blues

July 7, 2009 By

Well-paying summer jobs and prestigious internships have vanished, reports the New York Times. Parents can’t afford to fund “art tours of Tuscany” for college students. The young are getting restless.

To a high-achieving generation whose schedules were once crammed with extracurricular activities meant to propel them into college, it feels like an empty summer — eerie, and a bit scary.

“Things have changed drastically,” said Ron Alsop, author of “The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace,” a book that only last year portrayed young workers as entitled and in a hurry. “It has to be a huge wake-up call for this generation.”

Numbers provide the backdrop to the story — not just the grimly familiar national unemployment rate, 9.5 percent in June, but the even scarier, less publicized unemployment figure for 16- to 19-year-olds, which has hit 24 percent, up from 16.1 percent two years ago. Internships available to college students have fallen 21 percent since last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Stop blaming parents for young workers’ sense of entitlement, writes Jessica Grose at XX Factor. It’s the economy, stupid.

For a while now, Generation Y has been portrayed as a bunch of sneaker-wearing lazybones who skateboard to the office and demand a four-day work week. But I would argue that the way Gen-Y workers used to behave had nothing to do with indulgent parents who told us we were infallible. The way young workers behaved in the first half of the decade had everything to do with the economy. In the mid-aughts, people of all ages were being entitled and demanding of their employers … because they could be. In a market where jobs are abundant, it’s logical for workers to try to get the most perks possible—whether or not their Mommies told them they were special.

By the way, federally funded retraining doesn’t help older workers get new jobs or increase their pay, concludes a Labor Department study. I remember similar results in the ’80s. Job training is very hard to do effectively; it’s even harder to predict the real “jobs of the future.”

Funemployed? Take a starve-cation, advises Iowahawk.

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

Young, single and funemployed

June 20, 2009 By

Some twentysomethings aren’t sweating the recession, reports The Phoenix from a Boston club. Those with no children and no mortgage — and with supportive parents — see unemployment as a long vacation.

Nestled in a corner banquette are Senam, 25, and his friend Khushbu, 24. Senam’s dressed in cashmere and khakis, not a pore in sight. Khushbu’s all in black, fondling a BlackBerry. He’s in architecture, she’s a lawyer. Both sip white wine and seem happy to confide in a fleece-clad interloper.

“I was laid off last week,” says Senam, stretching like a happy feline. He grins and drinks. “Looks like it’s time for a vacation to Puerto Rico!” He smiles even more broadly now, revealing a perfect set of exceptionally white teeth. Khushbu giggles, smoothes her long black hair. “I lost my job a month ago,” she says calmly. “Here’s to the economy!” They clink glasses.

. . . Cara, a 25 year old with a background in international relations and journalism — who is also currently unemployed — is equally unfazed. “The economy better pick up soon!” she says, laughing. “But if it doesn’t, well, I’ll just have to try [looking for work] longer.” She shrugs and goes back to her drink. “I think the economy is just making people spend smarter,” adds Beth, who works in the restaurant industry. “Maybe I won’t go out to eat at a mediocre restaurant or spend a lot of money just going out for a beer. If I spend money, I want it to be amazing.”

In New York City’s Williamsburg neighborhood, parents are telling their heavily subsidized children that the money is running out, reports the New York Times.

Luis Illades, an owner of the Urban Rustic Market and Cafe on North 12th Street, said he had seen a steady number of applicants, in their late 20s, who had never held paid jobs: They were interns at a modeling agency, for example, or worked at a college radio station. In some cases, applicants have stormed out of the market after hearing the job requirements.

“They say, ‘You want me to work eight hours?’ ” Mr. Illades said. “There is a bubble bursting.”

Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses.

Then there’s the LA Times story on the “funemployed.”


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

Education vs. unemployment

February 9, 2009 By

More Americans are jobless. The unemployment rate is 3.8 percent for college graduates, 6.2 percent for those with some college or a two-year degree, 8 percent for high school graduates and 12 percent for drop-outs.

The numbers show the importance of postsecondary education, writes Eduwonk.

Joblessness is rising for every group, counters Sherman Dorn. The link between education and employment hasn’t changed significantly.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,
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