I noticed this buried nugget in a news article about the October (un)employment data (http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/06/news/economy/jobs_october/index.htm):

For those with college degrees, the unemployment rate fell to 4.7% from 4.9% in September

Then today, I saw this very interesting chart:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html

I had assumed it was stratification along those lines, but it's interesting to see real (inaccurate) numbers by demographic. Explains why some of us barely know anyone affected by this stuff, despite the gloomy macro numbers.

Criminologists are starting to predict major crime increases (poor people crime, obviously rich people crime demonstrably can't get much worse now that they've stolen $2.9 trillion unless they find a new planet to pilfer) because the principal unemployment sectors are young men without college degrees, the exact group of people most likely to turn to crime and vice in times of economic stress. The great bastion of socialist employment in the US, the military, went from recruiting shortfalls to surpluses and will probably stay there until we go bankrupt.

If we end up with another "jobless recovery" like the one after the last bubble, it's becoming unavoidable that the working class is going to vanish entirely back into the poor, having completely reversed the trend since the end of the great Depression/WWII. Where that leads us is up in the air, but very few people are going to think it's anywhere good.


Also, given the lack of new job creation in small/mid size business, I wouldn't be surprised to see a subsequent increase in the "good folks" like college-education white kids again as the available jobs are filled up. Those of us in careers are less likely to make room for them, and the f'ing boomers in the 55-65 range are all planning to put off retirement by years now. (thanks a lot dad!)

Well is it really a surprise to anyone that in this day and age, with the level of international competition we are facing, that going into the work force without a college degree is going to lead to you not getting a (good) job?

A college degree definitely doesn't give you immunity from international competition. It just means you have student loans to repay after your job's outsourced.

I thought Mike Rowe's commentary on our over-emphasis on college and white collar jobs in the reddit interview was good (the rest of the interview is good too, if you go back to the beginning):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEAatFXQBvA

Well is it really a surprise to anyone that in this day and age, with the level of international competition we are facing, that going into the work force without a college degree is going to lead to you not getting a (good) job?

Except the number of people actually qualified for those educations hasn't really changed, and most people are only going because it's a perceived requirement -- when no one understands what they're doing because most of it isn't actually work, you need some sort of rubber stamp on who can do it, which universities and other less scrupulous organizations were more than happy to provide for ridiculous sums of money. Consequently both education itself and the educated has suffered horribly in the last twenty years and a lot of the really smart people that could be doing something relevant instead went into finance and pointless specialized medicine (botoxing pays well).


And Mike Rowe's bit about Reddit karma was hilarious. And if nothing else, skip to the last minute of #3.

I admidt it doesn't give you immunity, and certainly we don't need more people with business degrees hoping to make a killing in housing or stocks or mortgages or whatever ...
We do need engineers, we need mathmaticians, we need scientists, we need educators and artists, we need biologists and medical professionals, we need entertainers and authors ... and these people generally are at least college educated (and I don't care if they got a paper degree from University of Somewhere or if they taught themselves to a college level). They are also the catalyst for the blue collar jobs. The engineers create the products that justify the factors and workshops filled with labor. They create the capitol and demand for automotive repair and carpentry and plumbing. They are the ones well read and inspired enough to create the small businesses.

And in truth it is very hard for me to feel sympathy for those who can but don't try to get educated so they can offer more than putting shit together on a conveyor belt. There are so many avenues to education in this country that there really isn't much left as an excuse.

I admidt it doesn't give you immunity, and certainly we don't need more people with business degrees hoping to make a killing in housing or stocks or mortgages or whatever ...
We do need engineers, we need mathmaticians, we need scientists, we need educators and artists, we need biologists and medical professionals, we need entertainers and authors ... and these people generally are at least college educated (and I don't care if they got a paper degree from University of Somewhere or if they taught themselves to a college level). They are also the catalyst for the blue collar jobs. The engineers create the products that justify the factors and workshops filled with labor. They create the capitol and demand for automotive repair and carpentry and plumbing. They are the ones well read and inspired enough to create the small businesses.

I don't disagree that we need theoretical innovators, but we were talking about employment. The job opportunities for mathematicians and scientists will always be a tiny fraction of those out there, even if those jobs directly enable the creation of many more.

It's also worth keeping in mind that the guy changing your brakes or fixing your leaking pipes probably makes more money than the average scientist or mathematician.

And in truth it is very hard for me to feel sympathy for those who can but don't try to get educated so they can offer more than putting shit together on a conveyor belt. There are so many avenues to education in this country that there really isn't much left as an excuse.

Because assembling TPS reports offers so much more than assembling something tangible? You should be glad there are people who want to do the hard, physical work, not disdaining them.

No disdain here, I just have a tough time with people turning to the crime Malse pointed outif they can't find a job when there are so many opportunities out there for someone willing to pursue the education required. Mechanics and plumbers have had to go out, dedicate the time to apprenticeship or a trade school and learn a skill, which is the same as someone going to a University or self teaching themselves. That isn't even what I was talking about.

I think one good example of opportunity would be our armed services. One of the talking heads this morning speaking about Fort Hood commented that we have less than 1% of our population who will have served in the military during the Iraq or Afghanistan wars compared to the 20% that served during World War II. The military is desperate for troops, as discussed in numerous threads here, and will provide college both during and after service as well as on the job training and will pay you as well. Yet what happens is we are still running 10+% unemployment, our troops are serving their 3rd and 4th tours due to the shortages and are ultimately coming home pretty fucked up. The military isn't the only area that are desperate for people, either. Nursing and health care is pretty topical right now, and a high school graduate could get their entire nursing program financed with loans and get a job before they even graduate. My sister's field (speech pathology) is so desperate for people that they hired her right out of school, they pay her more than I make (and she only works 9 months a year which is a total load of crap since I've been building my company for 5 years ... but I digress ...), and she isn't even certified yet (her School District will get her certified and pay for her tests and such during her first year).

If we're considering vocational education/apprenticeship as "education", then I agree with you. I don't have an ounce of sympathy for people who are just lazy.

I just hate the academic institution/industry/circlejerk leading to a bunch of morons taking out huge student loans to do nothing but unskilled paper pushing; learned at company training and not at college anyway. It has become more about turning the white-collar certification into a self-referential business than about education.

As far as the military, you can't blame anyone for being disinterested in being part of what's been going on for the last several years.

There are many jobs going begging, but they are not in the "What I want to do when I grow up" areas. The high visibility, high paycheck Wall Street mergers and acquisitions caliber jobs. Everyone wants to be the boss. The high power executive. Its what our society celebrates. Thankfully there are people like Mike Rowe who can present the other side of the coin in that there is fulfillment, honor and yes...MUCH money to be made by getting your hands dirty.

Our society doesn't want to get its hands dirty though. We would rather push buttons, tap on a keyboard and talk on the phone in a cushy climate controlled office while raking in 6-7 figures. Money for nothing and chicks for free, right? So as long as the government is still offering the tit, than people who feel no need to lift a finger can continue to suckle as long as it means they don't have to do what our society looks down its nose at:

Real work.

The kind that makes you sweat and get dirty. Heck, people don't even want to be engineers anymore and that requires a degree and passing an exam but there is a chance you might get dirty. People would rather knock over a bank or liquor store and run the risk of prison than bring themselves to want to go down a "collar" from white to blue, even if it might mean not that much of a dent in their pay. Well, if we want an economy there still has to be people to make widgets, build infrastructure, repair, maintain, and clean up. Those are all things you can't do in a comfy office and represent a much greater percentage of total jobs then white collar. China's stimulus (yes they needed one believe it or not) was to pour trillions into additional infrastructure and put people to work with plenty of dirty jobs. Highways. Rail. New airports. So on and so forth. Did they come up with that on their own? Heck no. Their buddies the Americans thought of it during the Great Depression. It just seems today that we don't want to do that work anymore. Maybe that is why India and China are having their day in the sun. We outsourced our desire to get dirty and do what it takes to feed our families and have some self-respect to them.

So there is that aspect. The rest might just be that the employees who were terrible at their jobs got fired (and are thus undesirable to any future employers because they are marked as such) or built in inefficiency that was retained for the sake of keeping people with a job out of compassion could no longer be afforded. Don't expect people to be flocking to the military during a period of being mired in unpopular wars either. WWII was a battle to save the world and you stood a very good chance of being killed if you served during WWII. Not so much today but still troop levels are over extended because of all the politics surrounding the wars. The amazing thing is there probably has never been as good a time to be in the military as now with all the perks and benefits as well as networking.

Dear Kelraz:

The 'healthcare shortage' depends a great deal on what specialty you're in (many schools are impacted, while others are under fire for producing too many graduates for the available jobs), and our ability to produce qualified nurses, surgical techs, etc, is severely constrained (thus the 'good wages' on the demand end) by the destruction ('collapse' would be too charitable) of our K-12 educational system (and by this I mean homogenized to the point that we're consistently producing graduates unqualified for anything but an equally meaningless modern 'liberal arts' education in anticipation of a nonexistent career selling something and/or generating TPS reports). As an instructor at a community college that is getting money *thrown* at us to train nurses and scientists, our biggest problem is that our students come in unable to do 4th grade math (and yes, I mean unable to calculate percentages, 'convert' between units in the *metric* system, or read a graph).

Our physicist, who is in his mid 70s now, an old rancher, and dedicated enough that he holds Saturday clinics at high schools in the outlying areas says that the major contributor to his students being completely unprepared is that none of our rural 'feeder' schools even *have* a qualified physics teacher - and so the kids are being sent to us with 'A's in the appropriate prep classes but in fact show up having never seen a mathematical equation in Physics or Chemistry (and forget about Biology!). Unlike so much in our subjective-reality America, bridge and drug tolerances, for example, tend to be non-negotiable, and this is difficult for both the students (who are frequently unprepared through no fault of their own) and the general public to understand when we attempt to hold the rubber accountable to the road for fear of what future roads might look like ;).

While I wish I could say steps were being taken to improve this situation (and they are at the individual school level, we're in the process of implementing a pilot developmental science class), the 'solution' put forth by the state of Texas this week was to base state funding for public *colleges* and universities on retention and productive grade rates. (I can't imagine what could POSSIBLY GO WRONG with this scenario since NCLB produced such improvements in student development after all that testing :) ). As a coincidence, I'm sure, at my particular college all three of our Anatomy/Physiology instructors/professors were called into the President's office this month and issued veiled threats with regard to their tenure/promotion about their pass rates - these three instructors teach the 'weedout' class for prospective nurses, just as I and the Organic Chemistry professors do for Pre-meds and we all have enough integrity that we feel that it would be unethical to produce nursing graduates that couldn't calculate drug dosages, locate the pancreas, or pass their boards or science/engineering graduates that do not stand a chance of success at university, but that is exactly what we are being pressured to do.

I've spoken in the past about the need to return vocational education to the schools and to diversify, rather than homogenize, K-12 education; equal *opportunity* should not equal 'identical processing' and we've done a tragic disservice both to our students and to the country's future by insisting that all students hop through a set of identical hoops that serve no potential future well - and tendering over the responsibility for producing our skilled tradesmen to for-profit tech schools.

As Sanchek points out, the commodification (sp?) of education has become a cancer that has permeated the colleges as well over the past 20 years and most colleges have become profit-driven businesses more interested in selling an 'education', i.e. the golden ticket, to students for as much profit as the market will bear while starving the substance of that education itself and forcing professors to bring in their own grant funding (or lose their jobs), turning them into mercenaries as well. The Mike Rowe interview is excellent and I agree completely with much of what he says - I remarked to a friend a short while ago that part of the reason that I think Dirty Jobs is so popular is that we are so disconnected from actual productive work that it has become a quaint and somewhat, well, dingy, mythology.

In the recent past, I would have said that for the properly qualified, there is no shortage of opportunity in many fields; however the larger economic collapse is directly impacting the *opportunity* for students to attend college not because of their own finances, but because colleges are being forced to slash programs and course offerings. This year in California, there is a thirty *thousand* student glut of students who have completed their lower division education and thus were guaranteed admittance to the 4 year college they prepped for, but there is no room to take them - they're being forced into either taking a year or more off (and student loans will come due), or spinning their wheels taking coursework that they do not need and running up more debt. Unfortunately, the economic reckoning result from the education bubble's collapse is, so far, mostly resulting in low enrollment but *needed* programs/specialties being thrown out the window first while schools try to hang on to their mass-enrollment cash cows.

This has run on a long while and I have a treadmill of the more prosaic type calling my name but I think we in the US have to throw our whole notion of education as a means to an mythologically affluent and 'classy' end (promised us by the folks who run the casino!) out the window and look at what the purpose of education *should* be if we have any interest in being in the business of constructing a functioning society.

Regards,
Nydia

A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. -Greek proverb

There is no magic formula for success. Other than to work hard and work smart. You want to be a tradesman? Go work on a job site as a laborer. Do all the shit jobs, be patient and keep your eyes and ears open. Most of all bust your ass. Live within your means and stay focused. Usually if you do that you will be fine. All you have to do is get off your ass and stay off it. The same applies to most any other business because when you look at it, the penance you pay before entering the workforce and finding your niche has really changed little since Medieval times. The difference today is instead of being directly indentured by a master, you are indentured by a system. The system always has openings just is not everyone wants to pay the penance.

You want to be a stock broker? Colleges tend to be about 75% puppy mill for credentials for the world's cubicle farms. There again, you are doing the shit jobs for almost as little pay as the laborer on the job site....learning your trade. If you desire to be a stock broker get your degree in finance and take a job as an intern doing cold calls just a couple bucks above minimum wage. The broker is telling you the do's and don'ts to get the most out of what he or she is paying you. Hopefully your are making enough to pay for the fares to the office and for your suit to be cleaned. Eventually you graduate and fullfill some HR person's requirement to get hired on full time somewhere and do those same cold calls again. Only now you have access to more experience, tools etc. More OJT.


Most any job, unless its theory based sciences, of which case you stand a good chance of never leaving academia, are OJT. A degree is just a very expensive ticket to a cleaner, better dressed but still low paying entry level job. You can pick and sort scrap lumber or you can get a bunch of "NO's" cold calling. Your choice. It jump starts the experience requirement and might even get you in favor with certain cliques....but that is about all it does. For those just looking to satisfy a HR person's requirement to do a bland job with the hope of learning more through experience in order to advance, the system of education in place works. In most cases, those college skills tend to be less directly applied if you want to advance in any field. It gets down to being more about managing projects, with the big factor in that being how you manage people and their skills as opposed to always just relying on your own. Projects can be a home remodel to a 160 story supertall building to purchasing copier paper to managing an IPO.

I believe that good education is a backbone for a progressive society. I also believe that it is not for everyone. The people that need the hard science and math...will get it. Those that don't....won't. Schools in the USA are facilitators which means its still almost 100% on YOU to do the learning on your own. Do the homework problems. Understand the theories etc. Asian schools rely strictly on core memorization and not comprehension. You know that 2 + 2 is 4 because the book you had to read 50 times says it is. Granted, they will show a film that has more depth than just a man's ass passing gas, but they will never ask as to who's ass it is and why is it farting. Granted that our public education system OVER ALL is a mess. Averages can hide the good examples under layers of shit and lawyers and politicians find new ways to add more shit layers every day. Even then there are plenty of educational opportunities for those that want to learn and learning is a broad spectrum because the School of Hard Knocks is still alive and well. All everyone needs to be able to do is find something and stay focused and work hard at it.