Source link: http://archive.mises.org/17272/a-grim-look-at-how-college-worked-out-for-2010-graduates/
A grim look at how college worked out for 2010 graduates
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I graduated in 2010, and ended up working as a delivery driver 55 hours a week. The good thing is that I quickly tired of music in the car and switched to audiobooks. The free availability of Mises.org’s audiobooks on torrent trackers got me started, and now I’m headed in a completely different direction in life. If I had been able to get a “real job” when I graduated, I would not be the same person I am today.
As an academic, I’ll be the first to tell you that being a delivery driver is a real job.
“As an academic, I’ll be the first to tell you that being a delivery driver is a real job.”
It sure is. The delivery driver is performing a valuable service in the market place. A job is a job. Nothing is “real” or “illusory” about them.
I finish one of my degrees next semester (and, I don’t know if I will pursue my second degree), and alone the degree is close to worthless (a degree in political science). Mixed with other skills I have, though, the degree gives me an important advantage in a world which values paper certificates. The truth is that if you graduate college with no skills other than the information you learned in class then the degree will probably serve you little. Nevertheless, a degree mixed with other skills is better than having skills but no degree.
One of the problems with having a degree alone is that it’s not a guarantee that the holder has a “brain” (so to speak). I don’t mean to sound condescending, but the majority of my peers in my department will either probably not do anything related to political science or would otherwise be horrible “political scientists” (whatever that really is). A degree in political scientist does not make you intelligent, even in the field you majored in. The same goes for most social sciences, including economics. I may be stereotyping, but the only degrees that seems worth it “alone” is an engineer or math degrees, or something in the hard sciences — it seems that you gain actually valuable information that you have few alternatives in learning.
My degree is in Political Science as well, and with a very few exceptions the majority of my peers in the program sound like the majority of yours. Political Science is a degree that either prepares you for more school or for jobs that don’t care what your major was.
I earned a Political Science degree in 2002 and I can tell you that you will not find one job that values just a that sort of degree. Skills are the most important factor by far. In 2007, I went to a CDL school for six weeks and came out with a job making much more starting off than any of the jobs that required the little piece of paper that took me 4 years to obtain. I still hold my Class A CDL and drive trucks to this day. One place that the degree may help is in advancing within the transportation/logistics operation, which I aspire to do and actually am interviewing for a promotion tomorrow. We shall see. I have developed an affinity for the industry.
If you want to make the most of a political science degree, I would definitely seek graduate work of some kind or law school. The B.S. or B.A. on it’s own won’t open up much opportunity these days.
This is a serious question and I am actually very curious:
How would you know that? I mean that you said you have another semester before you get your degree so it doesn’t seem that your speaking from experience here. Do you have a few other similar degrees and you have found this out in the workplace?
Or are you just saying this because you’ve been told things like this for years and it just makes sense?
A friend of mine graduated with a degree in the classics. Suffice to say, there was no job available for him in that area. I believe he went to a technical school afterwards and now works with some company making an “average” income. The degree, though, gave him a competitive edge against other people applying for the same job. Unemployment is higher amongst those who don’t hold degrees than amongst those that do, IIRC.
Maybe it did. It’s really hard to tell.
Each corporation is different with their own different culture and way of doing things. VASTLY different. Young people have no idea how different they can be.
Colleges that say they are preparing you for the workforce are simply lying. The reason I know this is because not even working in the workforce really prepares you for working in a different workforce. The companies are that different.
Also your carrier won’t be a linear thing, that is it won’t if you have any hope of real advancement. You’ll jump all over the place and it’s not really possible to map out your path.
I know managers that highly educated people with no work experience is actually a negative compared to somebody with no experience and no education. Most managers are not like that. Some really value education. The people I work for now don’t really care. They are indifferent.
I think that if you look that up you’ll find that it’s something coming from universities. They make money from convincing people to borrow huge amounts of money and give it to them. They are for profit, just like IBM or Walmart. Even if they claim they are non-profit, that’s just for tax reasons.. they still work for self-interest. Pay careful attention to
When you compare motivated person without 4-year degree versus motivated person without degree you’ll see that the statistics are not nearly as compelling as the universities make them out to be.
Now if you compare somebody just out of high school versus somebody with a 8 or 10+ years of education then that is different…
Nate-m,
Regarding the unemployment statistic, it’s either fact or not (regardless of who discovered the fact). Facts aren’t true depending on motivation.
Motivation matters to interpreting statistics. This is something that should be obvious to anybody with a education.
Can you tell me who they are comparing exactly? About 50% of the population has some form of welfare… are they comparing those people with college graduates? And if they are, which they are, how much do you suppose the college degree actually matters?
I know that they certainly are not taking what those people are employed in into account. A coffee house girl with 10 years of legal education is going to be counted the same as a employeed CPA, yet certainly the degree has nothing to do with how well she can serve coffee.
Correlation does not imply causation. This is something that they should of drummed into your head at school, at least.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that motivation and personal drive matters much more to whether or not your employed.
It depends on what you’re trying to do. If you want to be an accountant (or a lawyer), for instance in the UK, a degree is taken as a sign that you’ll perform well on exams like the AAT or ACA, or the GDL if you’re trying to convert to law, and therefore act as a sign to the company that you’re worth the investment. Many industries like recruitment also mandate that you must have a degree to even be considered. So it really boils down to what kind of work you’re after.
Of course, this is predicated on a society socially engineered to make it almost impossible to get good paying work without a degree and employers might change their requirements in coming years; however, for intellectually intense jobs – and especially ones that require significant human capital investment – I can easily see a degree as being an asset on your CV, and this remaining so.
Yes, some fields require a degree for entry. It’s really quite a racket.
In the USA, for a accountant (CPA), you have to pass the certification test. If you pass it without a degree or with a degree it shouldn’t make any difference. It never made a difference in the past… many famous American figures never received a formal education, yet exceeded their more educated peers in historical significance.
Personally I like education. Going to college or university is very laid back and enjoyable compared to working in the real world. It’s nice and learning is fun. It’s a fantastic way to improve yourself and get a leg up.
But it’s turned into a racket and the vast majority of people doing deeply into debt in the USA for a university degree are being handed a bill of goods.
Vast majority of 20-somethings have no clue just how horrific having 50-70 thousand dollars in debt is. They have no idea that they are going to probably be paying 200-300% the cost of the loan out to the lender over the next few decades and there is absolutely no reason to assume that education is going to lead to employment.
The economics professor they interviewed, RIchard Wolf, is openly Marxist. His website is here: http://www.rdwolff.com/. Just pointing that small fact out. Thankfully, however, he didn’t really have anything damaging to say in that short 5 second soundbite.
Tyrone,I got the feeling he was Marxist. The New School still teaches Marxist economics like it’s a viable field.He clearly doesn’t have his facts straight, however. The reporter said that he said the students owe the banks money, but of course most of them owe the feds money, not the banks. Second, the foreign students are often not from the top income bracket of their society, but rather are bankrolled by the government. They are probably from the top intelligence bracket, though. But that’s to be expected.Wolf likely has no idea that the feds are responsible for the tuition run-up.
His contribution was bizarre, since he seemed to be arguing the contrary of what the story was about. He seems to think college is too expensive to be accessible to American students while the report is that it’s not a good bargain for them. So he thinks students can’t afford a bad bargain?
(He also thinks colleges are the main source of “skilled” workers? Perhaps he should examine the increasing necessity of internships as colleges outsource much of the more practical training.)
Who says you have to go to college to be education? Anyone ever heard of an autodidact? How about Web sites like Khanacademy.com?
In addition to ITunesU, I would say that those alternatives are vastly superior substitutes for what little you’re offered in undergraduate studies. With the internet you can choose which lecture suits you best. However, acquiring a degree has little to do with investing in human capital and much more to do with signalling. You could go on and get all the free education you want. You can even attend university on a non credit-basis, but at the end of the day you have nothing to show for it at the job interview. And even if you’re set on contracting your labour like a doctor does, then good luck not meeting the legal requirements for that.
According to the raw data and experience in a certain large industry to which I have access, self-educated individuals usually don’t perform well in certain job categories that require that training. Given the requirements for these job categories, we (the modelers) believed that this actually was because those who self educate often don’t have the appropriate “people skills” and/or moral certainty of a true believer to manipulate others in a way that these job categories require.
I graduated in Spring 2010 with BS’s in math and economics and it seems to me that there’s plenty of jobs that I’m qualified for (imo) but that will never hire me due to job requirement inflation. I don’t even know how I’m supposed to get experience if every entry level job requires 5 years of directly applicable experience.
“Who says you have to go to college to be education? Anyone ever heard of an autodidact? How about Web sites like Khanacademy.com?”
MIT has a lot of video courses online for free.
<I have never let my schooling interfere with my education – Mark Twain
IMHO huge increases in college tuition costs are a bubble created by the relative ease with which you could get a loan. Student loans are guaranteed by the Federal Government, so guess what, the banks fell over themselves to hand out this money.
This is an interesting discussion and some good points have been made. But the suggestion that higher education isn’t worth the price sort of misses the boat. In absolute economic terms, on the individual level, this may be true. But the value of a liberal education, both for the individual and for society at large, is bigger than what can be reflected in the simple arithmetic.
A solid undergraduate education endows one with the ability to think well. You are exposed to ideas and forced to interact with them. You construct arguments and test them (both by participating in class discussion and writing papers that are typically critiqued by better thinkers, i.e. professors.) Your worldview is challenged, hopefully refined, often transformed. If a liberal education does what it is supposed to do, an individual emerges with a far improved ability to think, express, defend and critique the products of thought and ideally apply that better quality of thought to the betterment of the world.
I also take issue with the assertion that the same education can be had through exposure to the multitude of electronic and other resources available today. Don’t get me wrong, I love listening to and watching lectures–they are a great resource; and I love Kahnacademy both for what it is and what it aspires to. These are wonderful tools. But listening to online lectures is not on par with the quality of understanding gained from interaction with peers and quality professors.
Ever try reading Heidegger on your own? Most of us can’t with much success. Sure, if you have an IQ of 180 you may be able to digest a subject like German existentialism on your own. But I couldn’t. And I’m not exactly stupid. For the mortals among us, there is simply no substitute for ongoing interaction with peers and an expert in the field.
Having said all of that, a liberal education is not for everyone. As my grandfather was fond of saying, the world needs ditch diggers too. There is credence to the idea that the guy in lower management at a cell phone company does not need to have have read Homer. But wouldn’t you rather live in a world where he had?
Higher education in America has certainly become somewhat grotesque on a number of levels, specifically in the economics of it. And for the individual, it might make more sense to skip a four year degree; it all depends on your circumstances and personal values. But let’s not pretend that just because you might accumulate more tokens if you were to skip college and found a used car dealership that undergraduate education is a waste of time.
If you’re using a criterion like value to “society at large” as a means to assess something, you need to continue your own education with the Mises Institute.
There is no inherent contradiction in Libertarian philosophy/Austrian economics and valuing a society where people are educated as opposed to uneducated. I believe liberal education makes for better citizens, hence a better environment in which to live. It is better for me, my children, my friends, etc. You are entitled to the contrary view. But at least make an argument. You may be a nice guy. But your post is a thinly veiled ad hominem attack. I am willing to discuss the issue on merit. But your just casting stones. If you have a reasoned argument, I’d sincerely like to hear it. After all, I may be wrong.
“Enslaving students to banks”
Right on!
i believe one should go to college only if there is an established placement program waiting for you at the end of it.analyse if the college name is enough to attract recruiters (of worth) to your campus.
all pol sci or economics or art history can be learnt for free on your own free time .the internet has made learning for the really interested folks,free and abundantly rich.college should be treated just as a preparation for the placement season at the end of 3/4 yrs of campus capers.
I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from teaching themselves as much as possible, outside of the school system, but I would like to point out a curious fact.
It seems that nearly all of the great tyrants and mass murderers of the 20th century were largely self-educated. Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Pol Pot were all dropouts or minimally educated and apparently made up for this with large amounts of self-directed reading. As was Churchill for that matter, and Abraham Lincoln.
It could be that self education tends to result in the holding of crackpot ideas, from the inability to place facts into context. The easy path to follow is to read one book or one author, and then not bother to follow up by seeking out critical opinions in order to achieve balance. Reading and then sifting through conflicting opinions is harder work, intellectually, than simply reading a single author from A to Z and then filing away his opinions as facts.
However it is probably more complicated than that – presumably the latent psychotic tendencies of these future mass murderers caused them to fail or be expelled from formal education, but their native intelligence, curiosity and megalomania led them to read voraciously.
Another factor may be the large amounts of idle time enjoyed by would-be mass murderers during their younger years, from their disdain of normal work. Hitler notoriously spent thousands of hours in the library in Vienna reading about politics and history during the years when he should have been either studying art or architecture at school or learning a trade. Mao took a job as “assistant librarian” which presumably involved a great deal of sitting on one’s azz reading.
None of these factoids are an argument against self education, but a warning that self education is not always beneficial.
Where is the correlation to these curious facts? Fact they are, agreed.
Is group-think to learning more advantageous? Academia should look into their own skills and what they bring forth beside pontification.
You hit on an important point Oh Henry. Learning in isolation can be a wonderful thing. In fact it is an integral part of becoming a well rounded thinker. But without interaction, poor thought goes unchallenged. Total intellectual isolation can breed an unhealthy certitude in the patently absurd. For similar reasons, university departments try to avoid intellectual inbreeding by not bringing their own students on board as faculty. It is a basic pedagogical tenant. And it is rooted in the truth you point out in your post.
Mao Zedong received a degree from a college for teachers, served for many years as a librarian, and then became headmaster of the school. After leaving his post a college headmaster he went on to be one of the greatest serial murderers the world has ever known.
Hitler tried to join a academy of artists for formal training, but was not admitted. He made a living painting postcards, portraits and other small things until he joined the German army during WW1. He served mainly as a headquarters-to-front line runner. He was wounded twice, gassed once, and ended up spending the later part of the war in the hospital. He was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery.
After leaving the military he entered into a short, but colorful career as a socialist politician and mass murderer.
Stalin was sent to the seminary in Tiflis by his mother to become a priest. However he quickly dropped out and became involved in local revolutionary politics as a low level enforcer. He rose in the ranks as he systematically eliminated all rivals and impressed Lenin with his effectiveness.
After killing everybody that stood in his way he applied his finely honed skills towards running the country. Apparently under the belief that killing massive amounts of his own citizens was a cheaper motivation for work then paying them.
Pol Pot was a son of a wealthy land owner. He was sent to several different schools and won a few government grants for education. However he never did take advantage of it and quickly got into politics. He turned out to have a strange talent to convince people of odd things. Such as groups of teenagers should round up people that needed glasses and send them to government institutions were they were slowly tortured to death. He is notable for the discovery that it was more cost effective to bash babies and small children against trees rather then use bullets on them.
They are a bunch of fun people from all sorts of different backgrounds.
The only warning I get from you is the warning in trusting in your wisdom.
Hitler: “After leaving the military he entered into a short, but colorful career as a socialist politician and mass murderer.”
Not so fast. He was first hired as a Weimar Republic police informant to spy on the the NSDAP. Turns out he was a better orator than the people actually trying to rouse the discontented. He unsuccessfully putsched, went to prison, wrote a book, then pursued his political callings.
In a sane environment, he would have become janitor of the Munich Municipal Swimming Pool or maybe a sci-fi writer in the USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream
I’d guess that since those who have the discipline to self-educate tend to be natural leaders and have a strong sense of self, the mass-murders you mentioned were also natural leaders with a strong sense of self. One thing any good leader must be able to do is cast a vision of how things should be. A man who is self-educated is not necessarily going to be deterred by the fact that his vision of how things should be may require aggression. He is only deterred when his action requires aggression if he has come to the belief that aggression is immoral. A man educated in group-think may actually like the current system (or believe it is best possible system) or have some other reason (indoctrination into some moral code for example) for believing aggression would be immoral.
BTW
The expression about enslaving young people to banks is bang-on, but does anyone else have the feeling that the resentment against this kind of slavery will be twisted and turned by politicians into slavery to the government in the form of “voluntary” (semi-coerced) or mandatory (fully coerced) participation in either the military or in civilian make-work programs? There has already been talk of forgiving student loans in return for enlistment in the military or for joining “community service” groups which supposedly would be under military justice.
As a graduate myself, I agree that a degree does not guarantee you a job in your field. But it does help in getting a job nevertheless. Having a degree means that you are able to learn and adapt, and to most companies, that you have the comprehension that they will require at the very least. Still, it feels like a failure for a fresh graduate to fail to get a job in their field. But as long as you’re earning, you’ve got to admit at least you’re surviving, and that’s the starting point for any career.
Karla
My Blog – Estetica Brasilia
Don’t take it as a failure, take it as a challenge. Nowadays being graduated does not mean you can have a your own job. So better seek a job before you graduated.
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Jobs WA
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