Posted on 04/27/2012 7:24:15 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
WASHINGTON (AP) — The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.
Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.
While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.
Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
"I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
43% of last years, 38% the year before. And about 63% live with their parents. THE GREAT SOCIETY!!! Way to many degrees in NOTHING!
Most owe tens of thousands of dollars in student loans from their nanny government, too. Lots of luck, grads. You are starting out way behind.
43% of last years, 38% the year before. And about 63% live with their parents. THE GREAT SOCIETY!!! Way to many degrees in NOTHING!
Plus, potential employers are not impressed when they find out a candidate funded their education through loans, instead of working their way through college.
You mean you didn't get an education suited towards the career you wanted? If you got a creative writing degree, you should be looking for a job...where you write creatively.
Apparently the critical thinking class has been cancelled at the local college. At the very least the barista should be offering a resume writing service to his customers...
“The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.”
There ya go..is this the new fancy diploma for capuccino maker?
“Saw this in our local newspaper as well. Frightening, as we are about to send our first to college. Have you heard about law school graduates suing their universities for misleading them about employment statistics? I've heard Wake Forest Law used to boast a 90% employment figure prior to graduation - it is now only about 10%. Last year our neighborhood swim team had a Wake law grad as our part-time coach. How's that for “underemployed”?
Get ready for huge healthcare layoffs as well. Medicare and Medicaid payments are supposed to be slashed by 27% over the next 3 years. Private insurance uses these payments as benchmarks, so consider it more of a 25% across the board cut for healthcare. Sounds great if you are the payor, not so great if you are a practice owner or manager.
Our neighbor, a family practice physician, just resigned after working 15-17 hour days for the past 4 months with no relief in sight. Reimbursements for primary caregivers are too low to operate a practice, so they are told to “see more”. However, how can you provide quality care in under 10 minutes per patient? Don't forget that you must document every thought, feeling, and action so you don't get sued for “missing something”.
Have you seen how much the electronic medical record, so touted in the last election, has improved healthcare??
Are you wallowing in the savings yet??”
Seems to me people of any major should be able to write well, why do they need a degree solely for writing? Write what?
What the hell is a Creative Writing Degree?
It is a degree for people who want to be novelists, playwrights, or scriptwriters, but who lack the talent.
But they never report what all these degrees are in. Are they in some technical field or Creative Writing (professional resume writers)?? I saw on BBC where one employer was wanting all the computer design or software people he could find. History or Classical Studies don’t cut it.
I love how the title says “1 out of 2”
It throws people off that aren’t good in math :)
I dare them to write “Half of...” LOL
Good.
Let’s see if they can figure out why...
I see so many businesses requiring degrees. I'm not sure how else they expect their potential candidates to pay for the OUTRAGEOUS prices charged by these overpaid insitutions. I could see 30k or 40k over 4-6 years being worked off, but 100k? It's ridiculous. These insitutions of higher learning should be forced to pay it back.
At the same time, I can't blame anyone who's not impressed with someone's six figure school loan debt, I know I'm not. A few members in my family are in this exact situation and they continue to borrow more. It's insane.
Well maybe if our colleges stopped acting as leftist indoctrination factories, companies would be more willing to hire. Companies want to MAKE money, not give it to the freakin’ government. Putting “Marxism” as an interest on your resume doesn’t quite cut it.
If it were Bush: 50% of graduates can’t find jobs, 4 Times the national unemployment rate.
Not saying to pay their entire way through, but at least enough to pay for maybe books or other expenses instead of just having a free ride, to party all the time.
Obama keeps promoting college education for everyone while also hinting that the government will pay for it if he gets another term.
What percent of jobs in the U.S. actually require a college education?
I doubt if it’s a large percent. It would be interesting to know.
Too many kids have been brainwashed into thinking they have to go to college to get a good job.
For the most part, a college education is overrated, particularly in view of the liberal agenda and the soft subjects being taught.
Obama does ‘his people’ no favors.
***There ya go..is this the new fancy diploma for capuccino maker?****
My thoughts is everyone who wants a college diploma in some off the wall field should first have a background in trades.
Welder-Machinest, Electrician, Plumber-Pipefitter, Heavy equipment operator, truck driver, diesel mechanics, Auto Mechanics, Crane Operator, and many other REAL JOBS.
That way when your pipe dream of a high dollar management job right out of college falls through, you will have a REAL JOB to fall back on.
Now that there is funny I don’t care who you are . . .
To increase empoyment, America has to change.
To begin with, our employees must get the same pay and benefits as China. Further, all corporations would have to pay a the same tax as GE. All corporations must not have unions like IBM. The nation would have to live with the same environmental regulations as China. This would make us the lowest cost country in the world.
One more thing. Before starting to work, you would have to become proficient in Chinese. You might not have to relocate.
Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example
A degree doesn’t equal talent and work ethic. Half of the college graduates don’t deserve to even work at McDonalds.
I graduated high school in the early 80’s - even back then it was drilled into everyone’s minds that you needed a college diploma because having a high school diploma was useless.
A college diploma is the new high school diploma - that is the educational systems plan...
I do understand that young people have kind of been bamboozled by Big Education and growing up thinking EVERYONE goes to college. Well, welcome to reality—it can be harsh. Not everyone should go to college. I'd say half at state unis should be learning a trade. Oh, but their poor widdle self esteem! Seems they were raised by the idiots in the schools that gave everybody a trophy for “participating” and never got a big fat F on their crappy book report because...why, that would damage widdle precious.
I can't tell you how many people I know with a CHILD of 25 living in the basement, asking for $$$ to go out and being absoutely livid when Mammy and Pappy tell them to at least go get a job at Target while waiting for that $85,000 per year position—with massive benefits...the one they got trained for with that fab Gender Studies degree: Diversity Coordinator for a crappy Big Education college.
I heard a guy on a touchy-feely NPR financial program call in and say he had...drum roll....$450,000 in student loans. I kid you not. It made my jaw drop. He had quite the attitude...explaining how he was going to be quite the surgeon in a JUST A FEW MORE YEARS. AND this dope had 2 kids and a wife...seems like the wife is a tad worried and wants him to knock of the additional medical school specialty and GET A JOB. I just don't understand the lack of living in reality lately.
My wonderful Doctor is hanging it up and moving to a little ranch in NM. He can’t take it anymore.
I hate Obama.
Become a Doctor of Social Justice! Go to riots, protest Whitey, attend sit-ins, read screeds from history’s greatest communists and America-haters, demand Israel be destroyed, demand slavery reparations, assault campus conservatives! All this can be yours, probably tuition-free if you are of an Officially Oppressed Minority. Once a doctor, you will be in high demand by NBC and CBS to appear on their networks and condemn America for not giving you a $200K/year job. Apply today!!
**
ROFl!!! I hear the capstone experience can be found at any OWLS gathering in one of our nation’s city parks ...
Our dear daughter is employed now 2 years after graduation, thankfully. And she worked dang hard for it.
But even she is experiencing a stagnant wage, no raises (just be glad your’e still employed type of attitude), and watches everyday as colleagues say 5-7 years ahead of her who have reached a certain level are increasingly canned once they become “too expensive” for the company to retain.
In other words ...work hard, advance, and they will pull the rug out from under you anyway a few years into it.
Ha ha ha! Hilarious!
But absolutely true. As pointed out elsewhere, the great novelists and poets of all time--how many of them had "Creative Writing" degrees? If you want to write creatively, do so. You may eventually become a success. Of course, if you want someone to foot the bill while you're writing creatively, you may want to get another job, just in case you're not as creative as you think.
Submitted here is an example of student reaction to one of his visits this week to UNC-CH. Clearly, this student cannot appropriately relate the facts disclosed on this thread to the campaigning President in Chapel Hill.
Had students been taught that the debtor is slave to the debtholder, and that the role of government is not to enslave people, but to provide a framework of laws to protect their freedom, they might not be attracted to shallow "rock star" leadership, but to someone who would tell them the truth about their Constitution's limits on power in government.
Sadly, the facts presented in the articles on this thread are not presented to these students, who, likely will not find jobs available because of the "taking" and "spending" philosophy of the redistributionist policies of the past 3+ years, and decades of government's ignoring Constitutional limits on spending, deficits, and debt.
Yep. The people I know have some nice credit card bills to go with their student loans. lol
It’s terrible.
Capstone clap or crabs? Or both?
This is exactly the information we need to keep hammering Obama with, non-stop through election day. High unemployment, 50% of college graduates can’t get a job, rising energy prices, lower and lower home values, etc.
Obama and his folks have no answer for these numbers, other than try to demonize us. Even the MSM, which has been complicit with Obama all along, can’t fudge the numbers enough to make Americans feel better about the direction this country his headed.
Like him or not, Romney has chosen the right path to the White House, focusing on Obama’s failures. I expect the notoriously thin-skinned Obama to react wildly.
To understand why so many people are pursuing degrees (even in fields that make no sense), look up the 1971 Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power. This set in motion the excessive demand for college education as employers, denied the right to winnow out applicants via such means as IQ texts, sought a proxy. That proxy was the sheepskin. They figured that anyone who had graduated from college possessed a certain degree of intelligence.
I am sure that other factors played a role but this makes sense to me.
I might mention that one additional factor is the maturation of the baby boomer generation and their desire to send their children to college.
That should be “IQ tests.”
That would not be good
Thanks for citing Griggs v. Duke Power. I knew of the case and its relevance but I couldn’t name it just now.
Of course, now that college degrees mean little more than that the bearer paid a bunch of money for a sheet of paper, companies are once again bringing back “assessment tests”...ON TOP OF the degree.
Interesting.
I must admit that I am ignorant of assessment tests. Are they some kind of tests to determine what the student learned in college? Or sre they different from that?
I know that my college administered a series of tests along the lines of what we learned of a grouping of broad categories (history of western civilization, mathematics, etc), but you are saying that companies do this, so the subjects certainly would be different.
Please advise.
My cousin “accidentally” got on a waiting list for a college diploma he wanted because the registrar’s office were idiots (his description).
Eventually he got bored and saw the adult education course for HVAC and plumbing. Years later/fast forward, he owns pretty much the contracts for multiple condos and small hotels in downtown. Plumbers and electricians make more money than 9-5 clerks.
I’m not entirely clear on them myself...about the best I can figure out is that they’re geared towards understanding the testee’s thought processes as well as knowledge.
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