Is a college degree still worth it? As U. S. employment patterns evolve, a diploma is no longer a guarantee of a better job and higher pay.
By Don Lee, Los Angeles Times
June 12, 2010
Is a college degree still worth it?
As U.S. employment patterns evolve, a diploma is no longer a guarantee of a better job and higher pay.As the warm glow of college commencement ceremonies gives way to the cold reality of today's job market, this year's graduates and their anxious parents might be tempted to wonder whether it was worth it.
After spending tens of thousands of dollars on higher education, often taking on huge debts along the way, many face a job market that doesn't seem to need them. Not only is the American economy producing few new jobs of any kind, but the ones that are being added are overwhelmingly on the lower end of the skill and pay scale.
In fact, government surveys indicate that the vast majority of job gains this year have gone to workers with only a high school education or less, casting some doubt on one of the nation's most deeply held convictions: that a college education is the ticket to the American Dream.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that seven of the 10 employment sectors that will see the largest gains over the next decade won't require much more than some on-the-job training. These include home healthcare aides, customer service representatives and food preparers and servers. Meanwhile, well-paying white-collar jobs such as computer programming have become vulnerable to outsourcing to foreign countries.
"People with bachelor's degrees will increasingly get not very highly satisfactory jobs," said W. Norton Grubb, a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Education. "In that sense, people are getting more schooling than jobs are available."
15 comments:
Unfortunately many college educated young people are on the fast track to poverty because no one sat them down and came up with a practical plan for what their goals are in life. They made unwise financial decisions by taking out massive student loans not realizing that all that debt will eventually force them to take a job they don’t like just to survive. Debt is the modern form of slavery keeping individuals in bondage. Instead of encouraging people to follow their dreams, talents, and passions, we are indoctrinating them to work for someone else and be a lapdog.
Society is also to blame for disregarding other honorable occupations that don’t require a college degree. Why are most young people forced fed lies that you must attend college in order to be successful? Academia was supposed to be a place for the highly learned, but now everyone and their mother is going to “college” which is undermining the value of the degree itself. Sadly I’ve encountered so many college-educated individuals who are ignorant and lack the ability to critically think. They regurgitate information that was told to them by some pompous professor instead of analyzing and questioning what they are being taught. Many young children don’t even know how to read or proper phonics. They just repeat! That’s why society is filled with individuals who are functional illiterates.
As someone who is college educated and comes from a family of highly learned individuals, we are still practical people. My father made it very clear to me that I will not go into debt for a piece of paper. I had options and the “man” financed my degree from one of their top institutions. I walked away with a great experience and my “paper” with zero debt. My pops told me to get my paper so that I can be a little more mobile than the so-called uneducated slave. The truth is no one has real freedom until they are able to work for themselves and control the resources they need to strive. But ironically my most valuable education came from the wisdom of my elders, working on the plantations of Corporate America, and being in the real world. I’ve learned all of this and I’m only 28 years old. Sadly I also learned about what people do when they are desperate and my eyes are open to the forces at play. Most people are being manipulated and it’s quite sad.
I’m not the one to disregard education. I’m all for people learning and having enriching experiences. College was a great time and I had the opportunity to meet interesting people. I also realized how stupid most people are. But let’s be honest. If you can’t afford to go to a 4-year institution, why not go to a JC for two years to cut cost then transfer? Or kick major butt in high school so someone else can pay for your education. Perhaps the downward economic climate and poor job prospects will finally get people to wake the hell up as to what’s going on in our screwed up world. The forces at play do not want you to be successful, happy, and connected to the most high.
What do you suggest as a viable alternative DV?
[Only 14 percent of the modern U.S. work force is engaged in production: manufacturing, mining, logging, construction and the like. The rest are in services.]-- Calvin Woodard
I have an associates and I still work in manufacturing, because it pays twice as much than working in an office. Just because you get the degree, doesn't mean you get the job. If you do want to get some type of degree or training, make sure you either get a scholarship or pay for it yourself and not with loans like I did. After I received my degree, I owed $16,000. That was in 2002. Now it's 2010 and I still owe about $7,000.
You mentioned the fastest growing sectors as:
-home healthcare aides,
-customer service representatives,
-and food preparers and servers.
Ye olde plantation insidiously renovated it with a vengeance. The majority are working as pseudo slaves for the multinational master, who outsourced the equivalent of cotton growing to his slaves in other countries.
And massa don't even have to pay much or any taxes here.
I predict this will change again in under ten years. The global economy is on the verge of collapse, taking down with it the USA. The Gulf going bang will speed this up. A new revolution is on our doorstep, and when the smoke clears from war and environmental destruction, and after the dead are buried, communities will be local out of necessity.
I still advocate higher education for those who love learning for the sake of it, particularly in philosophy, humanities, science, and math.
I could be wrong, but I think the top jobs will be in medical professions, followed by those where people can build and repair essential things with their hands, growing food, and teaching.
Under strikingly similar economic circumstances, but absent the hard-won experiences of the intervening 77 years - WHICH SHOULD AFFORD US 20-20 HINDSIGHT - Carter G. Woodson already spelled all of this out in extraordinary detail.
Aside from all the obvious socio-cultural differences between then and now - i.e., Black men being routinely lynched, 400,000 mexicans being forcibly deported, etc.., etc.., etc.., - the fundamental, inescapable, and decisive difference lies in the fact that there are 6 Billion more humans now than then.
WW-II was the global bankruptcy and reorganization required to correct the global economic system for its next multi-decade run. 10% of the population of the industrialized world was murdered in order to effect that reorganization.
Given so many more billions, the WW-III bankruptcy and reorganization is going to make WW-II seem like a walk in the park.
What Bro. Makheru is teaching in Charleston is of paramount importance to the future prospects of adaptable Black folk who will survive in America;
While you are purchasing expensive delicacies from white folks or Asians, my program has 25 young Afrikan American males growing their own crops and feeding their families from our urban garden on the Westside of Charlotte.
And given that the "war on drugs" has already consigned millions to a subsidiary level of possibility within the plantation, there's no time like now, and nothing but air and opportunity separating folk from reinventing themselves within the 14% of the total population engaged in tangibly productive economic activity.
Accept no substitutes.
"Debt is the modern form of slavery keeping individuals in bondage. Instead of encouraging people to follow their dreams, talents, and passions, we are indoctrinating them to work for someone else and be a lapdog." Muse
Uhm. Hm.
"Academia was supposed to be a place for the highly learned, but now everyone and their mother is going to “college” which is undermining the value of the degree itself." Muse
ha
uhm. hm.
"The truth is no one has real freedom until they are able to work for themselves and control the resources they need to strive." Muse
Like this cat
"The forces at play do not want you to be successful, happy, and connected to the most high." Muse
oohhhhhh. nice
...
Where you been bra?
These squares got me surrounded.
so much so you've takin to calling the sis bra...,
Well they've both got titties these days don't they CNu?
What difference does it make?
lol,
K-Dub tried to pull your sleeve on this y'day morning jiggaboo; LOOOOL! Oooh somebody got their lips poked out and feelin' all critical. Why y'tryin that NYAUOT reverse psychology? It's telling. Y'get your props when y'do, but let others shine for a minute, huh?
But then, she's sweet and kind and peacemaking like that.
Personally, I've never observed a mind as crippled by invidious comparison as yours is.
Left entirely to your own devices, you've remade yourself into the most niggardly "man" on the internet!
accept no substitutes....,
Denmark,
I’m female. I took down my photo because thirsty simps where trying to holla, but they failed to realize this pretty face has some brains. They all failed the test within five minutes of conversation. They have vaccine brains lol.
Furthermore, it is not the idea of the organization called "school" or "college" which fails. It's structure however, does.
Thus a department head and his staff might believe that the department is devoted to training future Nobel Prize winners in Physics, while in practice it operates mainly to provide the electronics industry with fairly capable applied researchers.
Escaping working for an organizaation for all of us is impossible. However, being in a position of having at least part time entrepreneurial efforts maximizes ones potential economic security.
Mahogany's Jewels
It is most economizing to be paid for the quality of ones work and not the time spent in working.
The family business model is a practical way of keeping financial security over generations.
Anything can be sold.
I've kept a mental note of everyone's SKILLS on this site and have found enough value to build something powerful. BUT..
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