Here’s a riddle: What costs anywhere from $50,000 to $400,000 but often is utterly useless?
Answer: a college degree.
Now that our daughters are at or approaching college age, my husband and I find ourselves deeply interested in the best tactic for launching them into adulthood with maximum potential and minimum disadvantages. Since neither of our kids is interested in studying STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, medicine), we’ve come to the conclusion a college education would be a wildly expensive mistake.
While it might seem like a sound decision to try and maximize one’s employability in the current unforgiving job market by going to college, too little serious attention is given to matching supply and demand when it comes to fields of study. Too many – far too many – baristas have bachelor’s or even master’s degrees with little prospect of better-paying employment before them.
The result is ironic. “Skilled workers with higher degrees are increasingly ending up in lower-skilled jobs that don’t really require a degree,” notes the Daily Beast, “and in the process, they’re pushing unskilled workers out of the labor force altogether. … [L]ower-skilled workers are increasingly falling out of the higher-paying jobs altogether as college graduates move down the skill ladder. … [T]his is ferociously depressing news. It suggests that we’re pushing more and more people into (more and more expensive) college programs, even as the number of jobs in which they can use those skills has declined.”
In other words, college-educated young people are gobbling up the jobs lower-skilled people “ought” to get. College-educated young people are underemployed, while lesser-educated young people are unemployed.
To add insult to injury, these highly educated baristas are laboring under a crushing amount of debt. It will likely take them decades or even a lifetime to pay off the student loans they acquired in hot pursuit of a degree in fields of study where no one is hiring. This can literally ruin their lives, affecting plans to marry, buy a house, have children and achieve other milestones of adulthood.
Look, folks, I’ll be blunt. It’s not rocket science; it’s a simple matter of supply and demand. Before – before – you go to college and major in your heart’s desire (and acquire $100,000 in student loan debt), you’d better check the job market and see if anyone is paying a living wage for that English, psychology, child development, or feminist studies degree. This is the time to be practical, not idealistic.
And don’t count on high school guidance counselors for help. Today 44 percent of recent college grads are working in jobs that don’t require any sort of higher education. Yet parents, teachers and school counselors are not advising graduates to avoid majoring in fields with no openings. Instead, they’re actively pushing kids to get into college and study things like theater arts, history, or literature … even though there are no appreciable jobs in these fields.
“Younger people are highly skilled in some areas … but deficient in practical, blue-collar skills such as welding or wiring,” said Dr. Mark Thornton, senior fellow economist at the Mises Institute. “Right now in our economy, we have a glut of workers for management, liberal arts and computer skills but a shortage of workers for practical skills. Public schools and universities have not kept up when it comes to preparing students for a place in the workforce. They’re not looking at supply and demand. There’s either a huge surplus or a huge shortage.”
As I see it, smart parents or school guidance counselors should be advising people to enter fields in need of skilled workers such as plumbing, welding, mechanics, medical technician, etc. These fields pay living wages and often require no more than a two-year degree. But advice like this isn’t happening. Instead, high schoolers are being told they can study whatever their little hearts desire and they shouldn’t worry about the big bad boogeyman of unemployment, since that specter is comfortably in the future.
“Too often, universities emulate greenhouses where fragile adults are coddled as if they were hothouse orchids,” writes Victor Davis Hanson in National Review. “Universities entice potential students with all sorts of easy loan packages, hip orientations and perks like high-tech recreation centers and upscale dorms. On the backside of graduation, such bait-and-switch attention vanishes when it is time to help departing students find jobs. … College often turns into a six-year experience. The unemployment rate of college graduates is at near-record levels. Universities have either failed to convince employers that English or history majors make ideal job candidates, or they have failed to ensure that such bedrock majors can, in fact, speak, write and reason well. … For many youths, vocational school is preferable to college. Americans need to appreciate that training to become a master auto mechanic, paramedic, or skilled electrician is as valuable to society as a cultural-anthropology or feminist-studies curriculum.”
If your proposed future job is something only the government can supply, or that the government requires, I strongly urge you to re-think your career path toward something the private sector needs, wants and is willing to pay for. Society doesn’t need diversity coaches or community organizers. But it does need butchers, welders, auto mechanics, nurses, medical technicians and other skilled workers.
This is why my husband and I are actively guiding our daughters into skilled vocational paths for which there is high demand. College will always be there – our girls can always take courses in art or history or even (ahem) feminist studies later on, if they wish, to broaden themselves. But to spend four to six years, acquire massive debt and then expect someone to hire them with these overstaffed or unnecessary degrees is ludicrous at best and cruelly misleading at worst.
It takes four years of training and apprenticeship to be an elevator repair technician with an average salary of $70,000. It takes 13 to 15 years to become a family physician with an annual salary of $200,000 – and $200,000 to $400,000 of debt. With careful investing, the elevator technician can spend 20 years socking away a fortune before the doctor has even paid off his debt.
Just something to consider as young people plan for their futures.
Media wishing to interview Patrice Lewis, please contact [email protected].
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