After 30 years of steady decline followed by rapid disintegration after 2008, America has become a country which no longer provides good opportunities for its young people to do the natural things—get a decent paying job, form households, get married, have children and all the rest. In short, American society has become so rotten that it has effectively abandoned the young.
More evidence for this grim conclusion comes from Hope Yen's 1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed.
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...
About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
[My note: My use of the term "underemployed" includes both those without a job and those with a part-time job who are seeking full-time work.]
Bear in mind that these are college graduates we're talking about here, not the larger segment of the youth who have no shot at a post-high-school education. We're often told that the unemployment rate among those with a college degree is much lower than it is among those who don't have one.
In turn, this low unemployment rate is used to rationalize why becoming a student debt slave is still a good decision because a college education is now a lifetime financial investment. They argue that a college graduate makes far more money in his or her lifetime than they would without that all-important degree.
Now we find out that over half those with a college degree are underemployed, and some large percentage of them are working as waiters or waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks, receptionists and the like.
Thus we have uncovered another pervasive, pernicious form of bullshit in America. You can read the AP article if you want the details. For example, some college degrees are better than others in terms of getting a job. But some details bear repeating, like this one.
David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, said a bachelor's degree can have benefits that aren't fully reflected in the government's labor data.
He said even for lower-skilled jobs such as waitress or cashier, employers tend to value bachelor's degree-holders more highly than high-school graduates, paying them more for the same work and offering promotions.
All we can hope for is that there is a Special Seat In Hell reserved for David Neumark, who is an economist of course, and thus can rationalize anything. But on a more serious note, consider this.
According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants.
Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.
Thus in the Happy Future the Labor Department imagines, there won't be many jobs for those with a college degree in any case. And no doubt any projection the Labor Department comes up with is an overly optimistic, best-case scenario. It is 100% guaranteed that they base their predictions on the dubious assumption that the economy will grow and grow out to 2020. What if it doesn't?
I have now completed my 59th year on this sorry planet. As I live through my 60th year, writing this stuff, you can trust that I know the difference between being screwed and not being screwed. I definitely know it when I see it. And regarding young people in America, I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb when I say this—they are well and truly screwed.
And good luck paying off those student loans.
I certainly feel screwed. I feel like if I don't go to school, I have nothing, but if I do go to school I'm caught in the jaws of an insidious trap. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Posted by: Wanooski | 04/24/2012 at 11:08 AM