> The comparison is worth pinning down. "All workers" is the whole U.S. labor force, and most of them are older and more experienced than a new graduate, so a fresh grad starts at a natural disadvantage. For decades the degree more than canceled that disadvantage out. Now it does not.
> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.
Outside of medicine, a non-CS engineering degree, preferably also a masters, remains a good pathway to a reasonable non-parasitic job, although relocation may be required.
Are there people who think college education is a shortcut to generic employment? This seems like a very misleading statistic. Average earnings (including those unemployed), etc might be better. Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
This is the easiest niche to pick on but I am mid career for cybersecurity. I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable. Really I'm not sure how new people to tech could even enter the industry, it seems like at the lower levels the entire industry is essentially closed.
However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
I would postulate that there are two reasons why this is happening.
1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.
2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.
I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.
Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless.
I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.
1. Is incredibly stupid and just a talking point used to bring in labor from overseas that is wage suppression at best and ethnic nepotism at worse. You mean to tell me the average college grad from India is better? Nonsense
Interestingly (and anecdotally), as a 10-year+ experienced college dropout, I still see challenges getting hired for jobs that list degrees as a requirement. The only time I get a call back on "front door" applications is with the fateful addendum of "OR relevant work experience". (I wonder if agents and their lack of human discretion is amplifying this.) The article's assertion that a college degree still offers an edge beyond entry level still seems very much true.
I know it seems awkward, but you can just lie on your resume. Most employers lie on their job ads, most applicants lie on their resumes. This is why the whole recruitment process is so broken.
Now I want to see the males/females ratio in that graph, I bet most of the unemployed are males, which is something weird I noticed where everyone who’s complaining about the job market are men, meanwhile women are hired and sometimes working two jobs on top of that.
I have no idea whether this is true but it is an interesting question which the knee-jerk downvote brigade should have left alone. Is this information available somewhere? As far as I know the majority of college graduates in all but the STEM fields is female now, there's only a few disciplines which are still majority male. Given this fact it would be expected that unemployment among female college graduates should be higher, not lower than that of men if companies were to aim for a 'fair' distribution between men and women in their workforce given that there will be more women vying for the 'female share' of the pie.
The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young.
We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young).
We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
As popular as this narrative is it's all revisionist propaganda intended to distract from the actual culprits. "We" never stopped building houses. What we stopped building is 1k sq ft starter homes and made manufactured housing uneconomical, thereby effectively removing the bottom rung on the ladder of home ownership. These weren't consensus-based decisions made by older generations. They are changes to the real estate landscape that were intentionally engineered by a handful of massive developer firms. Even this ignores that a large part of the rise in housing demand is due to a flood of economic refugees from rural communities that have been gutted by a combination of pro-corporate neoliberal economic policies and the corporatization of the AG industry.
You correctly indicate that all of this is a transfer of wealth to those individuals who are already wealthy. Where you're mistaken is in suggesting this is a generational transfer when it is corporations and by extension the 0.01% of the wealthiest individuals in our society that are the clear beneficiaries.
We haven’t eliminated entry level positions, we decided it was better to import foreign labor than to train up new grads. Because we’re dumb, and in some cases tribal.
Universities are not angels in this. MIT can fund all of their other classes with just what the Freshmen pay. 91/92 Supreme court ruled that if they give enough charity in the form of tuition reduction, they wouldn't be taxed. And so they kept raising prices and so did all the other schools. Terrible decision and schools should be on the hook for any defaulted student loans.
The current rate of new build construction is the highest it has been since 2007, ignoring the spike during late COVID-era zero interest rates. Also: US population is growing slower than anytime in modern history, again excluding COVID (though, a few more years and we'll be down at that level again all naturally).
The transfer of wealth is diminishing also as older generations didn’t save as much, are unable to retire, or are spending through most of their retirement
I wonder what the impact of the rising base rate of employees with college degrees is. In 1992, a fresh college graduate had better educational attainment than 42% of the labor force. In 2016 (latest date I found numbers for), that was down to 32%. https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/educational-attainment-of...
That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average member of the labor force.
This also neatly explains why Boomers were able to have a good life with just a high school diploma. Wikipedia has a good chart, but the short version is that having a high school diploma in 1965 meant you were better educated than 50% of the labor force.
I think the article is correct to point out remote work as a big culprit, but for the wrong reasons. The article says "Employers, the Fed argues, are wary of hiring inexperienced people into remote roles, where the on-the-job mentorship that turns a new grad into a productive worker is hard to deliver." And I agree that's a factor, but I really think that what changed in the late teens is that remote software and networks finally got good enough so that the hit you got to productivity from employing people in low cost of living areas really went away.
I lived through lots of "offshoring frenzies" that never went very far in the past, but things are different this time. Like in the fallout from the .com bust in the early 00s, there was all this talk about how we'd ship all software development to India, and a lot of companies did try to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. And top companies were still paying crazy high salaries for entry level top talent in the Bay Area because they knew it was worth it.
Now, though, I feel like companies are smarter. They know time zone overlap is key, so I've seen a lot more offshoring to Latin America, Canada and Europe where there is sufficient overlap with US time zones. Since even US folks spend so much of their time on Zoom etc. anyway, it doesn't really matter if your Zoom colleague is in your same city or thousands of miles away. I've worked with excellent colleagues from Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland etc. before, and the network speed was good enough so that videoconferencing quality was great. And this is a far cry from the early 00s when I was on choppy voice-only conference calls with a team in India.
So new grads are not only competing with other new grads, they're competing with highly competent, experienced grads from all over the world, most of whom have salary expectations much lower than US new grads.
I keep going back to the debate with myself. Do I give my now-young kids 500K in an ETF in 14 years or do I send them to college? And the debate is not about how they will spend it (I can hold on to it too), it’s about whether to spend the money or just pass on the wealth to them. People have given me tons of reasons why college is good for them - independence, etc etc. I can find a way to give them independence without spending 500k. I haven’t settled the debate but articles like this are not helping the college path.
My father offered me a similar deal 25 years ago. I chose college, but itsnt clearly correct. 250k (my offer) would be 2 million today, which is more than my savings from 20 years of work. I would have needed a different career, but that could be better or worse. If I had that and was an electrician for example, I would be far better off
I'm childless, but I go through that with nieces and nephews. I decided to give them a lump sum as a high school graduation gift to do with as they please.
IMO you could learn a lot more, as a young person, starting a small business than you'll ever learn at college, and it'll cost less even if you fail. So I don't want to make it a "college fund" or anything like that.
I strongly believe college is oversold but mostly because kids are told they just need to get "any degree", which is a blatant lie. It can totally be worth it if you are objectively looking at what outcomes a specific degree will get you.
To me the real question is why a new grad would have lower unemployment to begin with compared to the average worker. Presumably the average worker has more on-the-job experience, so it seems like maybe people are weighting that more heavily now compared to before.
Oh, I ended up in a really funny situation. I inherited a 45-square-meter apartment 1/2 portion, while my mother bought another portion from a relative and then sold that part to my wife, who bought it on credit. We were just so happy when we finally paid off all the debts. And then we had to leave the country and become refugees!
And now, after five years of living in another country, I realize that even if a country has democratic freedoms, economic life there is far from a bed of roses. This was a very sad and depressing realization this year, since I still haven’t found a full-time job, and naturally, that’s not having a very positive impact on my life.
The most popular major is probably business which is a little generic or hand wavy and I bet if you were to look at people who study more practical topics you see a much lower rate of unemployment.
Another part of it is of course the prestige of the institution. If everyone has a degree it's not what it used to be.
I definitely agree with other posters though that once you're in a remote work environment is South America really that different than another neighborhood or City if that same amount of money could bring in a more senior person with experience why hire the green? I think a key part of hiring green folks was culture and having young people around the office but that just isn't what it used to be.
The vibe shift seem to correlate with the general feeling that we're all busy and we really want to spend time babysitting a new grad versus all working hard with experienced people it's almost like once you're too busy it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that it's hard to spend time ramping people which is such a short-sihted thought.
Still I think in the fullness of time people will realize that eventually you do need to be bringing the next generation into the company and so this might be a temporary fad.
Is everyone just going to ignore that most of the jobs created in the post few years have gone to foreign born workers? Is it taboo, but some how the “Gen Z is dumb” is brought up multiple times in all its glorious stupidity
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 38.6 ms ] threadCollege doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares for academia (graduate school).
> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.
However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.
2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.
I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.
Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless.
I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.
We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young).
We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
No, the problem is that the universities are too bloated, not that we need to take even more in taxes from working people to feed the bloat
How can you transfer wealth from people who don't have it?
> saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities
The debt came from rising tuitions due to the government making it too easy to get loans.
> created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
???
You correctly indicate that all of this is a transfer of wealth to those individuals who are already wealthy. Where you're mistaken is in suggesting this is a generational transfer when it is corporations and by extension the 0.01% of the wealthiest individuals in our society that are the clear beneficiaries.
The current rate of new build construction is the highest it has been since 2007, ignoring the spike during late COVID-era zero interest rates. Also: US population is growing slower than anytime in modern history, again excluding COVID (though, a few more years and we'll be down at that level again all naturally).
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST?utm_source=chatgpt....
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...
- the smallest population cohort is entering workforce - Trump and Covid slowed down immigration - high interest rate slows down R&D
That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average member of the labor force.
This also neatly explains why Boomers were able to have a good life with just a high school diploma. Wikipedia has a good chart, but the short version is that having a high school diploma in 1965 meant you were better educated than 50% of the labor force.
PhDs are the new undergraduate degree.
I lived through lots of "offshoring frenzies" that never went very far in the past, but things are different this time. Like in the fallout from the .com bust in the early 00s, there was all this talk about how we'd ship all software development to India, and a lot of companies did try to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. And top companies were still paying crazy high salaries for entry level top talent in the Bay Area because they knew it was worth it.
Now, though, I feel like companies are smarter. They know time zone overlap is key, so I've seen a lot more offshoring to Latin America, Canada and Europe where there is sufficient overlap with US time zones. Since even US folks spend so much of their time on Zoom etc. anyway, it doesn't really matter if your Zoom colleague is in your same city or thousands of miles away. I've worked with excellent colleagues from Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland etc. before, and the network speed was good enough so that videoconferencing quality was great. And this is a far cry from the early 00s when I was on choppy voice-only conference calls with a team in India.
So new grads are not only competing with other new grads, they're competing with highly competent, experienced grads from all over the world, most of whom have salary expectations much lower than US new grads.
e.g. assuming $500k/yr at 4% interest, that would be $20k/yr which is not enough to live on but is still a nice cushion
IMO you could learn a lot more, as a young person, starting a small business than you'll ever learn at college, and it'll cost less even if you fail. So I don't want to make it a "college fund" or anything like that.
Another part of it is of course the prestige of the institution. If everyone has a degree it's not what it used to be.
I definitely agree with other posters though that once you're in a remote work environment is South America really that different than another neighborhood or City if that same amount of money could bring in a more senior person with experience why hire the green? I think a key part of hiring green folks was culture and having young people around the office but that just isn't what it used to be.
The vibe shift seem to correlate with the general feeling that we're all busy and we really want to spend time babysitting a new grad versus all working hard with experienced people it's almost like once you're too busy it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that it's hard to spend time ramping people which is such a short-sihted thought.
Still I think in the fullness of time people will realize that eventually you do need to be bringing the next generation into the company and so this might be a temporary fad.