Flocking to McJobs
Too many sheepskins these days?
Bah, or baa you might say, depending on your experience with the job market of 2009. Either you are disgusted by the prospects of employment for your new college grad or you, and your son or daughter, realize that a BA is no guarantee of anything but the most mundane, maybe disappointing career choices. Starbucks anyone?
Sometimes it helps to see ourselves if we first look elsewhere. Like China. By some estimates, 8 million new graduates are flocking to that country’s great urban pastures in search of the promised nirvana of lucrative employment. Like students in the U.S., new Chinese students seem perplexed, if not astounded, that their new degrees are almost meaningless in the job market. Higher education in China is a wooly bubble, about to burst.
Are too many people going to college?
Probably so. The very idea of college has somehow morphed from an institution of higher learning for those entering specialized professions, or desiring a more elevated, rounded educational experience to a marketplaces for jobs, not ideas. And college is expensive by any sane measure. The differences in income are highly exaggerated; and the fact (repeated on this blog) that 50% of entering freshmen never get a degree is telling. Most eventually wander off campus and suddenly find themselves with a “McJob, as a cashier at Best Buy a waitress at Denny’s or as office clerks in large, corporate offices.
So what really happens with a degree? You are witnessing it. About 2 million new grads enter the work force (er…I mean, unemployment lines) this Spring, at a time when 36% of employers are promising them starting salaries of $30,000 or less. Now, I don’t know about you, but in Bozeman Montana, that is far less than what a carpenter or a police officer might make– one a trade school “graduate,” the other with a 2 year degree in law enforcement.
What are we doing to our kids? Have you sat down with your 18 year old senior and discussed “life after high school?” Have you asked them if they really want to go to college? What makes im or her happy? Where do they find bliss? Remember, they are still young and looking for your guidance. In many, if not most household, college is an unspoken must.
Talk about it. Have you?
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