College grads taking low-wage jobs displace less educated

[Retro Rob]

If you want a career as a pilot... 4 years of college won't offer any benefit over a technical school devoted to aviation training. But good luck getting a decent job with out a 4 year degree.

What do you mean by a "decent job"? In my experience, the only time you would probably need a degree is if you're aiming for management or executive-level employment.

Depending on your field, you don't even need college. For instance, I started off reading computer certification books, took a couple of exams, and went from making $11/hr to $17/hr within a year's time, granted, I needed to leave my first job.

A little hard work and willingness to learn, and you can get a pretty decent job with livable wages without too much of a problem.

And I used to agree with you on your other point... that is getting some specialized skills without a degree. Plumbing for instance. Too many people felt crawling around a leaking poop pipe was beneath them... but a great living could be made. However now you cannot survive against these companies that hire illegal labor. They hire a number of illegals to do the dirty stuff with a skilled plumber overseeing the work. That company then could get a lot more done and charge less on volume. For a young plumber starting out it will be tough.

Really, so what about the illegal labor part? You cannot worry about that. The point is you'd have a marketable skill that few have and most people probably aren't willing to crawl under a nasty toilet or sink to fix something.

 

[rudder]

Mere assertion presented as fact. Illegals aren't hired because nobody else will do it, but because they're cheaper.

It's what the Jerb Creators do, right? Maximize profit!

Well it is a good thing I never said illegals were being hired because nobody wants to be a plumber.

 

[rudder]

What do you mean by a "decent job"? In my experience, the only time you would probably need a degree is if you're aiming for management or executive-level employment.

Depending on your field, you don't even need college. For instance, I started off reading computer certification books, took a couple of exams, and went from making $11/hr to $17/hr within a year's time, granted, I needed to leave my first job.

A little hard work and willingness to learn, and you can get a pretty decent job with livable wages without too much of a problem.

Really, so what about the illegal labor part? You cannot worry about that. The point is you'd have a marketable skill that few have and most people probably aren't willing to crawl under a nasty toilet or sink to fix something.

A decent job would be with a company that won't be gone in 6 months. There are a ton of startups short on cash that buy a Part 121 certificate and try to make a go at it. There are a ton of smaller airlines that have gone out of business that no one has ever heard of... Panagra, Sun Jet, Prestige Airways, Kitty Hawk, etc etc.

You will not get hired as an airline pilot without a 4 year degree. My point... you don't really need a degree... but a lot of companies require a 4 year degree to even look at your resume.

And a marketable skill gets you nothing if you have to bid so low on a job you lose money. Some people can make it, but illegal labor has threw many industries a curve. It used to be people were called masons and after high school and began work with a master mason as an apprentice. Now you have these illegals who get hired by working cheap and saying they have experience laying brick.

 

[Zaap]

Yeh, it's easy to label anybody who disagrees with you as a loser & a dummy. Within the usual self righteous wing nut headset, it's actually necessary to ignore what they say & to maintain denial.

If you actually attempted to answer the questions posed above, you'd end up questioning your belief structure, something Righties avoid at all costs. The people who feed you the bullshit you believe depend on that entirely.

ONLY moonbats like you think "learn to do something other people find valuable" is radical advice, and think "rave like a fucking loon about billionaires" is solid career advice.

You're DUMB as a fucking rock.

 

[Jhhnn]

ONLY moonbats like you think "learn to do something other people find valuable" is radical advice, and think "rave like a fucking loon about billionaires" is solid career advice.

You're DUMB as a fucking rock.

And you refuse to examine the larger issues, pretend they don't exist. Those larger issues are the reason that college grads are failing to find work commesurate with their education, and why wages for skilled labor are depressed in this country, have been for a long while.

Those of us who've done reasonably well really need to see that we've been more lucky than good, that we've somehow prospered during what really is a systemic decline in opportunity & compensation for work in this country, simply because Capitalists no longer need nearly as many Americans to do work as formerly.

OTOH, people still have to feed the kids, pay the bills, make the rent or payments on their little piece of the enormity of suburbia.

How do we, as a nation, a society, sustain that with a dearth of employment & enormous extraction of liquidity from the world of everyday commerce?

Obviously, we won't, not applying your headset to the issues.

 

[Newell Steamer]

Bu-bu-but, those tax cuts for the job creators should be creating jobs!!

 

[Exterous]

Really? Where is this research?

Here
Here
Here
and Here

Really Google is a wonderful thing.

The results of the various research can be summarized as follows:
For school education in finances to be successful it needs to be continuious (See: Brazil). A couple (or even several) of classes in High School, College or the Military has no correlation to improved financial literacy. Actually the military classes resulted in a negative correlation.
Parental involvement has more impact than education. (Imagine that - parents having to take part in the education of a child!). There appears to be a very direct link between families talking about how to handle money and financial literacy. If nothing else it is a far stronger correlation than the traditional school educational method.

Also, I thought that it starts at home. It seems to me that children are going to mimic what their parents do later in life. If a parent is a saver it is more than likely that their children will save. If mom and dad spent foolishly then their children are going to do the same.

I completely agree! Well, at least with the first part. Your second part is off base though. Studies have found that that parental involvement has far more to do with the financial success of the child than their parents being savers or spenders. If your parent is a spender but talks to their child and involves their child the child is far more likely to be more financially stable than if their parent was a saver who never talked to their child about money

 

[momeNt]

Jobs and wages are merely a symptom Jhhnn.

The real problem is how universities have structured themselves in response to the ease of a student to get loans for any degree they want.

I guarantee if all student loans were privately funded and not backstopped by the government, there would be extensive data on the amount of students in each particular field, and lenders would cut off loans at certain thresholds for certain degrees because the student wouldn't be able to pay it back. The lender has zero incentive to lend responsibly. Leaving students with poor degree choices and an inability to repay loans.

I am NOT blaming the students, I am blaming the structure that allows students to be able to pick these degrees in the first place.

So yea, either create a government office for employment and student education. Or just get government out of higher education. Either would work probably....

 

[fskimospy]

Jobs and wages are merely a symptom Jhhnn.

The real problem is how universities have structured themselves in response to the ease of a student to get loans for any degree they want.

I guarantee if all student loans were privately funded and not backstopped by the government, there would be extensive data on the amount of students in each particular field, and lenders would cut off loans at certain thresholds for certain degrees because the student wouldn't be able to pay it back. The lender has zero incentive to lend responsibly. Leaving students with poor degree choices and an inability to repay loans.

I am NOT blaming the students, I am blaming the structure that allows students to be able to pick these degrees in the first place.

So yea, either create a government office for employment and student education. Or just get government out of higher education. Either would work probably....

Without government backing of student loans for the most part they just wouldn't exist. That doesn't seem like a good plan for America. (unless we are just publicly funding higher education, which I am down with.)

What bank is willing to regularly give out large, unsecured loans to 18 year olds? Telling them that you're going to go be an engineer someday will not change their mind.

 

[Pulsar]

Ahh, yes- slime the victim. Works every time, huh? Well, at least in helping you maintain denial.

Time was that the particular degree didn't matter. Having it showed employers that you were intelligent, hardworking, willing to learn & to play the game.

Your bullshit just shows how much things have changed, and how effective the propaganda about jobs in this country really is. There are very, very few degrees, if any, that act as a shoo-in to your field of choice. A young person today could pick a seemingly solid major, work hard, get great grades, obtain an advanced degree only to find out it's obsolete when they get there. Which, in your estimation, is their fault entirely because they couldn't foretell the future.

It's like nesting sites for swallows. If you destroy the places where they nest, they can't survive. If the so-called Jerb Creators! keep destroying the jobs in this country, we'll end up in the same fix.

Bullshit.

If you go to college for an unvalued degree in a field that is overly supplied with majors - for instance *HISTORY TEACHERS*, don't be fscking surprised when you can't find a job. I have a brother-in-law who did the same thing, and he isn't the brightest bulb in the box. There are only so many places in this world for rote-reciting non-problem-solving people, and as the work force grows those places are in smaller supply.

I'm sorry if you equate reality and pragmatism to 'sliming the victim'. But stupid people often see themselves as victims rather than solving the problem at hand. In the other case.... 20 year old high school grad with a minimum wage job? Not exactly going places, huh? Doing a job that a 15 year old still in high school with no training can do just as easily, yet whining about the pay scale.

Typical mcowned crap supported by the usual suspects. *All humans are equal*... yeah go work on a genomics project or engineer the next supersonic airliner, then get back to us on that one.

 

[Pulsar]

Jobs and wages are merely a symptom Jhhnn.

The real problem is how universities have structured themselves in response to the ease of a student to get loans for any degree they want.

I guarantee if all student loans were privately funded and not backstopped by the government, there would be extensive data on the amount of students in each particular field, and lenders would cut off loans at certain thresholds for certain degrees because the student wouldn't be able to pay it back. The lender has zero incentive to lend responsibly. Leaving students with poor degree choices and an inability to repay loans.

I am NOT blaming the students, I am blaming the structure that allows students to be able to pick these degrees in the first place.

So yea, either create a government office for employment and student education. Or just get government out of higher education. Either would work probably....

Uh.... so it's not the person's fault? While I agree that your suggestion would help stop all the stupid people from getting pointless degrees, the fault still lies on the people who believe they 'can be anything they want' rather than realizing they need to be a productive member of society if they want to support themselves.

 

[Pulsar]

And you refuse to examine the larger issues, pretend they don't exist. Those larger issues are the reason that college grads are failing to find work commesurate with their education, and why wages for skilled labor are depressed in this country, have been for a long while.

Those of us who've done reasonably well really need to see that we've been more lucky than good, that we've somehow prospered during what really is a systemic decline in opportunity & compensation for work in this country

Bullshit. We researched in 8th grade to figure out what fields would be looking up at the point we were graduating from high school. We had tech, medical, and other companies come in and tell us where the economy was going. The teachers worked through the jobs likely to be high supply, and then advised the parents and students to base their curriculum around the ones that looked like the most interesting to them.

Planning your future isn't luck.

 

[unokitty]

The results of the various research can be summarized as follows:
For school education in finances to be successful it needs to be continuious (See: Brazil). A couple (or even several) of classes in High School, College or the Military has no correlation to improved financial literacy...
Parental involvement has more impact than education... There appears to be a very direct link between families talking about how to handle money and financial literacy. If nothing else it is a far stronger correlation than the traditional school educational method.

Not sure of the point that you are trying to make. And I don't want to make any assumptions. Please don't be offended.

But are you trying to imply that the US Government has loaned nearly a trillion dollars to students that, research shows, lack basic financial literacy?

Uno

 

[fskimospy]

Not sure of the point that you are trying to make. And I don't want to make any assumptions. Please don't be offended.

But are you trying to imply that the US Government has loaned nearly a trillion dollars to students that lack basic financial literacy?

Uno

What point are you trying to make? Using your standard, the free market has lent about $14 trillion to people that in many cases lack basic financial literacy.

 

[momeNt]

Uh.... so it's not the person's fault? While I agree that your suggestion would help stop all the stupid people from getting pointless degrees, the fault still lies on the people who believe they 'can be anything they want' rather than realizing they need to be a productive member of society if they want to support themselves.

I said I wasn't blaming the students. A lot of people at that age are not necessarily mentored enough by parents or teachers regarding career decisions.

If there was responsible lending a lot of bad choices could be nipped in the bud.

Right now only one side of the equation has the proper incentive to make correct decisions, the students, but the students don't always have access to enough information, or are simply not mature enough to make the correct choice. Lenders could also have similar incentive if they were made to feel the impact of their bad choices.

 

[fskimospy]

I said I wasn't blaming the students. A lot of people at that age are not necessarily mentored enough by parents or teachers regarding career decisions.

If there was responsible lending a lot of bad choices could be nipped in the bud.

Right now only one side of the equation has the proper incentive to make correct decisions, the students, but the students don't always have access to enough information, or are simply not mature enough to make the correct choice. Lenders could also have similar incentive if they were made to feel the impact of their bad choices.

Again though, in those cases student loans simply wouldn't exist. Do you think student loans not existing is a good answer?

 

[Pulsar]

Again though, in those cases student loans simply wouldn't exist. Do you think student loans not existing is a good answer?

If the jobs are un-needed, absolutely. In what world is a good idea to create a supply of a product no one wants (for example, a kajillion history majors).

 

[fskimospy]

If the jobs are un-needed, absolutely. In what world is a good idea to create a supply of a product no one wants (for example, a kajillion history majors).

What jobs? Ones that a student may or may not get four years later from a degree they may or may not finish?

All student loans would disappear, as banks are not in the habit of giving large, unsecured loans to 18 year olds.

 

[Exterous]

Not sure of the point that you are trying to make. And I don't want to make any assumptions. Please don't be offended.

But are you trying to imply that the US Government has loaned nearly a trillion dollars to students that, research shows, lack basic financial literacy?

Uno

Not really - just that the push for teaching financial literacy in school is likely misguided. Unless we are willing to devote consecutive classes over the course of years (which is unlikely IMO given the curriculum pressure already forcing out electives) then the focus needs to be less on school and more on the home.

However I would say the current lending environment which imposes no repercussions for banks for their poor lending policies is creating a serious issue. As should be clear from the housing crash if enough people are irresponsible with lent money everyone pays for it (With, perhaps, the exception of a few very rich people)

 

[momeNt]

Again though, in those cases student loans simply wouldn't exist. Do you think student loans not existing is a good answer?

Actually I think the universe might implode. Which would end all human suffering.

It's the best answer.

really though. Mortgages in many cases are predicated on having a job for 10-30 years. Student loans are predicated on the same thing. Private loans not backed by the government have existed for mortgages, so why wouldn't they exist for students?

 

[Spungo]

Again though, in those cases student loans simply wouldn't exist. Do you think student loans not existing is a good answer?

Uh yes? Students loans are a plague on our society. Millions of people are so deep in debt that their only hope is to leave the country. Record numbers of young adults are living with their parents because they are drowning in debt.

As usual, government interference has screwed up the market and caused incredible damage to the country. You need a 4 year degree to work at Walmart, but the wages are so low that it's impossible to pay that money back. We should try to get back to the days when most people did not go to college. People should be able to get a job when they are fresh out of high school with no experience and no debt. People should be able to buy their first home when they are 25 instead of needing to wait until 30 or 35.

 

[MagickMan]

ONLY moonbats like you think "learn to do something other people find valuable" is radical advice, and think "rave like a fucking loon about billionaires" is solid career advice.

You're DUMB as a fucking rock.

Yes, yes he is. "They need to accept me and pay me big money to do whatever I want. My Master's in Philosophy* has value! That's not fair!" Good luck with that worthless scrap of paper that cost you $150k, and you'll be paying on for the rest of your natural life. At least you'll be able to have riveting discussions on existentialism with other people riding the bus, on the way to your evening shift job bussing tables at Chuck E Cheese.



(* or modern art, or political science, or history, or archeology, or 18th century French poetry, etc. etc.)

 

[fskimospy]

Uh yes? Students loans are a plague on our society. Millions of people are so deep in debt that their only hope is to leave the country. Record numbers of young adults are living with their parents because they are drowning in debt.

As usual, government interference has screwed up the market and caused incredible damage to the country. You need a 4 year degree to work at Walmart, but the wages are so low that it's impossible to pay that money back. We should try to get back to the days when most people did not go to college. People should be able to get a job when they are fresh out of high school with no experience and no debt. People should be able to buy their first home when they are 25 instead of needing to wait until 30 or 35.

Your plan is to de-educate American society? That sounds like a really great idea, especially in a world where international competition is only increasing.

 

[unokitty]

Not really - just that the push for teaching financial literacy in school is likely misguided. Unless we are willing to devote consecutive classes over the course of years (which is unlikely IMO given the curriculum pressure already forcing out electives) then the focus needs to be less on school and more on the home.

However I would say the current lending environment which imposes no repercussions for banks for their poor lending policies is creating a serious issue. As should be clear from the housing crash if enough people are irresponsible with lent money everyone pays for it (With, perhaps, the exception of a few very rich people)

Thanks for your response.

It does seem that when a system exists where an institution can make loans, and profit on those loans, without regard as to the ability of the people receiving the loans to repay them, that it will not end well. (As you observed with the housing crash.)

Forbes describes the status quo this way:

It’s a negative sum game for both student-borrowers and the economy. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, student loan debt has reached a new milestone, crossing the $1.2 trillion mark — $1 trillion of that in federal student loan debt.

This pushes student loan debts to dizzying new heights, as they now account for the second highest form of consumer debt behind mortgages. With the federal debt at $16.7 trillion, student loan debts measure at 6% of the overall national debt. This is no small figure, and national debt carries many consequences including slowing economic growth (translating into fewer jobs being created) and rising interest rates. Capital will not be as easy to access.

The majority of student loans are backed by the U.S. government through banks like Sallie Mae, or since 2010, by the Department of Education. Translation: the creditor in this scenario is the U.S. tax payer, who if students default on these loans will be subject to carry the burden of these loans.

While I think that there is at least the glimmer of consensus concerning the problem definition. That is, there are too many people borrowing too much money... And finding out, years later, that they can't repay it...

Still, there seems to be a lack of consensus concerning what constitutes an appropriate solution.

On the other hand, in a society that lacks basic financial literacy, perhaps that isn't surprising...

And on yet another hand, the lack of a solution means that the problem is likely to continue to grow ...

An interesting dynamic. But, from my perspective, not one that is going to end well.

Uno

 

[Pulsar]

Your plan is to de-educate American society? That sounds like a really great idea, especially in a world where international competition is only increasing.

Because educating them in worthless fields is definitely going to help us in international competition...... derp....

Maybe you should have gone to school for debate. Then at least you'd understand the arguments need to support your conclusion.

How about this - government backed loans are offered only for fields where current needs lie. I know, I know, social engineering is an evil tool of the left.