Mac-Coleman

3 February 2013 –

Odds ‘n Ends

1.      As many others prepare to watch the Super Bowl today, I ruminate on the idea that professional football fanfare is a Sunday worship service.  I couldn’t devise a religion that receives more loyalty and devotion from its adherents yet rewards them with less meaningful insight into life than does professional football fandom.  Screen violence, beer, and a bunch of guys transfixed on the replay.  The result?  Nothing that improves them at all.  In fact, even the stats the game produces do not hold the magic or hidden meaning of baseball stats.   I am glad the game lost whatever appeal it held for me years ago.   I suppose I will hear the score on the news tomorrow and promptly forget it. 

2.      According to a new report by the nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity 37% of employed college graduates are in jobs that require no more than a high-school diploma, and 11 percent are in occupations requiring more than a high-school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree.  About five million college graduates are in jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics says don’t even require a high school education.  The problem, the Center purports, is an oversupply of college-educated Americans compared to the number of jobs requiring a college education.  See the full article below.   Hmm.  I ask myself a couple of questions:

a.       Like all statistical displays, they don’t tell the whole story.  How upwardly mobile are the people in these jobs, after getting a college degree?  Is this group of over-qualified janitors, bartenders, and waitresses working in temporary jobs until a more permanent job requiring their college skills inevitably opens for them?  Or, do these same people stay in this group year after year, and for what reasons?  Finally, how many people are in these jobs because are retired from something else and don’t want to do more than be a janitor.   This would be people 45-65 or 70, who, for whatever reason, are no longer teachers, scientists, or Air Force colonels.  I wonder.  If the nearly half of college graduates in the job market who are working in these jobs stay in these jobs for an extended time for lack of a better job, then one could say that there truly is an oversupply of college-educated Americans compared to the number of jobs requiring a college degree. 

b.      If the only purpose for going to college is to be prepared for the job market, then is college a waste of money in the light of these statistics?  It probably is a waste of money. 

c.       The final question is a follow-on to my last question:  Is college a waste of money for those who arrive on campus to be educated in the finest liberal arts tradition?  Given the incredible amount of educational information available at a much cheaper cost on electronic media today, college probably is a waste of money.  This is especially true at institutions where most classes on the lower levels, the classes that form one’s initial ideas in a particular discipline, are rarely taught by professors.  These duties usually are  given to graduate students while the professors do research or bask in the idleness of tenure.  If you want to do is understand the world and how it operates, then college will actually get in your way.  If you want to learn to write, then, as my brother told me forty years ago, you have to write. Buy the AP Style Guide, books on how to write fiction, and a book or two on logical display of an argument.  Read them and write.    I suppose one could do that while holding down a job as a janitor—or in Central Africa as a Government Technical Monitor. 

d.      Again, is college worth the ever-increasing costs?  If you want to work for a bureaucracy, whether it is government or business or academia, then you have to show that you have enough discipline to jump through the applicable hoops in the applicable college.  I finished a Master’s in Public Administration—otherwise known as a Master’s in Bureaucratic Crap—not because wanted to know all about the rise of the bureaucratic state, but because I wouldn’t have been promoted without a master’s degree.  Now, I am a retired colonel with all sorts of information on how bureaucracies become amorphic, throbbing masses of inefficiency and no interested audience.  But, it was the best degree offered at the Yokota Air Base, Japan, Education Center while we were stationed there.  Everybody has a story, I guess.  Mine includes working as a taxi driver, bartender, and laborer after graduation and waiting to go on active duty. 

REFERENCED ARTICLE AS IT WAS FOUND ON NEWSMAX.COM

Nearly half of employed college graduates in the United States hold down jobs that don’t require a four-year college education — including 323,200 waiters and waitresses, 115,520 janitors and cleaners, and 83,028 bartenders.

A new report from the nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity discloses that 37 percent of employed college graduates are in jobs requiring no more than a high-school diploma, and 11 percent are in occupations requiring more than a high-school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree.

About five million college graduates are in jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says don’t even require a high-school education.

The lead author of the report, Richard Vedder — an Ohio University economist and founder of the Center — says the trend is likely to continue over the next decade.

“It’s almost the new normal,” he declared.

The problem is an oversupply of college-educated Americans compared to the number of jobs requiring a college degree:

·  The number of Americans whose highest academic degree was a bachelor’s grew 25 percent to 41 million from 2002 to 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

·  The number with an associate degree rose 31 percent during that period.

·  Americans with a master’s degree rose 45 percent, and those with a doctorate degree rose 43 percent.

·  Labor Department data from 2010 show that there were 41.7 million college graduates in the workforce, while the number of jobs requiring a college degree was just 28.6 million.

·  In 1970, about 10 percent of Americans over age 25 had a college degree, while today the percentage has tripled to 30 percent.

According to Vedder, that helps explain why 15 percent of cab drivers had a bachelor’s degree in 2010 — compared to 1 percent in 1970 — as did 25 percent of retail sales clerks and 15 percent of firefighters.

Vedder, who is also an Adjunct Scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, added: “There are going to be an awful lot of disappointed [graduates] because a lot of them are going to end up as janitors.”