13 ms·

When I Was Your Age

91 points by aburan28 11y ago

pc86 11y ago
It's no surprise that the Center For American Progress pins the blame for this on lack of labor participation among Millennials, but I don't buy it. We're talking about a sub-2% drop compared to Gen X.
- cmdrfred 11y ago
  You forgot to adjust for inflation. 2% drop on money that is worth 6% less or so.
  - pc86 11y ago
    I was referring to unionized labor participation between Gen X (30 in 2004) and Millennial (30 in 2014) as defined by the article, meaning that its overall effect on Millennial income is negligible enough to approach zero. Not sure that inflation in relevant to that.
    - mikeyouse 11y ago
      Small absolute differences but that's still a ~22% decrease in union membership at the same age.. It could definitely affect wages, and certainly does for those in formerly union jobs.
- zanny 11y ago
  Also, if people don't participate and you actually have use for labor, that would drive the cost of labor up, not down. As it is, the vast majority of labor skirts the minimum wage because nobody wants people to do anything anymore. The utility of a fleshy meatbag is at all time lows, and will only continue to decline as we carve chunks out of the labor market through automation. It is also unreasonable to expect an entire generation to work in the very limited purview of STEM. Enough people just do not have the mindset for it and it is already hurting the overall quality of engineering how market forces are pushing people ill suited for such professions into them for survivals sake. The only reasonable answer is the recognition that, for most of our population, we have nothing productive for them to do, but they should not be punished for being unemployable when it is through no fault of their own. It is our job to raise and educate and mold them better to get a higher yield of analytic minds, but those who do not acquire the skills at the early ages when they form cannot be condemned to a life of poverty for something out of their adult control.
jcuga 11y ago
Graduates are increasingly less prepared for the working world and burdened with large student loans. It should come as no surprise that higher levels of education have not improved Millennials' standing. There are more distractions and diversions than ever that prevent youth from otherwise doing something constructive with their time. And universities have been dumbing down curriculum to bring in more (less qualified) students that are buoyed up by federal loans.
galfarragem 11y ago
My empiric opinion is that it's very common among millennials to 'follow their passion'. 'Weakness' that is exploited by business people when negotiating salaries. Mix it with post-scarcity economics and globalization and the phenomenon is explained.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  Most don't love what they do-they want the world their parents promised would be theirs by going to college.
  - galfarragem 11y ago
    I agree. Older generations made emotional promises that made sense in that moment of History - 'graduate from a good college and the world is yours' - forgetting that there are ever changing dynamics that easily refute that judgement: e.g. supply and demand. You don't earn a good sallary because you know a lot, you earn a good sallary because the skills that you are able to market have a favorable demand/supply ratio that inflationate their value.
    - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
      Moreover, it was promised (because when people graduated from college in 1973 it made sense) that any college degree was your white collar meal ticket. I still think people who advocate undergrad liberal arts/humanities are delusional or have a vested interest (like they themselves have non STEM degrees)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
cheath 11y ago
That lead photo caption is just horrible.
11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
I'd be interested in seeing the change in wage distribution by profession. In the 70's it was still possible to exit high school and move into manufacturing jobs that paid 2-4x minimum wage. Those jobs are largely gone now, and the opportunities for 30-year-olds with high school only are more often (I speculate) Walmart or Starbucks or Chipotle type jobs. There is a higher percentage of college educated that may balance that out, but we need to see the distribution to understand it.
- willholloway 11y ago
  People I know that skipped college and began working and saving right after high school (all as waiters), were able to purchase a home, or a two-family, or three units for investment purposes with the rock bottom prices/foreclosures during the housing crisis. They have been able to accumulate some wealth on service industry salaries. They don't make much less than many of their counterparts with liberal arts degrees, who without the head start graduated into the recession with nothing. For many the opportunity cost of college was high.
  - dionidium 11y ago
    I dated a bartender for a few years and one of my best friends waits tables, so I've ended up meeting a fair number of industry people. I have no idea what you're talking about. They're almost all renters. And this is in St. Louis, where housing is cheap. (Also, I'm in my thirties. Not talking about people just starting out.)
    - willholloway 11y ago
      What's cheap? My cousin bought his first foreclosure for 33k during the south Florida housing bust. He has two more now, all from waiting tables and being extremely thirfty. A 140k two family amortized over 30 years at 3.5% can be free to live in for the owner occupying one unit. That can be done in Connecticut for example. This is how some of my non colege educated millenial friends are getting by quite well.
  - 11y ago
huherto 11y ago
Paraphrasing the classics. It is the housing market stupid. Really, Even living in a place with very low population density(Rural Mass/NH). Rents are high (and scarce), you need at least 250K to buy a small house. Houses are old, Lot's are big, big distances, very few new houses are built every year. I can't even image how blue collar families do it. If you think about it, it even makes local companies less competitive, since they need to pay more so people can barely survive. This resonated a lot with me. https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-graduate-is-turning-heads-over-his-theory-that-income-inequality-is-actually-2a3b423e0c#.iljcrro5m https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-gra...
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Our keystone national housing policy focuses on appreciating prices. A sensible national housing policy would focus on improving the characteristics of the housing stock (improving energy efficiency, removing lead, etc). Of course the building code moves forward over time and new housing generally beats older housing on metrics like that, and there are occasionally tax incentives for making improvements. but none of that comes close to the mortgage interest deduction in scope. It would also focus on affordability. It's clear enough that with 40 or 50 years for the policy to work and ~1/2 of the nation not having much of any wealth that home equity is not the path to universal prosperity.
  - Futurebot 11y ago
    This is one of the reasons that Germany housing policy is so successful: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/#1ef0063ebb2d http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/#1ef0063ebb2d In the US, housing is treated as an asset, which is a huge mistake. In place like Germany, most people are renters because: rents stay fairly low, the government reassesses population periodically to allow more houses to get built, and renters have plenty of rights. Here, we allow houses to act as a hybrid place to live, ATM, and stock.
    - Terr_ 11y ago
      Living in your investment is a bit like having your 401K funds invested in your employer: If something goes wrong, you're doubly-screwed.
timsco 11y ago
Boo hoo. Now get back to work! ;)
z3t4 11y ago
To hire someone, you need money, and to get money, you need to get hired ... The problem is that there is not enough money!
- maxerickson 11y ago
  There's plenty of money. The problem is that spending $10 on capital to make the existing work force more productive is often a better investment than spending $10 on some more labor. It's difficult for labor to argue its importance in such an environment.
  - z3t4 11y ago
    Being more productive usually let you earn more too.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      That's why I'm separating capital investment out from labor. New equipment helps the business earn more, which of course gives them the option to pay their employees more, but if there are lots of people willing to be employees, they business probably doesn't need to pay more.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Besides capital bringing productivity, the money is distributed very unevenly. That makes it hard to create new applications for that extra workforce, because most people have little money to spend on it.
lintiness 11y ago
govt subsidies for college degrees have made them the new high school diploma.
gragas 11y ago
>Millennials have spent almost their entire working lives in a labor market that is loose—with too many job seekers and too few jobs—and where private-sector labor unions are almost entirely absent. Certainly, monetary policy that promotes employment while making it easier for workers to form unions would help Millennials make up lost ground. The issue I have with this is it promotes a certain ideology—that job-seekers have the right to hold jobs even when there are too few. This article completely ignores the other paradigm, that if you don't have a job, it's up to you to make yourself valuable to employers. I'm not trying to argue for one ideology or the other, I just think it's absurd to ignore the existence of one or the other.
- geogra4 11y ago
  How about if you don't have a job you still deserve a basic income? Ultimately that's the future. There are going to be too few jobs for people going forward. There's no point in makework. Just give each person a basic income.
  - collyw 11y ago
    I don't buy the "too few jobs argument". We got told this 30 years ago when computers started becoming mainstream and households had one person going out to work. Certain jobs get automated but more bullshit jobs get created.
    - Retric 11y ago
      The % of total population that works has continued to drop. However, promoting BS jobs makes society worse. EX: 80+% of all time and effort spent on medical billing is simply economic dead weight. Medical billing reduces doctor effectiveness requiring more doctors, more people training doctors, and doctors to work longer hours doing crap work (filling out forms). Remove bullshit jobs and only a small fraction of the population actually works. Long term we can make an endless hell where paperwork is what 98% of humanity does, or we can just chose another system. PS: In the US over 50% of all money spent on healthcare goes to Overhead that has nothing to do with patents. In many cases it’s cheaper for people with insurance to go to private doctors who don’t accept insurance. [Think about that for a bit.]
lr4444lr 11y ago
"By all rights, Millennials—people born between 1981 and 1997—should be the highest-paid generation in American history. They are, after all, the most likely to hold a college degree and are working in a period of unsurpassed productivity" This syllogism is not only unfounded, but basic economics suggests the opposite is true.
- CPLX 11y ago
  I have a degree in Economics, and I don't understand what you're trying to say. There should be a positive correlation between productivity and compensation. How does "basic economics" suggest the opposite?
  - maze-le 11y ago
    I think what he means is: More people hava a college degree. That means more people are in competition to get "white collar" jobs. More competition on the "white collar"-job market, creates incentives to lower the cost per person (There is a bigger share of people willing to be paid less than a generation before). Therefore the average salary per person drops.
    - guscost 11y ago
      Also, "more productive" means fewer people are needed to do the same amount of work, so labor prices are being pushed down from the demand side too (as long as the total work being done doesn't keep pace, i.e. low growth).
  - lr4444lr 11y ago
    I do _not_ have a degree in economics, and am content to admit I only understand basic principles. My implicit point is that the credential does not "make one productive"; it qualifies one to perform in jobs that _carry_ higher productivity in the market. Without a commensurate increase in those jobs to match the higher proportion of the population obtaining the credential, the supply and demand equilibrium point moves. By all means, if there is data or more sophisticated principles at work, please correct me.
two2two 11y ago
Another issue worth noting is getting past the set requirements to be evaluated by a human. I'm 30, without a college education, and worked for Apple retail as a 'Genius' for 5 years. That meant enough at the time to get me a job at Hulu with the expectation of upward mobility. Unfortunately, Hulu's executives made poor decisions and the type of work I was doing was unbearable. After leaving, I've been unable to find a job due to my application submissions missing a key component to even be considered; a college degree. Now, no one cares I worked for Apple like they used to.
- ajmurmann 11y ago
  The whole college degree as a filter thing is the laziest thing a company could do to quickly get through a stack of applications. On the other hand the market is apparently in their favor enough that they can afford to use lazy filters like these that might lead to missing out on an awesome employee.
  - michaelbuddy 11y ago
    There really needs to be a way to get honorary degrees of some sort where you've put in the work. College degrees are something focused to complete, which shows initiative, but in terms of classes and skills they are so unfocused i'd rather see somebody so focused within a niche with no degree because they knew college would hurt their ambition.
    - michaelbuddy 11y ago
      What's with the downvotes? Somebody actually going to refute that college degrees aren't as focused? Because that's pretty hard to argue given all of the requuired non-essential tasks and all the electives which are just whatever classes that you have to pay for, but can be complete throwaways.
    - nradov 11y ago
      Honorary degrees are usually granted to people who have achieved something particularly noteworthy in the field, or who make large donations to the school. I think what you're actually asking for is academic credit for work experience. And indeed some of the lower-tier online colleges such as University of Phoenix or Kaplan University do offer that option. So if you just want to check the box of having a Bachelor's degree then that might be an option, but be aware that many employers don't take such degrees seriously.
jschwartzi 11y ago
Is it generally accepted that lower federal reserve interest rates increase employment? If so, what's the mechanism?
mattlutze 11y ago
They state the causes of lower Millennial average pay is an incomplete recovery causing lower participation in the labor market, and lack of unions to force higher wages. They then go on to say that the Fed should continue depressing interest rates, and that employers should start providing significant parenthood benefits. I'm not sure with the last two -- continuing to depress capital for businesses and increasing the costs of an employee -- will encourage greater hiring or higher wages. If it's not profitable to make loans, banks won't provide the capital many businesses need to grow their staff since profits instead have to be more conservatively retained to protect against cash flow fluctuations. I thought that recent economic research was demonstrating that, when controlled for position and employment type, male and female salaries weren't significantly different. I'm not sure this one makes complete sense as a solution to the problem of employers not hiring people, but I'd definitely be interested to see more analysis on the hypothesis that greater gap coverage for maternity leave could help keep women on track and such, that's particularly cool.
snake_plissken 11y ago
Huh? That chart in figure 3 tells it all; on the assumption that an employer in the 80s valued a college degree as much as a company in the 2010s, then as more people attain a college degree, it's value (i.e wages) won't move up. In fact you'd expect it to go down but that increase in "productivity" probably offset the downward pressure. If you asked me, the problem facing workers in their 20s and 30s is that people are having longer careers, either by choice or by necessity. This is coupled with a job market which has never really recovered from the mid 2000s peaks. Until the Baby Boomer generation really begins to retire, the job market will remain tricky to navigate. Compound it all with an ever increasing cost of living (basically, the cost of housing) in pretty much every market and you get the bleak landscape we have now.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- dang 11y ago
  > Are you f___ing kidding me? There's no need to bowdlerize swear words on HN, but there is a need not to post things like "Are you fucking kidding me". Civility has to do with how you treat your fellow users. Please eliminate incivility from your comments here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224796 and marked it off-topic.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
taivare 11y ago
Unemployment ,I graduated in 1981 , newly minted , state certified in welding 1750 cr. hrs. With a lot of hope went for a welding job in Toledo , the line was 100 yds. long . I got up there, the guy shook his head at the guy next to him and said this is the guy we need ; looked at me and said son look behind you all of those guys have families to feed ! Unemployment I could tell you all about unemployment !
gozur88 11y ago
>By all rights, Millennials—people born between 1981 and 1997—should be the highest-paid generation in American history. They are, after all, the most likely to hold a college degree and are working in a period of unsurpassed productivity. "By rights"? This article goes off the rails right there in the first sentence. It's hard to know where to start with how wrong this is. If the demand for your skill doesn't change and twice as many people have it, in aggregate the people with that skill are going to make less money. The idea that we're going to educate ourselves into prosperity as a society is daft - if we could all do brain surgery it would be a minimum wage job. The over-schooling of the millennials is a massive misallocation of resources, fueled by debt, cynical college administrators, weak politicians, credulous bureaucrats, and parents doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. That's not the kind of thing that makes you wealthier. Quite the opposite.

91 points by aburan28 11y ago

pc86 11y ago

It's no surprise that the Center For American Progress pins the blame for this on lack of labor participation among Millennials, but I don't buy it. We're talking about a sub-2% drop compared to Gen X.

cmdrfred 11y ago
You forgot to adjust for inflation. 2% drop on money that is worth 6% less or so.
- pc86 11y ago
  I was referring to unionized labor participation between Gen X (30 in 2004) and Millennial (30 in 2014) as defined by the article, meaning that its overall effect on Millennial income is negligible enough to approach zero. Not sure that inflation in relevant to that.
  - mikeyouse 11y ago
    Small absolute differences but that's still a ~22% decrease in union membership at the same age.. It could definitely affect wages, and certainly does for those in formerly union jobs.
zanny 11y ago
Also, if people don't participate and you actually have use for labor, that would drive the cost of labor up, not down. As it is, the vast majority of labor skirts the minimum wage because nobody wants people to do anything anymore. The utility of a fleshy meatbag is at all time lows, and will only continue to decline as we carve chunks out of the labor market through automation. It is also unreasonable to expect an entire generation to work in the very limited purview of STEM. Enough people just do not have the mindset for it and it is already hurting the overall quality of engineering how market forces are pushing people ill suited for such professions into them for survivals sake. The only reasonable answer is the recognition that, for most of our population, we have nothing productive for them to do, but they should not be punished for being unemployable when it is through no fault of their own. It is our job to raise and educate and mold them better to get a higher yield of analytic minds, but those who do not acquire the skills at the early ages when they form cannot be condemned to a life of poverty for something out of their adult control.

jcuga 11y ago

Graduates are increasingly less prepared for the working world and burdened with large student loans. It should come as no surprise that higher levels of education have not improved Millennials' standing. There are more distractions and diversions than ever that prevent youth from otherwise doing something constructive with their time. And universities have been dumbing down curriculum to bring in more (less qualified) students that are buoyed up by federal loans.

galfarragem 11y ago

My empiric opinion is that it's very common among millennials to 'follow their passion'. 'Weakness' that is exploited by business people when negotiating salaries. Mix it with post-scarcity economics and globalization and the phenomenon is explained.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
Most don't love what they do-they want the world their parents promised would be theirs by going to college.
- galfarragem 11y ago
  I agree. Older generations made emotional promises that made sense in that moment of History - 'graduate from a good college and the world is yours' - forgetting that there are ever changing dynamics that easily refute that judgement: e.g. supply and demand. You don't earn a good sallary because you know a lot, you earn a good sallary because the skills that you are able to market have a favorable demand/supply ratio that inflationate their value.
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    Moreover, it was promised (because when people graduated from college in 1973 it made sense) that any college degree was your white collar meal ticket. I still think people who advocate undergrad liberal arts/humanities are delusional or have a vested interest (like they themselves have non STEM degrees)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

cheath 11y ago

That lead photo caption is just horrible.

11thEarlOfMar 11y ago

I'd be interested in seeing the change in wage distribution by profession. In the 70's it was still possible to exit high school and move into manufacturing jobs that paid 2-4x minimum wage. Those jobs are largely gone now, and the opportunities for 30-year-olds with high school only are more often (I speculate) Walmart or Starbucks or Chipotle type jobs. There is a higher percentage of college educated that may balance that out, but we need to see the distribution to understand it.

willholloway 11y ago
People I know that skipped college and began working and saving right after high school (all as waiters), were able to purchase a home, or a two-family, or three units for investment purposes with the rock bottom prices/foreclosures during the housing crisis. They have been able to accumulate some wealth on service industry salaries. They don't make much less than many of their counterparts with liberal arts degrees, who without the head start graduated into the recession with nothing. For many the opportunity cost of college was high.
- dionidium 11y ago
  I dated a bartender for a few years and one of my best friends waits tables, so I've ended up meeting a fair number of industry people. I have no idea what you're talking about. They're almost all renters. And this is in St. Louis, where housing is cheap. (Also, I'm in my thirties. Not talking about people just starting out.)
  - willholloway 11y ago
    What's cheap? My cousin bought his first foreclosure for 33k during the south Florida housing bust. He has two more now, all from waiting tables and being extremely thirfty. A 140k two family amortized over 30 years at 3.5% can be free to live in for the owner occupying one unit. That can be done in Connecticut for example. This is how some of my non colege educated millenial friends are getting by quite well.
- 11y ago

huherto 11y ago

Paraphrasing the classics. It is the housing market stupid. Really, Even living in a place with very low population density(Rural Mass/NH). Rents are high (and scarce), you need at least 250K to buy a small house. Houses are old, Lot's are big, big distances, very few new houses are built every year. I can't even image how blue collar families do it. If you think about it, it even makes local companies less competitive, since they need to pay more so people can barely survive. This resonated a lot with me. https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-graduate-is-turning-heads-over-his-theory-that-income-inequality-is-actually-2a3b423e0c#.iljcrro5m https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-gra...

maxerickson 11y ago
Our keystone national housing policy focuses on appreciating prices. A sensible national housing policy would focus on improving the characteristics of the housing stock (improving energy efficiency, removing lead, etc). Of course the building code moves forward over time and new housing generally beats older housing on metrics like that, and there are occasionally tax incentives for making improvements. but none of that comes close to the mortgage interest deduction in scope. It would also focus on affordability. It's clear enough that with 40 or 50 years for the policy to work and ~1/2 of the nation not having much of any wealth that home equity is not the path to universal prosperity.
- Futurebot 11y ago
  This is one of the reasons that Germany housing policy is so successful: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/#1ef0063ebb2d http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/#1ef0063ebb2d In the US, housing is treated as an asset, which is a huge mistake. In place like Germany, most people are renters because: rents stay fairly low, the government reassesses population periodically to allow more houses to get built, and renters have plenty of rights. Here, we allow houses to act as a hybrid place to live, ATM, and stock.
  - Terr_ 11y ago
    Living in your investment is a bit like having your 401K funds invested in your employer: If something goes wrong, you're doubly-screwed.

timsco 11y ago

Boo hoo. Now get back to work! ;)

z3t4 11y ago

To hire someone, you need money, and to get money, you need to get hired ... The problem is that there is not enough money!

maxerickson 11y ago
There's plenty of money. The problem is that spending $10 on capital to make the existing work force more productive is often a better investment than spending $10 on some more labor. It's difficult for labor to argue its importance in such an environment.
- z3t4 11y ago
  Being more productive usually let you earn more too.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    That's why I'm separating capital investment out from labor. New equipment helps the business earn more, which of course gives them the option to pay their employees more, but if there are lots of people willing to be employees, they business probably doesn't need to pay more.
marcosdumay 11y ago
Besides capital bringing productivity, the money is distributed very unevenly. That makes it hard to create new applications for that extra workforce, because most people have little money to spend on it.

lintiness 11y ago

govt subsidies for college degrees have made them the new high school diploma.

gragas 11y ago

>Millennials have spent almost their entire working lives in a labor market that is loose—with too many job seekers and too few jobs—and where private-sector labor unions are almost entirely absent. Certainly, monetary policy that promotes employment while making it easier for workers to form unions would help Millennials make up lost ground. The issue I have with this is it promotes a certain ideology—that job-seekers have the right to hold jobs even when there are too few. This article completely ignores the other paradigm, that if you don't have a job, it's up to you to make yourself valuable to employers. I'm not trying to argue for one ideology or the other, I just think it's absurd to ignore the existence of one or the other.

geogra4 11y ago
How about if you don't have a job you still deserve a basic income? Ultimately that's the future. There are going to be too few jobs for people going forward. There's no point in makework. Just give each person a basic income.
- collyw 11y ago
  I don't buy the "too few jobs argument". We got told this 30 years ago when computers started becoming mainstream and households had one person going out to work. Certain jobs get automated but more bullshit jobs get created.
  - Retric 11y ago
    The % of total population that works has continued to drop. However, promoting BS jobs makes society worse. EX: 80+% of all time and effort spent on medical billing is simply economic dead weight. Medical billing reduces doctor effectiveness requiring more doctors, more people training doctors, and doctors to work longer hours doing crap work (filling out forms). Remove bullshit jobs and only a small fraction of the population actually works. Long term we can make an endless hell where paperwork is what 98% of humanity does, or we can just chose another system. PS: In the US over 50% of all money spent on healthcare goes to Overhead that has nothing to do with patents. In many cases it’s cheaper for people with insurance to go to private doctors who don’t accept insurance. [Think about that for a bit.]

lr4444lr 11y ago

"By all rights, Millennials—people born between 1981 and 1997—should be the highest-paid generation in American history. They are, after all, the most likely to hold a college degree and are working in a period of unsurpassed productivity" This syllogism is not only unfounded, but basic economics suggests the opposite is true.

CPLX 11y ago
I have a degree in Economics, and I don't understand what you're trying to say. There should be a positive correlation between productivity and compensation. How does "basic economics" suggest the opposite?
- maze-le 11y ago
  I think what he means is: More people hava a college degree. That means more people are in competition to get "white collar" jobs. More competition on the "white collar"-job market, creates incentives to lower the cost per person (There is a bigger share of people willing to be paid less than a generation before). Therefore the average salary per person drops.
  - guscost 11y ago
    Also, "more productive" means fewer people are needed to do the same amount of work, so labor prices are being pushed down from the demand side too (as long as the total work being done doesn't keep pace, i.e. low growth).
- lr4444lr 11y ago
  I do _not_ have a degree in economics, and am content to admit I only understand basic principles. My implicit point is that the credential does not "make one productive"; it qualifies one to perform in jobs that _carry_ higher productivity in the market. Without a commensurate increase in those jobs to match the higher proportion of the population obtaining the credential, the supply and demand equilibrium point moves. By all means, if there is data or more sophisticated principles at work, please correct me.

two2two 11y ago

Another issue worth noting is getting past the set requirements to be evaluated by a human. I'm 30, without a college education, and worked for Apple retail as a 'Genius' for 5 years. That meant enough at the time to get me a job at Hulu with the expectation of upward mobility. Unfortunately, Hulu's executives made poor decisions and the type of work I was doing was unbearable. After leaving, I've been unable to find a job due to my application submissions missing a key component to even be considered; a college degree. Now, no one cares I worked for Apple like they used to.

ajmurmann 11y ago
The whole college degree as a filter thing is the laziest thing a company could do to quickly get through a stack of applications. On the other hand the market is apparently in their favor enough that they can afford to use lazy filters like these that might lead to missing out on an awesome employee.
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  There really needs to be a way to get honorary degrees of some sort where you've put in the work. College degrees are something focused to complete, which shows initiative, but in terms of classes and skills they are so unfocused i'd rather see somebody so focused within a niche with no degree because they knew college would hurt their ambition.
  - michaelbuddy 11y ago
    What's with the downvotes? Somebody actually going to refute that college degrees aren't as focused? Because that's pretty hard to argue given all of the requuired non-essential tasks and all the electives which are just whatever classes that you have to pay for, but can be complete throwaways.
  - nradov 11y ago
    Honorary degrees are usually granted to people who have achieved something particularly noteworthy in the field, or who make large donations to the school. I think what you're actually asking for is academic credit for work experience. And indeed some of the lower-tier online colleges such as University of Phoenix or Kaplan University do offer that option. So if you just want to check the box of having a Bachelor's degree then that might be an option, but be aware that many employers don't take such degrees seriously.

jschwartzi 11y ago

Is it generally accepted that lower federal reserve interest rates increase employment? If so, what's the mechanism?

mattlutze 11y ago

They state the causes of lower Millennial average pay is an incomplete recovery causing lower participation in the labor market, and lack of unions to force higher wages. They then go on to say that the Fed should continue depressing interest rates, and that employers should start providing significant parenthood benefits. I'm not sure with the last two -- continuing to depress capital for businesses and increasing the costs of an employee -- will encourage greater hiring or higher wages. If it's not profitable to make loans, banks won't provide the capital many businesses need to grow their staff since profits instead have to be more conservatively retained to protect against cash flow fluctuations. I thought that recent economic research was demonstrating that, when controlled for position and employment type, male and female salaries weren't significantly different. I'm not sure this one makes complete sense as a solution to the problem of employers not hiring people, but I'd definitely be interested to see more analysis on the hypothesis that greater gap coverage for maternity leave could help keep women on track and such, that's particularly cool.

snake_plissken 11y ago

Huh? That chart in figure 3 tells it all; on the assumption that an employer in the 80s valued a college degree as much as a company in the 2010s, then as more people attain a college degree, it's value (i.e wages) won't move up. In fact you'd expect it to go down but that increase in "productivity" probably offset the downward pressure. If you asked me, the problem facing workers in their 20s and 30s is that people are having longer careers, either by choice or by necessity. This is coupled with a job market which has never really recovered from the mid 2000s peaks. Until the Baby Boomer generation really begins to retire, the job market will remain tricky to navigate. Compound it all with an ever increasing cost of living (basically, the cost of housing) in pretty much every market and you get the bleak landscape we have now.

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dang 11y ago
> Are you f___ing kidding me? There's no need to bowdlerize swear words on HN, but there is a need not to post things like "Are you fucking kidding me". Civility has to do with how you treat your fellow users. Please eliminate incivility from your comments here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224796 and marked it off-topic.
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taivare 11y ago

Unemployment ,I graduated in 1981 , newly minted , state certified in welding 1750 cr. hrs. With a lot of hope went for a welding job in Toledo , the line was 100 yds. long . I got up there, the guy shook his head at the guy next to him and said this is the guy we need ; looked at me and said son look behind you all of those guys have families to feed ! Unemployment I could tell you all about unemployment !

gozur88 11y ago

>By all rights, Millennials—people born between 1981 and 1997—should be the highest-paid generation in American history. They are, after all, the most likely to hold a college degree and are working in a period of unsurpassed productivity. "By rights"? This article goes off the rails right there in the first sentence. It's hard to know where to start with how wrong this is. If the demand for your skill doesn't change and twice as many people have it, in aggregate the people with that skill are going to make less money. The idea that we're going to educate ourselves into prosperity as a society is daft - if we could all do brain surgery it would be a minimum wage job. The over-schooling of the millennials is a massive misallocation of resources, fueled by debt, cynical college administrators, weak politicians, credulous bureaucrats, and parents doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. That's not the kind of thing that makes you wealthier. Quite the opposite.