20 ms·

There are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with PhDs

179 points by surlyadopter 16y ago

starkness 16y ago
"[T]here are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees." Not clear what "professional" degrees they're referring to here, so doesn't sound like it's just Ph.D.'s. (MBAs, JDs, MFAs, MPHs?)
- gthank 16y ago
  Professional degrees are degrees that are designed to prepare you for a specific profession. Those professions typically involve government regulation, with said regulation commonly requiring the degree in question. It's often used to indicate M.D. and J.D. degrees, although it also includes a slew of others, e.g., nursing, accounting, education.
  - starkness 16y ago
    I'm aware of what they are (and in fact have one myself), but my point was that they're distinct from Ph.D.'s (so the title is misleading), and they can span across a broad spectrum of fields.
    - gthank 16y ago
      Sorry about the misunderstanding. At a guess, I'd say they mostly just mean J.D. and M.D. degrees. Those are the ones most commonly lumped in with Ph.D.s, probably due to the amount of time you need to spend getting them.
krschultz 16y ago
This is horribly confusing "current job" with "lifetime earnings". I took 2 months off last year to go skiing in Colorado with some of my friends who were ski bums. One in particular was about 26, was a web developer with a CS degree, and had been a ski bum for 3 years. During that time he had been a janitor/house cleaner. Was that using his degree? Obvously not. Did it pay the bills and allow him to ski every single day while working in the late afternoon/evening? It sure did. This year he moved back and is going to graduate school and consulting on the side (why he cleaned toilets instead of consulting the whole time still escapes me). He is back on his "real" career after taking that time to do what he wanted to do with his life. Honestly, I don't think it is a bad thing.
- vinhboy 16y ago
  "why he cleaned toilets instead of consulting the whole time still escapes me" -- either you've never done consulting, or never cleaned a toilet. From experience, I can tell you I rather clean a toilet. =) But alas, cleaning toilets can't pay my mortgage. =(
  - krschultz 16y ago
    Ha true. There were some perks of it, since he worked for the mountain he got a free season pass which was about $500, and when your monthly expenses are barely $500 that is signficant.
    - xyzzyb 16y ago
      If it was anything like the menial jobs I've taken, he was also part of a fantastic culture of camaraderie.
- matwood 16y ago
  I used to know a guy just like this. He had a PhD in physics, but was a bartender for a couple years while he did his own thing. Now he's part of some research group.
sigzero 16y ago
This reminds me of the Garbage Man in the Dilbert comics for some reason.
- ciupicri 16y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_smartest_garbageman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_smartest_garbageman
ojbyrne 16y ago
"I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning" I'm not sure how that follows from the data. I'd be more likely to conclude that the job market doesn't support the levels of college graduates being produced.
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago
  Charles Murray has never been one to let a non sequitur get between the data and his conclusions.
- sprout 16y ago
  Or that people don't get graduate degrees with the intent of maximizing their earnings potential. I've often heard it said that the fundamental problem with economics is that it assumes people are rational and have good information. I'd say it goes deeper than that: it assumes that money is the rational thing for a person to maximize. In reality, money is something that bears some maximization, but it's hardly the primary consideration.
  - achompas 16y ago
    Economics doesn't assume everyone wants to maximize money. It assumes everyone wants to maximize utility, and then uses money as a (poor) proxy for utility. It's a subtle, important difference.
    - ghb 16y ago
      Serious question: what's utility?
      - achompas 16y ago
        Wikipedia calls it "relative satisfaction." I'd call it "personal benefit or gain." Considering that, it's clear why we'd use money as a proxy. Not a perfect one, of course.
aresant 16y ago
I agree that higher education is on the brink of major change, but the author presents that data in a vacuum. How about: - What is the historical data set for higher-ed graduates aggregate? During recession? - What fields of study are represented here? I would bet the data skews hard to BAs vs. BS.
aidenn0 16y ago
The problem is that for a lot of the jobs listed as "underemployment" the nash equilibrium is that a significant percentage of these jobs will always have bachelors degrees. If you can get a receptionist with a bachelors degree, would you hire one that is right out of high-school?
- krschultz 16y ago
  Yes, becuase the person with the bachelors degree is obviously going to leave at the first oppurtunity and be unhappy about their salary and responsiblity the entire time. Filling a position costs money so best to do it less often.
  - lsc 16y ago
    what if their bachelors is in fine art? My assistant has one of those, and I'm a lot less worried about her leaving than my support guy who has no degree but quite a lot of *NIX experience. My point is that a degree does not necessarily impart more upwards mobility than other kinds of less formal training.
hugh3 16y ago
[citation needed] Seriously, is there a central index of janitors somewhere listing their highest level of educational achievement from which a precise number like 5057 can be read out? Did they interview twenty janitors, find one who claimed to have a PhD, and extrapolate? Did they derive the number completely ex anum? Because I'm finding it difficult to believe.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  I expect the answer to your question is buried somewhere in this document: http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch1_itc.htm http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch1_itc.htm
  - achompas 16y ago
    Specifically at this link: http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch1_f.htm http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch1_f.htm The short answer is, yes, they extrapolate from a sample. 72,000 households from 754 sample areas. Crude calculations here, but some quick linear analysis says they found 1 janitor with a PhD, JD, MBA, or another professional degree.
    - bd 16y ago
      Nice perspective, I can easily imagine finding one janitor with PhD in 200K town. There is absolutely nothing surprising about this (in contrast to seemingly high 5000 PhD janitors in the whole US).
- Alex3917 16y ago
  I haven't read the methodology for how the bureau of labor statistics gets its data, but I'd be very surprised if it were significantly flawed. The federal government is generally extremely competent at collecting social sciences data like this. I'd actually say that it's one of the few things the government does really well. The big thing you need to watch out for is the media and other government agencies spinning it. For example I always see MSM articles saying that 41% of Americans have tried weed, despite the fact that it's closer to 85% of Americans under age 55.[1] (And above that we don't have as good data.) [1] http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_article1.shtml http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_ar...
adammichaelc 16y ago
This analysis would be much more useful if (a) lifetime earnings were factored in as a data point, and (b) schools were reported separately (a PhD from MIT is a lot different from one from University of Phoenix, but the referenced study seems to treat them as equal).
charlief 16y ago
What percentage of those janitors earned their degrees in the US? Are many of them immigrants? If you are calling out the US education system, the questions above have to be answered.
TallGuyShort 16y ago
A parking lot attendant is more likely to have a college degree than an electrician? As if I needed more cynicism about my life.
- sachinag 16y ago
  We have a well-established apprenticeship system for electricians and other skilled trades here in the States. Not all formal learning happens in colleges.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Makes sense. Electrician is a skilled job which requires a lot of training. It's not the kind of thing you just fall into as a temporary stopgap when you can't get real work with your B.A. in Medieval Basket-weaving.
- aaronbrethorst 16y ago
  In college I knew a ton of people who would take jobs as parking lot attendants because it gave them a simple, non-taxing job with plenty of spare time allowing them to study while working. Even those these were all undergrads, I can easily imagine lots of grad students would do the same.
elbenshira 16y ago
This data is pretty useless without data from other time periods. And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. We use stories of the "I'm $200,000 in debt from my Ivy league B.A. in English and no one wants to hire me!" nature to justify that higher education is becoming irrelevant. But I think we're all missing several pieces of the puzzle. One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA? OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years. I do agree that higher education is broken. But higher education is broken in every single freaking country. The French spend less time in college, but they have a higher unemployment rate than us. Kenya's universities are based on entrance exams that encourages memorization and discourages critical thinking and imagination. Asia's universities are based on elite entrance exams where students to spend up to a year studying for. Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years. Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years? If not, then we can call it a waste. Wasting "government money" isn't a tiny drop in some gigantic abstract pool of thousand dollar bills. It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.
  - igravious 16y ago
    >> It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money. The money in your hand only has the value it has because we collectively instill a value in it. This is true, isn't it? I mean it really is just numbers and ink on pieces of paper and electrons over a bunch of wires. But if it were just the ink and and numbers and electrons then I could write a few zeros on a piece of fancy paper and become rich overnight. But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created. So "your money" (see? I can do quotes too) is really society's money. Moreover we collectively agree that the government allocates a portion of all of our earnings and recognize that this happens nowadays in a mainly un-coerced fashion. Sorry it inconveniences you. Maybe we can argue about waste without bringing your pet ideology into it.
robryan 16y ago
I think there is a net positive effect on society of more people having decent educations and committing to learn past the compulsory levels, even if these skills aren't put to good use in a direct way with a job. What would be their solution, you can't retroactively decide that certain people shouldn't have attended college when down the track they either can't or decide not to take up a job in their field.
Semiapies 16y ago
The well-known but thoroughly ignored issue in this article: college has become all-but-a-necessity to get a decent job in the US because having only a high school diploma doesn't even guarantee to an employer that one has basic literacy or math skills.
plesn 16y ago
> my feeling that diminishing returns have set in to investments in higher education That's seeing people only as a black box slave-like "workforce", giving them "education" as well as food to sustain your busyness > Now it is true that college has a consumption as well as investment function. People often enjoy going to classes [...] It has many other functions too, for the human beeings beiing "educated". If done well, it can even give them critical thought process, and knowledge about certain topics of their environement. In eastern europe countries, the aboundance of educated people in a beauraucratic regime which did not propose so much interesting life openings contributed to its fall. > [...] increasingly costly and unproductive forms of special pleading by a sector that abhors transparency and performance measures. Just like the banking sector, the pharmaceutical sector, etc... Performance is a word people often use meaning fittness to a metrics relevant to their particular interests. > Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not. Which only means the balance of powers is changing. Care to ellaborate about why and how ? Otherwise it is just saying : specialized labour is less needed by US industry, so less people have to be trained. Ok, agreed (or not), so let's give them education instead.
nck4222 16y ago
"there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees." So, the titles wrong. Professional degree != Ph.D. right?
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yarapavan 16y ago
This is surprising but the study quoted says it explicitly: * In general, marginal and average returns to college are not the same... * Some marginal expansions of schooling produce gains that are well below average returns, in general agreement with the analysis of Charles Murray
kloncks 16y ago
There's a ton of jobs that society deems as bad that are in fact not bad at all. "Garbage men" in certain cities, for example, make quite a nice living. I just think that sometimes we see "Janitor" and think that it's automatically bad. Too often, we don't even scratch the surface or know the whole story. And (honestly not joking), Good Will Hunting is a great movie.
- jpr 16y ago
  > I just think that sometimes we see "Janitor" and think that it's automatically bad. Some people, sometimes, probably. Me, most of the time, no. Currently I'd be rather happy if I were a janitor. Easy going job, lot's of time to think about neat stuff, no major stress and stable income. Or at least that's how I think it would be, reality might differ.
  - dinkumthinkum 16y ago
    Yeah, I think this is ridiculously naive. I know many janitors that would totally disagree with you. This is sort of like idea of slumming.
  - qq66 16y ago
    Tell me what your stress level is like when you're elbows deep in someone else's shit.
- zipdog 16y ago
  The dig at parking attendants is off the mark, I think Parking attendant is a great job (if you angle it right and get a quiet parking lot, say, long term by the airport). You are free to read to your hearts content, and get paid to do so.
  - idoh 16y ago
    This is a good documentary about parking lot attendants: http://www.theparkinglotmovie.com/ http://www.theparkinglotmovie.com/
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- jgroch 16y ago
  I think the number 107,000 is the number of janitors and cleaners with degrees, not total janitors and cleaners. Note the author says "Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degree" - 317,000 is in the same column as the 107,000.
csomar 16y ago
As someone who switched from the "low educated" level to the "higher" one (and I did that myself, not from Uni. or anything else, but just reading on the web and opening my mind), I do value a lot Higher Education. It improves quality. Wouldn't it be better if a waiter in Tunisia speaks English well to improve the tourists experience. The problem is that there is no university for waiters. It seems stupid, but just think twice of it. If you provide them higher language education (how they speak to customers, answer their questions) and formal practice (how they should put the food, ask for payments...). This won't take 3 year, may be only one, but would probably rise their salaries. And so, the waiter, carpenter, bartender... salary increase. This follow up with a high purchase power, more sales, better companies, higher salaries for Engineers, doctors... May be I'm wrong? I'm open for discussion about that.
Digital 16y ago
It would be more useful to know how many people with a bachelor's degree are under-employed against their will. A computer science graduate working as a janitor because he can't find a job is a problem. If after his course work he decides he wants to be a janitor, that's a different story. What their majors were, and what college they were from would also be informative as other replies noted.
georgecmu 16y ago
I wonder if these janitors are American-born or rather are immigrants without work authorization or adequate language skills.
- fbcocq 16y ago
  Me too. I know a lot of people with degrees in Law, Linguistics, Literature (in their respective languages) and so on who moved to the US and now have regular jobs because their degrees lose any meaning when changing the country. You go to college to have options later, not to pursue a career, you know little about at the age of 18, due to some misguided sense of loyalty to the taxpayer.
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83457 16y ago
Please present proof of future employment with your application.
d4ft 16y ago
Doesn't that 5,057 include "other professional degrees"? Further, are these only from accredited schools? Both could greatly reduce the effect of this particular statistic. That said, it is always disheartening to be reminded of the poor folks who likely shelled out tons of money only to find there were no jobs on the other end.
blahedo 16y ago
This article, and many (not all) of the comments here, are really missing an important point: that if you don't view a bachelor's degree as vocational training, but rather as the education proper to any free person---i.e. the liberal arts ideal---then you would expect a lot of people with at least bachelor's degrees working in fields that don't, on surface, "require" them. The idea of college (=university) students having a specialisation (a "major" area of study) is not by any means a new one, but the idea that this tightly corresponds to one's career and serves as a sort of vocational training program, that's pretty new. Schooling of that nature used to be found primarily in apprenticeships and vocational schools.
- byrneseyeview 16y ago
  The problem many people have here is that college is heavily subsidized, and those subsidies pretty much require us to get something for our money. I would be very surprised if the government's policy was "we will lend up to $200K to people with no assets and no prospects, which they can use to purchase art." And yet when those people borrow similar sums of money to purchase, say, a BA and MA in art history, it's fine. That's a bad policy. If the university system didn't exist, and you tried to pitch the current version to Congress, you'd be ridiculed.
  - abeppu 16y ago
    Can you clarify the 'heavily subsidized' part? I don't know a whole lot about this area, but I was under the impression that relatively speaking, the US higher education system was significantly less subsidized than in many comparably developed countries. And anecdotally, I'm sure we all know students and families that struggle with tuition costs. Are the subsidies you're talking about Pell grants? or tax breaks for funding education? People in this conversation make is sound like getting a full ride from public funds is the norm, but that seems really off.
    - smallblacksun 16y ago
      Public Universities (which usually have names like "University of Florida" or "Idaho State University" are heavily subsidized by direct money from (primarily) state governments. Many "private" universities also get significant direct money from government. In addition, there are federally (and state) funded scholarship programs that give money for school directly to students, and student loans have their interest paid while the student is in school by the federal government. I don't know how it compares to other countries, but there is a lot of government subsidization.
jcfrei 16y ago
Another aspect we have to consider is title inflation. It's no problem nowadays to buy a BA, MA or even doctoral degrees - it dont know how and if those fake degrees have been counted in the statistics.
jedwhite 16y ago
His argument is a fallacy. A parking lot attendant or janitor does not require even a high school education. So does that mean we should stop investing in high school education too? There are always exceptional people outside the normal parameters. But the higher the level of education in any social group the better off the entire group will be in the long term, whatever the individual variations.
dspeyer 16y ago
I'd love to see this broken down by major, GPA, toughness-of-curriculum and prestige-of-university. Assuming the claim isn't extrapolated from a single janitor. Not all degrees are equal.
dbingham 16y ago
This argument is circular, at least with respect to the Ph.Ds. The primary field of employment for those with Ph.Ds is higher education. The deal is they are paid by universities to teach students and do research. When there is less funding for the university and less students to teach, there is also less funding for research. And less money to hire Professors. The fact that so many with Ph.Ds are underemployed is symptomatic of a lack of funding for these institutions. Using that data to claim that it reveals that these institutions are over funded reveals a lack of understanding of the field in question. Furthermore, the rest of the posted argument takes the data out of context. The context is one of the worst economic downturns of the last hundred years. With the highest unemployment and underemployment rates we've seen in a long time. Of course there are tons of people with college degrees working shit jobs. We knew that already. Finally, those who the author calls "higher education apologists" want higher education to be a general thing not simply because it leads to more productive citizens, but rather because of the value society as a whole receives when the standard of education is higher. Especially with respect to our citizen's duties toward our Democratic society. "In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." --Thomas Jefferson
alexyoung 16y ago
Wow, being a janitor sure has high education requirements in the US!
known 16y ago
America has better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility then rest of the world.
SemanticFog 16y ago
Are these all graduates of US colleges? I can't find confirmation either way, but it's worth keeping in mind that college degrees from many countries are not comparable to US.
jobobo 16y ago
Higher education is useless without the job market to sustain it. Most people don't spend 50k+ on a college degree to be better "educated". They do so in anticipation of improving their lives, not making them worse. I have a BS in Mathematics and Chemistry and neither of those degrees has improved my life, only limited my jobs to those that require someone to have a degree and of those, the pay is less than most waiters/waitresses make. The more you push for everyone to attend higher education and the less jobs are created, then you have a debt ridden "educated" soceity that can't afford to pay for their student loans. Which then the government has to do something about, which means all the tax payers have to pay for. So now we're all smart and poor. Sounds like a bad plan to me.

179 points by surlyadopter 16y ago

"[T]here are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees." Not clear what "professional" degrees they're referring to here, so doesn't sound like it's just Ph.D.'s. (MBAs, JDs, MFAs, MPHs?)

gthank 16y ago
Professional degrees are degrees that are designed to prepare you for a specific profession. Those professions typically involve government regulation, with said regulation commonly requiring the degree in question. It's often used to indicate M.D. and J.D. degrees, although it also includes a slew of others, e.g., nursing, accounting, education.
- starkness 16y ago
  I'm aware of what they are (and in fact have one myself), but my point was that they're distinct from Ph.D.'s (so the title is misleading), and they can span across a broad spectrum of fields.
  - gthank 16y ago
    Sorry about the misunderstanding. At a guess, I'd say they mostly just mean J.D. and M.D. degrees. Those are the ones most commonly lumped in with Ph.D.s, probably due to the amount of time you need to spend getting them.

krschultz 16y ago

This is horribly confusing "current job" with "lifetime earnings". I took 2 months off last year to go skiing in Colorado with some of my friends who were ski bums. One in particular was about 26, was a web developer with a CS degree, and had been a ski bum for 3 years. During that time he had been a janitor/house cleaner. Was that using his degree? Obvously not. Did it pay the bills and allow him to ski every single day while working in the late afternoon/evening? It sure did. This year he moved back and is going to graduate school and consulting on the side (why he cleaned toilets instead of consulting the whole time still escapes me). He is back on his "real" career after taking that time to do what he wanted to do with his life. Honestly, I don't think it is a bad thing.

vinhboy 16y ago
"why he cleaned toilets instead of consulting the whole time still escapes me" -- either you've never done consulting, or never cleaned a toilet. From experience, I can tell you I rather clean a toilet. =) But alas, cleaning toilets can't pay my mortgage. =(
- krschultz 16y ago
  Ha true. There were some perks of it, since he worked for the mountain he got a free season pass which was about $500, and when your monthly expenses are barely $500 that is signficant.
  - xyzzyb 16y ago
    If it was anything like the menial jobs I've taken, he was also part of a fantastic culture of camaraderie.
matwood 16y ago
I used to know a guy just like this. He had a PhD in physics, but was a bartender for a couple years while he did his own thing. Now he's part of some research group.

sigzero 16y ago

This reminds me of the Garbage Man in the Dilbert comics for some reason.

ciupicri 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_smartest_garbageman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_smartest_garbageman

ojbyrne 16y ago

"I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning" I'm not sure how that follows from the data. I'd be more likely to conclude that the job market doesn't support the levels of college graduates being produced.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago
Charles Murray has never been one to let a non sequitur get between the data and his conclusions.
sprout 16y ago
Or that people don't get graduate degrees with the intent of maximizing their earnings potential. I've often heard it said that the fundamental problem with economics is that it assumes people are rational and have good information. I'd say it goes deeper than that: it assumes that money is the rational thing for a person to maximize. In reality, money is something that bears some maximization, but it's hardly the primary consideration.
- achompas 16y ago
  Economics doesn't assume everyone wants to maximize money. It assumes everyone wants to maximize utility, and then uses money as a (poor) proxy for utility. It's a subtle, important difference.
  - ghb 16y ago
    Serious question: what's utility?
    - achompas 16y ago
      Wikipedia calls it "relative satisfaction." I'd call it "personal benefit or gain." Considering that, it's clear why we'd use money as a proxy. Not a perfect one, of course.

aresant 16y ago

I agree that higher education is on the brink of major change, but the author presents that data in a vacuum. How about: - What is the historical data set for higher-ed graduates aggregate? During recession? - What fields of study are represented here? I would bet the data skews hard to BAs vs. BS.

aidenn0 16y ago

The problem is that for a lot of the jobs listed as "underemployment" the nash equilibrium is that a significant percentage of these jobs will always have bachelors degrees. If you can get a receptionist with a bachelors degree, would you hire one that is right out of high-school?

krschultz 16y ago
Yes, becuase the person with the bachelors degree is obviously going to leave at the first oppurtunity and be unhappy about their salary and responsiblity the entire time. Filling a position costs money so best to do it less often.
- lsc 16y ago
  what if their bachelors is in fine art? My assistant has one of those, and I'm a lot less worried about her leaving than my support guy who has no degree but quite a lot of *NIX experience. My point is that a degree does not necessarily impart more upwards mobility than other kinds of less formal training.

hugh3 16y ago

[citation needed] Seriously, is there a central index of janitors somewhere listing their highest level of educational achievement from which a precise number like 5057 can be read out? Did they interview twenty janitors, find one who claimed to have a PhD, and extrapolate? Did they derive the number completely ex anum? Because I'm finding it difficult to believe.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
I expect the answer to your question is buried somewhere in this document: http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch1_itc.htm http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch1_itc.htm
- achompas 16y ago
  Specifically at this link: http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch1_f.htm http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch1_f.htm The short answer is, yes, they extrapolate from a sample. 72,000 households from 754 sample areas. Crude calculations here, but some quick linear analysis says they found 1 janitor with a PhD, JD, MBA, or another professional degree.
  - bd 16y ago
    Nice perspective, I can easily imagine finding one janitor with PhD in 200K town. There is absolutely nothing surprising about this (in contrast to seemingly high 5000 PhD janitors in the whole US).
Alex3917 16y ago
I haven't read the methodology for how the bureau of labor statistics gets its data, but I'd be very surprised if it were significantly flawed. The federal government is generally extremely competent at collecting social sciences data like this. I'd actually say that it's one of the few things the government does really well. The big thing you need to watch out for is the media and other government agencies spinning it. For example I always see MSM articles saying that 41% of Americans have tried weed, despite the fact that it's closer to 85% of Americans under age 55.[1] (And above that we don't have as good data.) [1] http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_article1.shtml http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_ar...

adammichaelc 16y ago

This analysis would be much more useful if (a) lifetime earnings were factored in as a data point, and (b) schools were reported separately (a PhD from MIT is a lot different from one from University of Phoenix, but the referenced study seems to treat them as equal).

charlief 16y ago

What percentage of those janitors earned their degrees in the US? Are many of them immigrants? If you are calling out the US education system, the questions above have to be answered.

TallGuyShort 16y ago

A parking lot attendant is more likely to have a college degree than an electrician? As if I needed more cynicism about my life.

sachinag 16y ago
We have a well-established apprenticeship system for electricians and other skilled trades here in the States. Not all formal learning happens in colleges.
hugh3 16y ago
Makes sense. Electrician is a skilled job which requires a lot of training. It's not the kind of thing you just fall into as a temporary stopgap when you can't get real work with your B.A. in Medieval Basket-weaving.
aaronbrethorst 16y ago
In college I knew a ton of people who would take jobs as parking lot attendants because it gave them a simple, non-taxing job with plenty of spare time allowing them to study while working. Even those these were all undergrads, I can easily imagine lots of grad students would do the same.

elbenshira 16y ago

This data is pretty useless without data from other time periods. And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. We use stories of the "I'm $200,000 in debt from my Ivy league B.A. in English and no one wants to hire me!" nature to justify that higher education is becoming irrelevant. But I think we're all missing several pieces of the puzzle. One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA? OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years. I do agree that higher education is broken. But higher education is broken in every single freaking country. The French spend less time in college, but they have a higher unemployment rate than us. Kenya's universities are based on entrance exams that encourages memorization and discourages critical thinking and imagination. Asia's universities are based on elite entrance exams where students to spend up to a year studying for. Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years. Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years? If not, then we can call it a waste. Wasting "government money" isn't a tiny drop in some gigantic abstract pool of thousand dollar bills. It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.
- igravious 16y ago
  >> It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money. The money in your hand only has the value it has because we collectively instill a value in it. This is true, isn't it? I mean it really is just numbers and ink on pieces of paper and electrons over a bunch of wires. But if it were just the ink and and numbers and electrons then I could write a few zeros on a piece of fancy paper and become rich overnight. But then there is the printing presses, which are guarded and the vaults that are guarded and the software systems that are guarded and the counterfeiting laws none of which you created. So "your money" (see? I can do quotes too) is really society's money. Moreover we collectively agree that the government allocates a portion of all of our earnings and recognize that this happens nowadays in a mainly un-coerced fashion. Sorry it inconveniences you. Maybe we can argue about waste without bringing your pet ideology into it.

robryan 16y ago

I think there is a net positive effect on society of more people having decent educations and committing to learn past the compulsory levels, even if these skills aren't put to good use in a direct way with a job. What would be their solution, you can't retroactively decide that certain people shouldn't have attended college when down the track they either can't or decide not to take up a job in their field.

Semiapies 16y ago

The well-known but thoroughly ignored issue in this article: college has become all-but-a-necessity to get a decent job in the US because having only a high school diploma doesn't even guarantee to an employer that one has basic literacy or math skills.

plesn 16y ago

> my feeling that diminishing returns have set in to investments in higher education That's seeing people only as a black box slave-like "workforce", giving them "education" as well as food to sustain your busyness > Now it is true that college has a consumption as well as investment function. People often enjoy going to classes [...] It has many other functions too, for the human beeings beiing "educated". If done well, it can even give them critical thought process, and knowledge about certain topics of their environement. In eastern europe countries, the aboundance of educated people in a beauraucratic regime which did not propose so much interesting life openings contributed to its fall. > [...] increasingly costly and unproductive forms of special pleading by a sector that abhors transparency and performance measures. Just like the banking sector, the pharmaceutical sector, etc... Performance is a word people often use meaning fittness to a metrics relevant to their particular interests. > Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not. Which only means the balance of powers is changing. Care to ellaborate about why and how ? Otherwise it is just saying : specialized labour is less needed by US industry, so less people have to be trained. Ok, agreed (or not), so let's give them education instead.

nck4222 16y ago

"there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees." So, the titles wrong. Professional degree != Ph.D. right?

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yarapavan 16y ago

This is surprising but the study quoted says it explicitly: * In general, marginal and average returns to college are not the same... * Some marginal expansions of schooling produce gains that are well below average returns, in general agreement with the analysis of Charles Murray

kloncks 16y ago

There's a ton of jobs that society deems as bad that are in fact not bad at all. "Garbage men" in certain cities, for example, make quite a nice living. I just think that sometimes we see "Janitor" and think that it's automatically bad. Too often, we don't even scratch the surface or know the whole story. And (honestly not joking), Good Will Hunting is a great movie.

jpr 16y ago
> I just think that sometimes we see "Janitor" and think that it's automatically bad. Some people, sometimes, probably. Me, most of the time, no. Currently I'd be rather happy if I were a janitor. Easy going job, lot's of time to think about neat stuff, no major stress and stable income. Or at least that's how I think it would be, reality might differ.
- dinkumthinkum 16y ago
  Yeah, I think this is ridiculously naive. I know many janitors that would totally disagree with you. This is sort of like idea of slumming.
- qq66 16y ago
  Tell me what your stress level is like when you're elbows deep in someone else's shit.
zipdog 16y ago
The dig at parking attendants is off the mark, I think Parking attendant is a great job (if you angle it right and get a quiet parking lot, say, long term by the airport). You are free to read to your hearts content, and get paid to do so.
- idoh 16y ago
  This is a good documentary about parking lot attendants: http://www.theparkinglotmovie.com/ http://www.theparkinglotmovie.com/
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jgroch 16y ago
I think the number 107,000 is the number of janitors and cleaners with degrees, not total janitors and cleaners. Note the author says "Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degree" - 317,000 is in the same column as the 107,000.

csomar 16y ago

As someone who switched from the "low educated" level to the "higher" one (and I did that myself, not from Uni. or anything else, but just reading on the web and opening my mind), I do value a lot Higher Education. It improves quality. Wouldn't it be better if a waiter in Tunisia speaks English well to improve the tourists experience. The problem is that there is no university for waiters. It seems stupid, but just think twice of it. If you provide them higher language education (how they speak to customers, answer their questions) and formal practice (how they should put the food, ask for payments...). This won't take 3 year, may be only one, but would probably rise their salaries. And so, the waiter, carpenter, bartender... salary increase. This follow up with a high purchase power, more sales, better companies, higher salaries for Engineers, doctors... May be I'm wrong? I'm open for discussion about that.

Digital 16y ago

It would be more useful to know how many people with a bachelor's degree are under-employed against their will. A computer science graduate working as a janitor because he can't find a job is a problem. If after his course work he decides he wants to be a janitor, that's a different story. What their majors were, and what college they were from would also be informative as other replies noted.

georgecmu 16y ago

I wonder if these janitors are American-born or rather are immigrants without work authorization or adequate language skills.

fbcocq 16y ago
Me too. I know a lot of people with degrees in Law, Linguistics, Literature (in their respective languages) and so on who moved to the US and now have regular jobs because their degrees lose any meaning when changing the country. You go to college to have options later, not to pursue a career, you know little about at the age of 18, due to some misguided sense of loyalty to the taxpayer.

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83457 16y ago

Please present proof of future employment with your application.

d4ft 16y ago

Doesn't that 5,057 include "other professional degrees"? Further, are these only from accredited schools? Both could greatly reduce the effect of this particular statistic. That said, it is always disheartening to be reminded of the poor folks who likely shelled out tons of money only to find there were no jobs on the other end.

blahedo 16y ago

This article, and many (not all) of the comments here, are really missing an important point: that if you don't view a bachelor's degree as vocational training, but rather as the education proper to any free person---i.e. the liberal arts ideal---then you would expect a lot of people with at least bachelor's degrees working in fields that don't, on surface, "require" them. The idea of college (=university) students having a specialisation (a "major" area of study) is not by any means a new one, but the idea that this tightly corresponds to one's career and serves as a sort of vocational training program, that's pretty new. Schooling of that nature used to be found primarily in apprenticeships and vocational schools.

byrneseyeview 16y ago
The problem many people have here is that college is heavily subsidized, and those subsidies pretty much require us to get something for our money. I would be very surprised if the government's policy was "we will lend up to $200K to people with no assets and no prospects, which they can use to purchase art." And yet when those people borrow similar sums of money to purchase, say, a BA and MA in art history, it's fine. That's a bad policy. If the university system didn't exist, and you tried to pitch the current version to Congress, you'd be ridiculed.
- abeppu 16y ago
  Can you clarify the 'heavily subsidized' part? I don't know a whole lot about this area, but I was under the impression that relatively speaking, the US higher education system was significantly less subsidized than in many comparably developed countries. And anecdotally, I'm sure we all know students and families that struggle with tuition costs. Are the subsidies you're talking about Pell grants? or tax breaks for funding education? People in this conversation make is sound like getting a full ride from public funds is the norm, but that seems really off.
  - smallblacksun 16y ago
    Public Universities (which usually have names like "University of Florida" or "Idaho State University" are heavily subsidized by direct money from (primarily) state governments. Many "private" universities also get significant direct money from government. In addition, there are federally (and state) funded scholarship programs that give money for school directly to students, and student loans have their interest paid while the student is in school by the federal government. I don't know how it compares to other countries, but there is a lot of government subsidization.

jcfrei 16y ago

Another aspect we have to consider is title inflation. It's no problem nowadays to buy a BA, MA or even doctoral degrees - it dont know how and if those fake degrees have been counted in the statistics.

jedwhite 16y ago

His argument is a fallacy. A parking lot attendant or janitor does not require even a high school education. So does that mean we should stop investing in high school education too? There are always exceptional people outside the normal parameters. But the higher the level of education in any social group the better off the entire group will be in the long term, whatever the individual variations.

dspeyer 16y ago

I'd love to see this broken down by major, GPA, toughness-of-curriculum and prestige-of-university. Assuming the claim isn't extrapolated from a single janitor. Not all degrees are equal.

dbingham 16y ago

This argument is circular, at least with respect to the Ph.Ds. The primary field of employment for those with Ph.Ds is higher education. The deal is they are paid by universities to teach students and do research. When there is less funding for the university and less students to teach, there is also less funding for research. And less money to hire Professors. The fact that so many with Ph.Ds are underemployed is symptomatic of a lack of funding for these institutions. Using that data to claim that it reveals that these institutions are over funded reveals a lack of understanding of the field in question. Furthermore, the rest of the posted argument takes the data out of context. The context is one of the worst economic downturns of the last hundred years. With the highest unemployment and underemployment rates we've seen in a long time. Of course there are tons of people with college degrees working shit jobs. We knew that already. Finally, those who the author calls "higher education apologists" want higher education to be a general thing not simply because it leads to more productive citizens, but rather because of the value society as a whole receives when the standard of education is higher. Especially with respect to our citizen's duties toward our Democratic society. "In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." --Thomas Jefferson

alexyoung 16y ago

Wow, being a janitor sure has high education requirements in the US!

known 16y ago

America has better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility then rest of the world.

SemanticFog 16y ago

Are these all graduates of US colleges? I can't find confirmation either way, but it's worth keeping in mind that college degrees from many countries are not comparable to US.

jobobo 16y ago

Higher education is useless without the job market to sustain it. Most people don't spend 50k+ on a college degree to be better "educated". They do so in anticipation of improving their lives, not making them worse. I have a BS in Mathematics and Chemistry and neither of those degrees has improved my life, only limited my jobs to those that require someone to have a degree and of those, the pay is less than most waiters/waitresses make. The more you push for everyone to attend higher education and the less jobs are created, then you have a debt ridden "educated" soceity that can't afford to pay for their student loans. Which then the government has to do something about, which means all the tax payers have to pay for. So now we're all smart and poor. Sounds like a bad plan to me.