5 ms·

'Malemployment' on the Rise

18 points by J3L2404 16y ago

devmonk 16y ago
Malemployment is very subjective. I can't see how you could effectively measure it and it mean that much. I think a job happiness index would be better. You could just ask, "From 1-10 how happy are you with your current job (1=couldn't be more unhappy, 10=couldn't be happier)," would be enough. If this score dipped, morale is lower overall, and productivity will suffer.
- stellar678 16y ago
  I think they covered the basics of it - malemployment is employment that's not paying the expected ROI on someone's education level.
  - devmonk 16y ago
    Yes, but just being accredited by an institution as having been educated in a subject doesn't mean that you are qualified for a job. I'm not saying that it isn't a valid indicator, just that it seems subjective and fuzzy. If some "over-educated" employees still happy and perhaps have substantially greater output than their "less-educated" counterparts, then there could be a significant enough ROI on their education to justify it. However, you can't differentiate those from the "over-educated" workers that are unhappy that would be more productive in other roles. This is why I think a work happiness index would be a better indicator of how well those that are employed are fairing.
twymer 16y ago
In 2000, about 30 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds were working in jobs that did not require college degrees. By 2010, that percentage had risen drastically to almost 40 percent. 20-24? A lot of students are taking more than four years for degrees these days. This statistic doesn't specify if it counts students enrolled in college working at a campus job or not. At the beginning of this year, there were twice as many four-year college graduates working as waiters and bartenders as engineers. Is the problem just that it's mostly expected that everyone moves on to college, whether or not they can pick a degree they care enough about to make a real effort in succeeding with?
- mian2zi3 16y ago
  > At the beginning of this year, there were twice as many four-year college graduates working as waiters and bartenders as engineers. Umm, maybe this is because 60% (or more) of college students studied the humanities rather than engineering?
  - twymer 16y ago
    I assume this is related to my point, though, that most people aren't going to college because they care about something but rather because they are expected to. They then wind up picking something easier somewhat at random and can't get a job because of it.
gaius 16y ago
Well, most jobs don't need degrees. That doesn't mean they're any less worthy, mind. But it's the truth. I'm not even talking about unskilled jobs - just jobs that require some other kind of training that academia.
- eru 16y ago
  Yes. Vocational training and apprenticeships are probably undervalued.
sudont 16y ago
This situation's looking a lot more like Iceland's (right country?) workplace dimorphism, with a majority of women graduating college and entering office, technical and desk jobs, and men working more traditional (manly) jobs such as fishing and oil-rigging.
pashields 16y ago
I don't know why they made up a new word for this or why they think it is different from underemployment. From wiktionary definition of underemployed: "Employed in a job for which one is overqualified" http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/underemployed http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/underemployed
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago
  I've always understood "underemployment" to mean working part-time when you want to work full-time.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    I've seen it used for both situations.
- aplusbi 16y ago
  I suppose that depends on what you mean by "overqualified". I'm a computer programmer, and let's say I lost my job and started looking for a job in construction. I've never worked in construction before and while I'm not out-of-shape I'm not exactly ready for heavy-lifting. So am I overqualified or underqualified? Or both?
  - sin7 16y ago
    That's easy. You are a construction apprentice and therefore, neither over nor under-qualified.
  - jhamburger 16y ago
    I would think of it like this- If the job on paper requires you to be a high school graduate, you're overqualified because you have education beyond high school. If the job requires vocational training/certification/licenses/experience etc, that's a different story. The fact that you wouldn't be that good at the job in practice doesn't mean you're not overqualified.
grannyg00se 16y ago
How long do we have to hear the same "college is a ripoff" fact, wrapped in different stories, before people actually stop promoting a four year degree as the primary post secondary path for young adults? The return on investment has been questionable for quite some time now.
- flatpointer 16y ago
  http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm Education / Unemployment Rate: Didn't finish high school 15.3% No college degree 10.1% College Degree 4.7% That looks like a solid ROI to me. I think this article is indicative of the fact that education + not much experience means you get left out in the cold when people with the same education and more experience are looking for work. Note that they talk about recent college grads in the low 20s - these typically aren't people with lots of degree-related work experience. You can also argue that not all degrees are created equal, in terms of employment. But hearing 'college is a ripoff' a lot (like, say, here) doesn't make it true.
  - grannyg00se 16y ago
    Those statistics don't show an ROI, they show a correlation between education and unemployment. There could be many reasons that people with higher education aspirations have lower unemployment. Correlation does not imply causation. I'm sure you can imagine that if somebody has the drive and mental capacity to finish a college degree, they also likely have the drive and mental capacity to land and keep a job. It is not the college degree that matters necessarily. Using your own statistics, 89.9% of college dropouts have a job. And 95.3% of college grads have a job. Is four or five years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars worth a 5.4% increase? What if you were to dedicate those four years to personal study and lower job market experience and work your way up for four years instead? Can you be sure that the college route is the better solution, knowing that it only gives a 5.4% increase in those statistics?
z0r 16y ago
Higher education should be free! Then the 'return on investment' issue would not be as serious
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  "Higher education should be free!" Do you mean no one should be paid to provide it?
  - z0r 16y ago
    Society should pay for it, since society will benefit from it.
    - jdminhbg 16y ago
      Society doesn't seem to be benefiting from it right now if it's employing grads as waiters and bartenders.
    - RyanMcGreal 16y ago
      Education is a positive externality, i.e. the economy as a whole benefits as well as the individual receiving the education. In a free market, individuals tend to under-invest in education and the overall economy misses out on a higher aggregate education level.
    - jamesbritt 16y ago
      "Society should pay for it, since society will benefit from it." OK, but if someone is paying for it then it's not free. Whether "society" (whihc I'm guessing really means tax payers) should foot the bill is a different matter. There's a good self-interest argument that one is better off in a society where more people are better educated, but the devil is in the details: Who gets funding, with what strings attached, and so on.
  - todayiamme 16y ago
    You know if you set up research based institutes that actively encourage spin offs based upon the knowledge generated and gained inside their walls. Then, this problem won't exist. For example, if I start a company/business the school will help me out with resources and in return take some amount of equity. Thus, what happens is that you have a VC-esque institution that remains true to the objectives of a university; learning.
adolph 16y ago
The problem isn’t that precious college graduates have to get their hands dirty. Rather, the issue is that people who paid for a college education aren’t getting the expected return on that investment – and might never get it. This sounds a lot like the underwater mortgage issue. Maybe people are overpaying for college because of easy government-backed credit?
- josh33 16y ago
  Agreed. Here's a solid video on the topic where Peter Schiff explains why college tuition is so high: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIcfMMVcYZg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIcfMMVcYZg
harshpotatoes 16y ago
I liked where the article started out, but the only advice they offered was keep your chin up and go to mint.com. The line between news and advertisement is thinning. Of course, maybe good financial planning is helpful if students are graduating with $4000 of credit card debt... That is the nu mber I will never understand.
mswen 16y ago
Conversation at a wedding reception the other day. Approx. 120 Civil Engineering BA graduates for the 2009 and 2010 graduating classes from a major university. As of this fall only 5 graduates from those two classes, actually have been hired into engineering positions. My friend's son happened to be one of those 5 but what a dilemma for the other 115, do you double down and go to graduate school? Do you take whatever you can get and hope to enter engineering later? I don't know.
JonnieCache 16y ago
A bit of anecdotal evidence; I graduated university in the UK the summer before last, and "malemployment" as defined in this article applies to almost all of my friends and classmates. I have been very lucky to land a job doing what I love. Many of my newly graduated friends are doing service jobs or doing brainless admin tasks in offices. Most are simply unemployed, they cannot bring themselves to settle for these jobs and would rather sit at home on unemployment benefit. Often these jobs only pay one or two pounds more per week than what they are receiving in benefits. The worst thing about this situation is the sense of helplessness and having been lied to it instills in young people. We have been told by our parents, rightly or wrongly, for the first two decades of our lives that if we simply work hard in our education we will land well paid, secure jobs. This was the reward for all the hard work at school, and for all the debt uni now requires. Now these kids are graduating, and finding that their £30000 of debt and three years of hard work might get them a job in macdonalds, if they're lucky. When you combine that with the fact that those responsible for this situation got all their education completely free and were given large grants to pay their way through, you end up with the events of last week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3IEKWu4rA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3IEKWu4rA
- patio11 16y ago
  Was there an option in, say, 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for people with brand spanking new English degrees that wasn't a braindead job in an office? The entry level job mix changed a bit but the character strikes me as fairly consistent: if you have no commercially valuable skills at graduation (and if you majored in English, you probably don't), you get a low-responsibilities job while becoming acclimated to your industry and learning some soft skills.
  - JonnieCache 16y ago
    You would've been able to get a job as a junior sales/marketing/etc person. Now they will hire you as a secretary if you're lucky. Edit: this was also due to the relatively smaller proportion of the population with degrees at that time.
- gaius 16y ago

18 points by J3L2404 16y ago

Malemployment is very subjective. I can't see how you could effectively measure it and it mean that much. I think a job happiness index would be better. You could just ask, "From 1-10 how happy are you with your current job (1=couldn't be more unhappy, 10=couldn't be happier)," would be enough. If this score dipped, morale is lower overall, and productivity will suffer.

stellar678 16y ago
I think they covered the basics of it - malemployment is employment that's not paying the expected ROI on someone's education level.
- devmonk 16y ago
  Yes, but just being accredited by an institution as having been educated in a subject doesn't mean that you are qualified for a job. I'm not saying that it isn't a valid indicator, just that it seems subjective and fuzzy. If some "over-educated" employees still happy and perhaps have substantially greater output than their "less-educated" counterparts, then there could be a significant enough ROI on their education to justify it. However, you can't differentiate those from the "over-educated" workers that are unhappy that would be more productive in other roles. This is why I think a work happiness index would be a better indicator of how well those that are employed are fairing.

twymer 16y ago

In 2000, about 30 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds were working in jobs that did not require college degrees. By 2010, that percentage had risen drastically to almost 40 percent. 20-24? A lot of students are taking more than four years for degrees these days. This statistic doesn't specify if it counts students enrolled in college working at a campus job or not. At the beginning of this year, there were twice as many four-year college graduates working as waiters and bartenders as engineers. Is the problem just that it's mostly expected that everyone moves on to college, whether or not they can pick a degree they care enough about to make a real effort in succeeding with?

mian2zi3 16y ago
> At the beginning of this year, there were twice as many four-year college graduates working as waiters and bartenders as engineers. Umm, maybe this is because 60% (or more) of college students studied the humanities rather than engineering?
- twymer 16y ago
  I assume this is related to my point, though, that most people aren't going to college because they care about something but rather because they are expected to. They then wind up picking something easier somewhat at random and can't get a job because of it.

gaius 16y ago

Well, most jobs don't need degrees. That doesn't mean they're any less worthy, mind. But it's the truth. I'm not even talking about unskilled jobs - just jobs that require some other kind of training that academia.

eru 16y ago
Yes. Vocational training and apprenticeships are probably undervalued.

sudont 16y ago

This situation's looking a lot more like Iceland's (right country?) workplace dimorphism, with a majority of women graduating college and entering office, technical and desk jobs, and men working more traditional (manly) jobs such as fishing and oil-rigging.

pashields 16y ago

I don't know why they made up a new word for this or why they think it is different from underemployment. From wiktionary definition of underemployed: "Employed in a job for which one is overqualified" http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/underemployed http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/underemployed

RyanMcGreal 16y ago
I've always understood "underemployment" to mean working part-time when you want to work full-time.
- gte910h 16y ago
  I've seen it used for both situations.
aplusbi 16y ago
I suppose that depends on what you mean by "overqualified". I'm a computer programmer, and let's say I lost my job and started looking for a job in construction. I've never worked in construction before and while I'm not out-of-shape I'm not exactly ready for heavy-lifting. So am I overqualified or underqualified? Or both?
- sin7 16y ago
  That's easy. You are a construction apprentice and therefore, neither over nor under-qualified.
- jhamburger 16y ago
  I would think of it like this- If the job on paper requires you to be a high school graduate, you're overqualified because you have education beyond high school. If the job requires vocational training/certification/licenses/experience etc, that's a different story. The fact that you wouldn't be that good at the job in practice doesn't mean you're not overqualified.

grannyg00se 16y ago

How long do we have to hear the same "college is a ripoff" fact, wrapped in different stories, before people actually stop promoting a four year degree as the primary post secondary path for young adults? The return on investment has been questionable for quite some time now.

flatpointer 16y ago
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm Education / Unemployment Rate: Didn't finish high school 15.3% No college degree 10.1% College Degree 4.7% That looks like a solid ROI to me. I think this article is indicative of the fact that education + not much experience means you get left out in the cold when people with the same education and more experience are looking for work. Note that they talk about recent college grads in the low 20s - these typically aren't people with lots of degree-related work experience. You can also argue that not all degrees are created equal, in terms of employment. But hearing 'college is a ripoff' a lot (like, say, here) doesn't make it true.
- grannyg00se 16y ago
  Those statistics don't show an ROI, they show a correlation between education and unemployment. There could be many reasons that people with higher education aspirations have lower unemployment. Correlation does not imply causation. I'm sure you can imagine that if somebody has the drive and mental capacity to finish a college degree, they also likely have the drive and mental capacity to land and keep a job. It is not the college degree that matters necessarily. Using your own statistics, 89.9% of college dropouts have a job. And 95.3% of college grads have a job. Is four or five years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars worth a 5.4% increase? What if you were to dedicate those four years to personal study and lower job market experience and work your way up for four years instead? Can you be sure that the college route is the better solution, knowing that it only gives a 5.4% increase in those statistics?

z0r 16y ago

Higher education should be free! Then the 'return on investment' issue would not be as serious

jamesbritt 16y ago
"Higher education should be free!" Do you mean no one should be paid to provide it?
- z0r 16y ago
  Society should pay for it, since society will benefit from it.
  - jdminhbg 16y ago
    Society doesn't seem to be benefiting from it right now if it's employing grads as waiters and bartenders.
  - RyanMcGreal 16y ago
    Education is a positive externality, i.e. the economy as a whole benefits as well as the individual receiving the education. In a free market, individuals tend to under-invest in education and the overall economy misses out on a higher aggregate education level.
  - jamesbritt 16y ago
    "Society should pay for it, since society will benefit from it." OK, but if someone is paying for it then it's not free. Whether "society" (whihc I'm guessing really means tax payers) should foot the bill is a different matter. There's a good self-interest argument that one is better off in a society where more people are better educated, but the devil is in the details: Who gets funding, with what strings attached, and so on.
- todayiamme 16y ago
  You know if you set up research based institutes that actively encourage spin offs based upon the knowledge generated and gained inside their walls. Then, this problem won't exist. For example, if I start a company/business the school will help me out with resources and in return take some amount of equity. Thus, what happens is that you have a VC-esque institution that remains true to the objectives of a university; learning.

adolph 16y ago

The problem isn’t that precious college graduates have to get their hands dirty. Rather, the issue is that people who paid for a college education aren’t getting the expected return on that investment – and might never get it. This sounds a lot like the underwater mortgage issue. Maybe people are overpaying for college because of easy government-backed credit?

josh33 16y ago
Agreed. Here's a solid video on the topic where Peter Schiff explains why college tuition is so high: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIcfMMVcYZg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIcfMMVcYZg

harshpotatoes 16y ago

I liked where the article started out, but the only advice they offered was keep your chin up and go to mint.com. The line between news and advertisement is thinning. Of course, maybe good financial planning is helpful if students are graduating with $4000 of credit card debt... That is the nu mber I will never understand.

mswen 16y ago

Conversation at a wedding reception the other day. Approx. 120 Civil Engineering BA graduates for the 2009 and 2010 graduating classes from a major university. As of this fall only 5 graduates from those two classes, actually have been hired into engineering positions. My friend's son happened to be one of those 5 but what a dilemma for the other 115, do you double down and go to graduate school? Do you take whatever you can get and hope to enter engineering later? I don't know.

JonnieCache 16y ago

A bit of anecdotal evidence; I graduated university in the UK the summer before last, and "malemployment" as defined in this article applies to almost all of my friends and classmates. I have been very lucky to land a job doing what I love. Many of my newly graduated friends are doing service jobs or doing brainless admin tasks in offices. Most are simply unemployed, they cannot bring themselves to settle for these jobs and would rather sit at home on unemployment benefit. Often these jobs only pay one or two pounds more per week than what they are receiving in benefits. The worst thing about this situation is the sense of helplessness and having been lied to it instills in young people. We have been told by our parents, rightly or wrongly, for the first two decades of our lives that if we simply work hard in our education we will land well paid, secure jobs. This was the reward for all the hard work at school, and for all the debt uni now requires. Now these kids are graduating, and finding that their £30000 of debt and three years of hard work might get them a job in macdonalds, if they're lucky. When you combine that with the fact that those responsible for this situation got all their education completely free and were given large grants to pay their way through, you end up with the events of last week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3IEKWu4rA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3IEKWu4rA

patio11 16y ago
Was there an option in, say, 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for people with brand spanking new English degrees that wasn't a braindead job in an office? The entry level job mix changed a bit but the character strikes me as fairly consistent: if you have no commercially valuable skills at graduation (and if you majored in English, you probably don't), you get a low-responsibilities job while becoming acclimated to your industry and learning some soft skills.
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  You would've been able to get a job as a junior sales/marketing/etc person. Now they will hire you as a secretary if you're lucky. Edit: this was also due to the relatively smaller proportion of the population with degrees at that time.
gaius 16y ago