7 ms·

This old canard is quite tiresome, and is rarely presented with evidence, but it's always written as capital T truth. The realities, laid out in the article, a

by zecho 12y ago

This old canard is quite tiresome, and is rarely presented with evidence, but it's always written as capital T truth. The realities, laid out in the article, are all economic and well researched. Millennials have high debt and low wages with a poor job outlook. The underlying trends have existed for quite some time and appear to be getting worse over time, especially with the recent recession hitting youth hardest. But yeah, let's blame motivation rather than figure out how to improve the system. Clearly kids with college degrees aren't motivated enough to will jobs that can cover their debts and maintain the comfortable standard of living their parents had.

opendais 12y ago
Yes. The only people in my social circle I know that didn't boomerang were STEM graduates. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/03/01/most-college-grads-cant-find-work-in-their-field-is-a-management-degree-the-answer/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/03/01/m... 60% can't find a job in their field isn't a "motivational problem" or a "I picked the wrong degree problem". It is a general, widespread economic problem. If your assumptions require more than 10% of people to be incompetent, your assumptions are wrong.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I get the 'I can't find a job opening in the area I'm trained/passionate about' but what I would like to understand is whether or not that includes "I can't create a job in the area I am trained/passionate about." I have coached a number of folks who seemed to feel strangely disempowered, which is to say that the world had to change (job opening appears, company moves to their area, etc) in order for them to make progress on their goals. I've had some success at simplifying the question using the common trick of assuming solutions to the presumptive problems. So for example starting with "Ok lets stipulate that there is a million dollars in a bank vault that is paying you $1,200 a month in 'free' money. And you're living in an area where that pays all your food, rent, and gas. Now, what do you want to do with your time?" That gets us past blaming "the economy" and taking ownership of what they want to do. It is a different way of thinking, but it gets out of the rut of 'answer' based thinking. Life is like riding a train that you know is on a track with a bridge out over a 1000' chasm. When the train gets there, it will fall into the chasm, and everyone on board will die. Given that every train you could take from a station has this same "feature" what train do you pick? Who do you pick to ride with you? What places does the train need to go through before it gets to the missing bridge? Sometimes it isn't as complicated as what do you want to do with your life, it is simply what can you do today that is fulfilling to you?
  - opendais 12y ago
    > "I can't create a job in the area I am trained/passionate about." A) Demand B) Access to Capital If you can't find an employer, there is likely insufficient demand. As someone who "created his job" initially, I was badly underpaid for the first 18 months and got sick of dealing with it even once my income grew to a "normal rate". I think you are looking at this from the perspective of someone who is going to be in the top 50% of a large field and be successful, no matter the economic situation. I think most people aren't in that top 50%.
    - ChuckMcM 12y ago
      Can you say more about this? "As someone who 'created his job' initially, I was badly underpaid for the first 18 months and got sick of dealing with it even once my income grew to a 'normal rate'." I think it is awesome that you went from 'no job in your area of expertise' to 'normal income' in 18 months. I have a huge amount of respect for that, I am looking for clarity on the 'got sick of dealing with it' part. What were you sick of? I have never commissioned a survey on it but my experience from undergraduate to career was that there was a 100% correlation between passion for something and top 50% of people who do that thing. Every student I met at USC that was passionate about electrical engineering was in the top 50% of their graduating class, every clerk, salesperson, engineer, gardner, taxi driver, artist, and writer I've ever met who was passionate about what they were doing, did it better than most. That observation has been pretty foundational in my thinking about life and happiness. I would be intrigued to find a counter example.
      - opendais 12y ago
        > I think it is awesome that you went from 'no job in your area of expertise' to 'normal income' in 18 months. I'm pretty sure my outcome so far is 50%+ luck and I don't know if I'll be able to sustain it forever. > I am looking for clarity on the 'got sick of dealing with it' part. What were you sick of? Consulting/Contracting work [my only option with $0 in capital] requires soft skills in dealing with people. The majority of my personal failings all relate to soft skills. 1) I've got a tendency to provide too much information rather than too little. 2) I tend to have poor communication with non-technical people [aka clients]. While I could blame it on them, the fact remains it was vital to my income on that course and therefore truly on me. 3) I'm a bit of an odd duck socially, even by programmer standards. 4) I don't have a poker face when annoyed/irritated/etc. I also have poor control over my tone in such situations. Coupled with #1 & #2 this tends to lead to a much higher client turnover than most consultants/contractors experience [I could be wrong, but I don't think so]. 5) I was able to get a "normal job" and I prefer it. However, there is still one older engineer who needles me about #2. ;) > I have never commissioned a survey on it but my experience from undergraduate to career was that there was a 100% correlation between passion for something and top 50% of people who do that thing. Every student I met at USC that was passionate about electrical engineering was in the top 50% of their graduating class, every clerk, salesperson, engineer, gardner, taxi driver, artist, and writer I've ever met who was passionate about what they were doing, did it better than most. That observation has been pretty foundational in my thinking about life and happiness. I would be intrigued to find a counter example. You may be right. I don't think I'm in the top 50% of software developers, I am probably in the top 65%. EDIT: A perfect example of #2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921042 I wasn't sufficiently clear about what I meant by "market rates" which leads to him launching into an explanation that [I think] he realized was not needed when he basically agreed with another poster about the $ figure quoted in the article. This is due to the fact I didn't explicitly define "market rates" as the amount the person received on offer in the article.
- wil421 12y ago
  >"I picked the wrong degree problem". I would argue this point. Many people I know or worked at my college jobs just plain chose the wrong path. Creative writing degrees, Drama degrees, or even one poor girl with over 100K in debt from an Opera degree. Working as a waiter I even encountered people how made more money waiting tables then with their social work or teaching degrees. Its crazy they still work their college job paying off student debt they never needed. These people are not at all incompetent they were just told to follow their dreams when they were 17 18 and choose a degree to cater towards their dream, passion, or what have you.
  - ebiester 12y ago
    They don't need their degrees for their current jobs. That doesn't mean they will be waiting tables forever.
    - tsotha 12y ago
      If you don't get a job in you field within the first few years, your odds of ever doing so become much smaller.
      - ebiester 12y ago
        Consider that my sister started out (without a college degree) working basic jobs until she ended up working recruiting. She's done that for years now, but she's reached a ceiling because jobs in HR ask for a degree. Any degree. Communication, Psychology, English, anything. Now, all that it would take for her to break through is to have some experience in general HR. After that, nobody would even look at the degree. However, there's a ceiling there. I look at many of my friends who have humanities and Social Science degrees and their real careers didn't take off until their late 20s or early 30s. Does that mean that my friends with Communications degrees ended up in Radio? No. But they would have never ended up where they are without that "any" degree. IT is a different world entirely.
  - opendais 12y ago
    http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.as... Please find me 60% in a single class of major in that table for me? How about we write off two entire categories. Say Humanities and "Other" degrees! That is only 41% of that 60%. It just doesn't get you there to blame "those people". Sorry. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/20/only-27-percent-of-college-grads-have-a-job-related-to-their-major/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/20/o... And if you think the 60% number is high, this one pegs it at 73%!
- tsotha 12y ago
  >60% can't find a job in their field isn't a "motivational problem" or a "I picked the wrong degree problem". It is a general, widespread economic problem. Not necessarily. If there have ever only been 2,000 positions for marine biologists opening up every year and 20,000 graduate, that's not a widespread economic problem so much as a mismatch between what people want to do and the availability of jobs in that field. Part of the problem is too many people are getting advanced degrees. It seems to be dogma these days that society will become wealthier if we graduate more people with specialized skills. But that's putting the cart before the horse - producing a whole bunch of experts in fields with no demand for those experts results in a bunch of people who've wasted a decade of their lives. People need to be realistic about the implications of their field of study.
  - opendais 12y ago
    If the majority of intelligent, educated people make the wrong choice and you want to blame those people: A) You believe you are smarter than 60% of people with degrees and are accurately capable of predicting supply/demand. B) You believe an external factor is at fault. Even I, who have met many people I think are idiots with college degrees, would not presume A. From your comment, I think you are really trying to sell A. I'm not buying. Particularly: > People need to be realistic about the implications of their field of study. If I misunderstood, please explain.
    - tsotha 12y ago
      Oh, allow me to explain. > A) You believe you are smarter than 60% of people with degrees and are accurately capable of predicting supply/demand. You don't have to be exactly 3 SD out to be smarter than 60% of a group of people, so I likely am. On top of that, these are people who've never had a real job and are choosing a major at age 18 or so. But that's not the point. The point is many of these people just assumed the job would be there when they graduated without doing any research at all. They didn't even look. There's two really terrible common pieces of advice parents give to their children: 1) "Just be yourself" when dating and 2) "When choosing a major do what you love". > B) You believe an external factor is at fault. Well, yes, an external factor is partially at fault. That external factor is the higher education establishment, which is corrupt as hell. They lobby the government for ever increasing amounts of loans for students and then award themselves $400k salaries. Don't let anyone tell you there's such a thing as a nonprofit institution. The idea that 60% of people couldn't find work in their field of study isn't surprising to me at all.
rayiner 12y ago
This is absolutely on point. My observation among my circle of friends (I'm 30), is that we are if anything more pessimistic and pragmatic than our parents.[1] Indeed, look at how 'msandford couched his point: in terms of what baby boomer parents said to millenials, not in terms of what millenials actually believe. My parents have always said: just get an education, don't worry about the debt, if you work hard you can do anything! I'm the one who has always had to push back with reality. [1] For example, millenials are less trusting in others: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/17/the-real-reason-why-millennials-dont-trust-others http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/1....
- tsotha 12y ago
  >This is absolutely on point. My observation among my circle of friends (I'm 30), is that we are if anything more pessimistic and pragmatic than our parents. That's true now, but was it true the day you graduated from college? Finally finishing school is always a splash of cold water, but my impression is it was especially so for people your age.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    My parents are more optimistic and less pragmatic in their 60's than I am at 30. My wife's parents, in their 50's, are somewhere in-between. This is anecdotal, obviously, but it's consistent with the study I linked-to about millenials trusting other less than Gen X-er's, who trust others less than baby boomers. Obviously people are more optimistic before graduation than after, but I think that's been true ever since Americans started going to college in large numbers, with the baby boom generation. I do think the shock of graduation and the drop-off in optimism has been greater with people in my generation, but I don't think it's because they were more optimistic than previous generations before they graduated. I think it's because, by virtue of the economy, they're more pessimistic and cynical after graduation.
  - eitally 12y ago
    I think there have been two times in the past 15 years that it's happened. Once in 2000ish after the first tech crash and once again starting in 2008 as the general recession took hold. We haven't recovered from the recession yet, and although corporations are making more money now than [in some cases] ever before, there isn't adequate profit sharing via increased salaries and broader hiring to affect worker sentiment in a meaningfully positive way. I graduated in 1999 and, after shifting from physics to history mid-way through, I got a temp-to-hire job doing web dev as the bubble was popping. while everything worked out for me, things are not working out for people who've graduated in the past few years. I only paid $2500/semester tuition and, with a 15-25hr/wk side job was able to live happily and graduate with barely any debt, which I repaid in the first year of employment. Many public universities now charge upwards of $15k/yr tuition for in state students -- this is just untenable for the majority of matriculating high school grads given the current job market. When I went to college, my engineer father said "study anything that interests you. You're smart and if you work hard you won't have any trouble finding good work." He was right. Now, when my son is planning and preparing for college, I will very strongly encourage him to pursue an engineering degree with a minor in math, statistics, or economics... unless he's set on a physical science, in which case I'll encourage at least a minor in CS. I don't want my kids to be forced into unskilled work while carrying boatloads of debt, and the way things are going, the only pretty reliable way around that is to have the skills and knowledge to create things (and communicate clearly verbally & in writing). Like rayiner, I'm pessimistic. Living/working through this and experiencing wage stagnation and utter apathy from employers & government only reinforces it.
callmeed 12y ago
I don't really think he's saying it's about motivation. It's about the "do anything/follow your passion" passion ... the problem is, people have a passion for art, they rack up $100K in student loan debt getting an art history degree, and now they can't find a job. If anything, he's putting as much blame (or more) on the parents.
- zecho 12y ago
  Again, let's talk about a point of fact here, rather than a myth that it's humanities students who are worse off. Since the 70s, the percentage of students with bachelor's degrees in the humanities has not increased. It's always been around 16-17% of total degrees earned. Social science has been dropping as a percentage of students with earned degrees in those fields, but not by much. Math and science has always hovered around 8% of total degrees earned. Computer science (amazingly) has not grown as a percentage of total degrees earned since the 70s. Business majors haven't grown as a percentage since the 80s. Education majors have fallen dramatically each decade, taken up primarily by other fields. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.as... And yet, here we are across the board, with low wages (comparatively to previous generations, comparatively to older workers, comparatively in almost every way measurable), massively increasing education costs and a really, really poor job outlook for young workers. It's a canard, plain and simple.
  - callmeed 12y ago
    > And yet, here we are across the board This is your incorrect premise. Wages aren't low "across the board" and the job outlook isn't poor "across the board". They are low/poor for jobs that have high supply and/or low demand. What you've basically said is that the supply of various degree holders has remained the same. But that doesn't mean demand hasn't changed because of globalization/automation/[whatever]ation. You can call it a canard until you're blue in the face, but how do you argue with: Unemployment for arts: 10% Unemployment for engineering: 7% Unemployment for medical/health services: 4% [0] Also, see the recent "Downward Ramp" article on the NYT [1]. [0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19/unemployment-college-graduates-majors_n_3462712.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19/unemployment-colleg... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/the-downward-ramp.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/the-downward-ramp.... EDIT: BTW, I'm not saying the student loan/debt issue is not a problem. I definitely agree that it is.
waps 12y ago
I think that raising indebtedness, raising effectively the minimum acceptable wage for a large number of people is how the FED (and euro central banks) raised the standard of living. And this worked marvelous ... until about 1987 or so where it started to result in unemployment. But luckily the economy picked up (probably due to an oil boom), and until the late nineties there was unemployment, but it wasn't growing anymore. Something very weird happened in Japan though : no amount of indebting regular Japanese could raise wages. They tried, no wage rises, and tried again, no wage rises, and tried some more, and all the while slowly rising unemployment. Money just wasn't circulating anymore, it skipped the bottom of society. Looking at the graphs of what they did you find this incredible, but oh dear God, did they try. Then of course the crash. People walking away from debt and dominoes started falling over when payments didn't come in, because there weren't jobs to finance them from. So the FED (again, and other central banks, this time including some asian ones) asked the government and decided to prevent the whole domino game from falling over. How ? By making policies that effectively tripled American and European people's indebtedness. Surely better jobs will become available, right ? It even worked. I think mostly because it took companies time to ship jobs overseas, and they still needed employees in the meantime. But wages didn't rise ... and so the dominoes started falling over again. Yet no wage rises, and unemployment started spiking again, so they did it again. The same thing happened, now in 2008. And look, this time China joins the club. Luckily, the US got a break : the shale revolution. A Godsend ! Very labour intensive, high-value, no way to eliminate people from the process. Praise the lord. Not enough to do anything other than stop the unemployment rise (unemployment is only going down because people are leaving the job pool. In reality unemployment is at the 2002-2003 level). And of course, the shale boom will only last until probably about the end of next year, no more. To make matters worse, oil is about to become much less available to Europeans, and in 2-3 years the same will happen in the US. This is a massive oversimplification. There are many connotations to make, going from wars, oil, and so on. TLDR: we don't need people any more to make the economy run. But because the economy is still growing we do need highly educated people to figure out how to ship jobs offshore, or automate them out of existence. This will continue for a while, until we hit the next phase. You see the economy is only growing because we need more products for more people. That's where debt comes in. Because unemployment is going to spike, growth will stall. No more products needed. At that point, only one business tactic will work : lower costs, and eliminate competition. Back to the huge conglomerates of the beginning of the previous century. Explicitly try to get stuck in a local optimum. At that point we will get back to the conditions that existed before the oil boom : 90%+ unemployment as the norm. Education, aptitude, motivation all will simply be replaced by desperation.
oscargrouch 12y ago
I think we must add, also as a generation problem, that our romantic partnerships are much more unstable, since we have more freedom than previous generations.. The romantic partnership of older generations were much more reliable.. and now to get to the point.. this also means economic backup and partnership.. I think only look to the economical side of things wont map the reality properly.. there also a lot of distinct social mechanics in course.. You cant explain such a complicated matter only by looking to the economical side of it..
hnal943 12y ago
Blaming the economy of course does not absolve the Millennials from culpability. For example, they voted in droves for the current administration, which at the very least has not helped the economy. Any systemic solution along the lines of "it's all someone else's fault" is highly suspect to me.
- wonderzombie 12y ago
  The obvious rejoinder, of course, is: who was president when the crash happened in the first place? And I disagree with your characterization that it hasn't helped, either-- look at how many jobs have been added since the administration took office. But this isn't a productive framing. As much as we wish presidential administrations could make or break the economy -- it makes partisan sense, and it makes us think at least someone could run the show if they got their shit together -- it just isn't so. The current recession has its roots going much farther back than 2008. Depending on how you reckon, someone who's now 27 was either not yet conceived or in diapers when the bubble began inflating. Likewise no amount of perseverance, hard work, temerity, gumption, or whatever the hell you want to call it, can wish the economy back to the '90s.
  - hnal943 12y ago
    I agree that politics is only a fraction of the issue. Washington affects the economy in complicated ways. Still, I recoil at an entire generation of people looking for others to blame for their failure. That's not productive either, and it has a creepy fascistic vibe to it.
    - zecho 12y ago
      It's an open question as to whether this is generation Y's failure, or the baby boomer's.
      - hnal943 12y ago
        The baby boomers have jobs are living in homes. (Some of) Gen Y is jobless and moping. Gen Y clearly are the failures, regardless of whose fault it is.
geebee 12y ago
Your comment really resonates with me, even though I'm nowhere close to a millenial. I graduated in 1993, into a pretty bad recession. It was very difficult to find a job, though (as usual) engineering grads did much better than humanities majors on average. I ended up doing a series of jobs that allowed me to survive financially, but did almost nothing to forward my career. I eventually went back to school to pursue a degree that would lead to better employment. Fast forward to 1998, when the dot-com boom was going on, and it was an astoundingly different situation. I finished an MS (in engineering) and entered the workforce, but I really can't tell you if it was the degree or the timing, because college graduates with degrees in Art History and no experience were having a vastly easier time getting jobs. They didn't pay as well as engineering, typically, but they weren't stuck at the rental car counter or the coffee shop. They were getting jobs in marketing, sales, that sort of thing. Although the market crashed badly a couple of years later, I think that the few years of experience may have made a huge impact compared to people who graduated into the earlier or later recessions. Seriously, I wasn't all that much older than these 1998 graduates - maybe 5 years or so, but the difference in experience was striking. And here's the thing - it can be lasting. By going back to grad school, I managed to get myself considered a "new grad", though I was on the outer edge, age-wise, of this cohort. But without this? I would have been someone applying with jobs, with 5 years of non-relevant work experience. Some employers will be understanding, but they typically go to recent grads for the "zero experience" jobs. During the meltdown that followed, I saw the same thing - recent grads in bad shape. I'd say the difference for the humanities majors is greater, because work experience makes such a difference. An engineering major will usually manage to get something that puts him or her on the career path, even if isn't the easy pickings it can be in boom times. But to a humanities major, it can be the difference between 5 years doing career-oriented work in the marketing department of 5 years stringing together coffee shop and dog-walking gigs. When that 5 years is up, they'll be at a disadvantage to new grads. And if you graduated into a boom, you have a much better chance of clinging to that marketing job, or getting one of the few ones that come available, because you have an incumbent advantage or even just a whisker of experience that makes all the difference when there are far more applicants than positions. All of this has me very sympathetic to "cohort disadvantage". It can be somewhat generational, but I suspect that it actually happens dramatically even within generations. In short, graduating with an English degree in 1998 rather than 1993 can actually make a very big, and very lasting, difference in a career. It makes a difference for engineering majors as well, but it's the people at the margins (like the humanities majors) - where it can really go either way, where the starting point in that vector field really impacts the y-value 15 years later on that x-axis. As a side note, I also read that grads of very elite schools are also less likely to suffer from the cohort disadvantage. Again, my guess is that this is probably because, like engineers, they don't end up on the wrong side of the vector field - they may not get their ideal choice of first job or move up as quickly, but they tend to get enough of a foothold that they don't end up on the other side of a brick wall - as a result, when the next boom happens, they are positioned to take advantage rather than getting left behind. There's also a good chance that they have access to a vastly a better network (say, harvard grads) to get back in even if they have floated a bit for a few years.
msandford 12y ago
> The realities, laid out in the article, are all economic and well researched. Millennials have high debt and low wages with a poor job outlook. The underlying trends have existed for quite some time and appear to be getting worse over time, especially with the recent recession hitting youth hardest. But WHY do these kids have high debt and low wages? They have a high debt-to-wage ratio in some fields and quite reasonable ratios in others. People with STEM degrees as a whole are better off than those with less immediately relevant degrees. If these trends have been going on for some time and the factors underlying them haven't been changing, then why has the primary message been "do what you love" instead of "do something that will keep you alive" since as it seems, the future is kinda bleak right now. > But yeah, let's blame motivation rather than figure out how to improve the system. I was doing EXACTLY the opposite. The problem is that people have unrealistic expectations because they've been set-up by their parents or society or whoever (it's nebulous) to fail. If employment in general is terrible but in some fields it's still good, telling people to "do what they love" is idiotic at best and criminally negligent at worst. Here's a quote from my original post: "But what that cheery, the-world-is-your-oyster message fails to communicate is that life can be difficult and that for a great many people just keeping themselves alive SOMEHOW is really about all that they can do. And that for the entire history of the world minus about 50 years that could be considered Success(tm)." So how exactly am I blaming people's motivation?
- zecho 12y ago
  The canard is that you've accepted that there's a "primary message" of "do what you love" or "the-world-is-your-oyster" without showing how it has actually affected society. I argue that the perception of such a message has had nothing to do with any of youth's current economic woes. It completely sidesteps the real issues. Let's say nobody told any young child of the 80s and 90s that they were special and the entire job market shifted on them anyway. They'd still be living at their parents' house, because they have no jobs, high debt and not much of a financial independence ahead of them. It's a logical thing to do when your parents have stable incomes and you do not. Please read through my other comments in this thread, but my point is that the entire market shifted, which we agree on. Where I disagree, and frankly, get really annoyed about, is placing the blame on how these students were raised for wholly unrelated economic trajectories. This has nothing to do with expectations and everything to do with realities. Realities that are being dealt with by boomeranging. As for "WHY do these kids have high debt and low wages," I've also discussed, but blaming debt-to-wage ratio for choice of study seems bizarre to me when the problem is school is more expensive than ever and jobs are scarcer than ever, especially for recent graduates. They have high debt and low wages because they have high debt and low wages. An ontology, for sure, but just as likely a vicious cycle: One must have a degree to get a good job in one's chosen field, but having a degree may no longer advance one's position and yet, not having a degree could be far worse. As noted throughout this thread, students have been choosing essentially the same degrees for decades, regardless of job prospects in those fields. The things that changed to create the boomerang problem (assuming we see it as a problem), are all outside of those choices: increasing education costs, poorer job prospects across nearly all fields, etc. etc. If job prospects were related to field of study, you'd expect to see shifts in completed degree fields over the years, but we don't. So back to the "primary message," as you put it. Was it inherent in that message that students get similar degrees as boomers and Gen Xers? It worked for them just fine. Why wouldn't it work for their kids? Seems hardly criminally negligent or idiotic to me and, again, it's completely unrelated to the real economic reality. To me, that framing sounds a lot like "kids these days" and doesn't isn't helpful at all, especially when it appears "kids will be kids" seems the more apt cliche to use when talking about choice of degree.

by zecho 12y ago

opendais 12y ago

Yes. The only people in my social circle I know that didn't boomerang were STEM graduates. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/03/01/most-college-grads-cant-find-work-in-their-field-is-a-management-degree-the-answer/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/03/01/m... 60% can't find a job in their field isn't a "motivational problem" or a "I picked the wrong degree problem". It is a general, widespread economic problem. If your assumptions require more than 10% of people to be incompetent, your assumptions are wrong.

ChuckMcM 12y ago
I get the 'I can't find a job opening in the area I'm trained/passionate about' but what I would like to understand is whether or not that includes "I can't create a job in the area I am trained/passionate about." I have coached a number of folks who seemed to feel strangely disempowered, which is to say that the world had to change (job opening appears, company moves to their area, etc) in order for them to make progress on their goals. I've had some success at simplifying the question using the common trick of assuming solutions to the presumptive problems. So for example starting with "Ok lets stipulate that there is a million dollars in a bank vault that is paying you $1,200 a month in 'free' money. And you're living in an area where that pays all your food, rent, and gas. Now, what do you want to do with your time?" That gets us past blaming "the economy" and taking ownership of what they want to do. It is a different way of thinking, but it gets out of the rut of 'answer' based thinking. Life is like riding a train that you know is on a track with a bridge out over a 1000' chasm. When the train gets there, it will fall into the chasm, and everyone on board will die. Given that every train you could take from a station has this same "feature" what train do you pick? Who do you pick to ride with you? What places does the train need to go through before it gets to the missing bridge? Sometimes it isn't as complicated as what do you want to do with your life, it is simply what can you do today that is fulfilling to you?
- opendais 12y ago
  > "I can't create a job in the area I am trained/passionate about." A) Demand B) Access to Capital If you can't find an employer, there is likely insufficient demand. As someone who "created his job" initially, I was badly underpaid for the first 18 months and got sick of dealing with it even once my income grew to a "normal rate". I think you are looking at this from the perspective of someone who is going to be in the top 50% of a large field and be successful, no matter the economic situation. I think most people aren't in that top 50%.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Can you say more about this? "As someone who 'created his job' initially, I was badly underpaid for the first 18 months and got sick of dealing with it even once my income grew to a 'normal rate'." I think it is awesome that you went from 'no job in your area of expertise' to 'normal income' in 18 months. I have a huge amount of respect for that, I am looking for clarity on the 'got sick of dealing with it' part. What were you sick of? I have never commissioned a survey on it but my experience from undergraduate to career was that there was a 100% correlation between passion for something and top 50% of people who do that thing. Every student I met at USC that was passionate about electrical engineering was in the top 50% of their graduating class, every clerk, salesperson, engineer, gardner, taxi driver, artist, and writer I've ever met who was passionate about what they were doing, did it better than most. That observation has been pretty foundational in my thinking about life and happiness. I would be intrigued to find a counter example.
    - opendais 12y ago
      > I think it is awesome that you went from 'no job in your area of expertise' to 'normal income' in 18 months. I'm pretty sure my outcome so far is 50%+ luck and I don't know if I'll be able to sustain it forever. > I am looking for clarity on the 'got sick of dealing with it' part. What were you sick of? Consulting/Contracting work [my only option with $0 in capital] requires soft skills in dealing with people. The majority of my personal failings all relate to soft skills. 1) I've got a tendency to provide too much information rather than too little. 2) I tend to have poor communication with non-technical people [aka clients]. While I could blame it on them, the fact remains it was vital to my income on that course and therefore truly on me. 3) I'm a bit of an odd duck socially, even by programmer standards. 4) I don't have a poker face when annoyed/irritated/etc. I also have poor control over my tone in such situations. Coupled with #1 & #2 this tends to lead to a much higher client turnover than most consultants/contractors experience [I could be wrong, but I don't think so]. 5) I was able to get a "normal job" and I prefer it. However, there is still one older engineer who needles me about #2. ;) > I have never commissioned a survey on it but my experience from undergraduate to career was that there was a 100% correlation between passion for something and top 50% of people who do that thing. Every student I met at USC that was passionate about electrical engineering was in the top 50% of their graduating class, every clerk, salesperson, engineer, gardner, taxi driver, artist, and writer I've ever met who was passionate about what they were doing, did it better than most. That observation has been pretty foundational in my thinking about life and happiness. I would be intrigued to find a counter example. You may be right. I don't think I'm in the top 50% of software developers, I am probably in the top 65%. EDIT: A perfect example of #2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7921042 I wasn't sufficiently clear about what I meant by "market rates" which leads to him launching into an explanation that [I think] he realized was not needed when he basically agreed with another poster about the $ figure quoted in the article. This is due to the fact I didn't explicitly define "market rates" as the amount the person received on offer in the article.
wil421 12y ago
>"I picked the wrong degree problem". I would argue this point. Many people I know or worked at my college jobs just plain chose the wrong path. Creative writing degrees, Drama degrees, or even one poor girl with over 100K in debt from an Opera degree. Working as a waiter I even encountered people how made more money waiting tables then with their social work or teaching degrees. Its crazy they still work their college job paying off student debt they never needed. These people are not at all incompetent they were just told to follow their dreams when they were 17 18 and choose a degree to cater towards their dream, passion, or what have you.
- ebiester 12y ago
  They don't need their degrees for their current jobs. That doesn't mean they will be waiting tables forever.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    If you don't get a job in you field within the first few years, your odds of ever doing so become much smaller.
    - ebiester 12y ago
      Consider that my sister started out (without a college degree) working basic jobs until she ended up working recruiting. She's done that for years now, but she's reached a ceiling because jobs in HR ask for a degree. Any degree. Communication, Psychology, English, anything. Now, all that it would take for her to break through is to have some experience in general HR. After that, nobody would even look at the degree. However, there's a ceiling there. I look at many of my friends who have humanities and Social Science degrees and their real careers didn't take off until their late 20s or early 30s. Does that mean that my friends with Communications degrees ended up in Radio? No. But they would have never ended up where they are without that "any" degree. IT is a different world entirely.
- opendais 12y ago
  http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.as... Please find me 60% in a single class of major in that table for me? How about we write off two entire categories. Say Humanities and "Other" degrees! That is only 41% of that 60%. It just doesn't get you there to blame "those people". Sorry. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/20/only-27-percent-of-college-grads-have-a-job-related-to-their-major/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/20/o... And if you think the 60% number is high, this one pegs it at 73%!
tsotha 12y ago
>60% can't find a job in their field isn't a "motivational problem" or a "I picked the wrong degree problem". It is a general, widespread economic problem. Not necessarily. If there have ever only been 2,000 positions for marine biologists opening up every year and 20,000 graduate, that's not a widespread economic problem so much as a mismatch between what people want to do and the availability of jobs in that field. Part of the problem is too many people are getting advanced degrees. It seems to be dogma these days that society will become wealthier if we graduate more people with specialized skills. But that's putting the cart before the horse - producing a whole bunch of experts in fields with no demand for those experts results in a bunch of people who've wasted a decade of their lives. People need to be realistic about the implications of their field of study.
- opendais 12y ago
  If the majority of intelligent, educated people make the wrong choice and you want to blame those people: A) You believe you are smarter than 60% of people with degrees and are accurately capable of predicting supply/demand. B) You believe an external factor is at fault. Even I, who have met many people I think are idiots with college degrees, would not presume A. From your comment, I think you are really trying to sell A. I'm not buying. Particularly: > People need to be realistic about the implications of their field of study. If I misunderstood, please explain.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    Oh, allow me to explain. > A) You believe you are smarter than 60% of people with degrees and are accurately capable of predicting supply/demand. You don't have to be exactly 3 SD out to be smarter than 60% of a group of people, so I likely am. On top of that, these are people who've never had a real job and are choosing a major at age 18 or so. But that's not the point. The point is many of these people just assumed the job would be there when they graduated without doing any research at all. They didn't even look. There's two really terrible common pieces of advice parents give to their children: 1) "Just be yourself" when dating and 2) "When choosing a major do what you love". > B) You believe an external factor is at fault. Well, yes, an external factor is partially at fault. That external factor is the higher education establishment, which is corrupt as hell. They lobby the government for ever increasing amounts of loans for students and then award themselves $400k salaries. Don't let anyone tell you there's such a thing as a nonprofit institution. The idea that 60% of people couldn't find work in their field of study isn't surprising to me at all.

rayiner 12y ago

This is absolutely on point. My observation among my circle of friends (I'm 30), is that we are if anything more pessimistic and pragmatic than our parents.[1] Indeed, look at how 'msandford couched his point: in terms of what baby boomer parents said to millenials, not in terms of what millenials actually believe. My parents have always said: just get an education, don't worry about the debt, if you work hard you can do anything! I'm the one who has always had to push back with reality. [1] For example, millenials are less trusting in others: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/17/the-real-reason-why-millennials-dont-trust-others http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/1....

tsotha 12y ago
>This is absolutely on point. My observation among my circle of friends (I'm 30), is that we are if anything more pessimistic and pragmatic than our parents. That's true now, but was it true the day you graduated from college? Finally finishing school is always a splash of cold water, but my impression is it was especially so for people your age.
- rayiner 12y ago
  My parents are more optimistic and less pragmatic in their 60's than I am at 30. My wife's parents, in their 50's, are somewhere in-between. This is anecdotal, obviously, but it's consistent with the study I linked-to about millenials trusting other less than Gen X-er's, who trust others less than baby boomers. Obviously people are more optimistic before graduation than after, but I think that's been true ever since Americans started going to college in large numbers, with the baby boom generation. I do think the shock of graduation and the drop-off in optimism has been greater with people in my generation, but I don't think it's because they were more optimistic than previous generations before they graduated. I think it's because, by virtue of the economy, they're more pessimistic and cynical after graduation.
- eitally 12y ago
  I think there have been two times in the past 15 years that it's happened. Once in 2000ish after the first tech crash and once again starting in 2008 as the general recession took hold. We haven't recovered from the recession yet, and although corporations are making more money now than [in some cases] ever before, there isn't adequate profit sharing via increased salaries and broader hiring to affect worker sentiment in a meaningfully positive way. I graduated in 1999 and, after shifting from physics to history mid-way through, I got a temp-to-hire job doing web dev as the bubble was popping. while everything worked out for me, things are not working out for people who've graduated in the past few years. I only paid $2500/semester tuition and, with a 15-25hr/wk side job was able to live happily and graduate with barely any debt, which I repaid in the first year of employment. Many public universities now charge upwards of $15k/yr tuition for in state students -- this is just untenable for the majority of matriculating high school grads given the current job market. When I went to college, my engineer father said "study anything that interests you. You're smart and if you work hard you won't have any trouble finding good work." He was right. Now, when my son is planning and preparing for college, I will very strongly encourage him to pursue an engineering degree with a minor in math, statistics, or economics... unless he's set on a physical science, in which case I'll encourage at least a minor in CS. I don't want my kids to be forced into unskilled work while carrying boatloads of debt, and the way things are going, the only pretty reliable way around that is to have the skills and knowledge to create things (and communicate clearly verbally & in writing). Like rayiner, I'm pessimistic. Living/working through this and experiencing wage stagnation and utter apathy from employers & government only reinforces it.

callmeed 12y ago

I don't really think he's saying it's about motivation. It's about the "do anything/follow your passion" passion ... the problem is, people have a passion for art, they rack up $100K in student loan debt getting an art history degree, and now they can't find a job. If anything, he's putting as much blame (or more) on the parents.

zecho 12y ago
Again, let's talk about a point of fact here, rather than a myth that it's humanities students who are worse off. Since the 70s, the percentage of students with bachelor's degrees in the humanities has not increased. It's always been around 16-17% of total degrees earned. Social science has been dropping as a percentage of students with earned degrees in those fields, but not by much. Math and science has always hovered around 8% of total degrees earned. Computer science (amazingly) has not grown as a percentage of total degrees earned since the 70s. Business majors haven't grown as a percentage since the 80s. Education majors have fallen dramatically each decade, taken up primarily by other fields. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.as... And yet, here we are across the board, with low wages (comparatively to previous generations, comparatively to older workers, comparatively in almost every way measurable), massively increasing education costs and a really, really poor job outlook for young workers. It's a canard, plain and simple.
- callmeed 12y ago
  > And yet, here we are across the board This is your incorrect premise. Wages aren't low "across the board" and the job outlook isn't poor "across the board". They are low/poor for jobs that have high supply and/or low demand. What you've basically said is that the supply of various degree holders has remained the same. But that doesn't mean demand hasn't changed because of globalization/automation/[whatever]ation. You can call it a canard until you're blue in the face, but how do you argue with: Unemployment for arts: 10% Unemployment for engineering: 7% Unemployment for medical/health services: 4% [0] Also, see the recent "Downward Ramp" article on the NYT [1]. [0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19/unemployment-college-graduates-majors_n_3462712.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/19/unemployment-colleg... [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/the-downward-ramp.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/the-downward-ramp.... EDIT: BTW, I'm not saying the student loan/debt issue is not a problem. I definitely agree that it is.

waps 12y ago

I think that raising indebtedness, raising effectively the minimum acceptable wage for a large number of people is how the FED (and euro central banks) raised the standard of living. And this worked marvelous ... until about 1987 or so where it started to result in unemployment. But luckily the economy picked up (probably due to an oil boom), and until the late nineties there was unemployment, but it wasn't growing anymore. Something very weird happened in Japan though : no amount of indebting regular Japanese could raise wages. They tried, no wage rises, and tried again, no wage rises, and tried some more, and all the while slowly rising unemployment. Money just wasn't circulating anymore, it skipped the bottom of society. Looking at the graphs of what they did you find this incredible, but oh dear God, did they try. Then of course the crash. People walking away from debt and dominoes started falling over when payments didn't come in, because there weren't jobs to finance them from. So the FED (again, and other central banks, this time including some asian ones) asked the government and decided to prevent the whole domino game from falling over. How ? By making policies that effectively tripled American and European people's indebtedness. Surely better jobs will become available, right ? It even worked. I think mostly because it took companies time to ship jobs overseas, and they still needed employees in the meantime. But wages didn't rise ... and so the dominoes started falling over again. Yet no wage rises, and unemployment started spiking again, so they did it again. The same thing happened, now in 2008. And look, this time China joins the club. Luckily, the US got a break : the shale revolution. A Godsend ! Very labour intensive, high-value, no way to eliminate people from the process. Praise the lord. Not enough to do anything other than stop the unemployment rise (unemployment is only going down because people are leaving the job pool. In reality unemployment is at the 2002-2003 level). And of course, the shale boom will only last until probably about the end of next year, no more. To make matters worse, oil is about to become much less available to Europeans, and in 2-3 years the same will happen in the US. This is a massive oversimplification. There are many connotations to make, going from wars, oil, and so on. TLDR: we don't need people any more to make the economy run. But because the economy is still growing we do need highly educated people to figure out how to ship jobs offshore, or automate them out of existence. This will continue for a while, until we hit the next phase. You see the economy is only growing because we need more products for more people. That's where debt comes in. Because unemployment is going to spike, growth will stall. No more products needed. At that point, only one business tactic will work : lower costs, and eliminate competition. Back to the huge conglomerates of the beginning of the previous century. Explicitly try to get stuck in a local optimum. At that point we will get back to the conditions that existed before the oil boom : 90%+ unemployment as the norm. Education, aptitude, motivation all will simply be replaced by desperation.

oscargrouch 12y ago

I think we must add, also as a generation problem, that our romantic partnerships are much more unstable, since we have more freedom than previous generations.. The romantic partnership of older generations were much more reliable.. and now to get to the point.. this also means economic backup and partnership.. I think only look to the economical side of things wont map the reality properly.. there also a lot of distinct social mechanics in course.. You cant explain such a complicated matter only by looking to the economical side of it..

hnal943 12y ago

Blaming the economy of course does not absolve the Millennials from culpability. For example, they voted in droves for the current administration, which at the very least has not helped the economy. Any systemic solution along the lines of "it's all someone else's fault" is highly suspect to me.

wonderzombie 12y ago
The obvious rejoinder, of course, is: who was president when the crash happened in the first place? And I disagree with your characterization that it hasn't helped, either-- look at how many jobs have been added since the administration took office. But this isn't a productive framing. As much as we wish presidential administrations could make or break the economy -- it makes partisan sense, and it makes us think at least someone could run the show if they got their shit together -- it just isn't so. The current recession has its roots going much farther back than 2008. Depending on how you reckon, someone who's now 27 was either not yet conceived or in diapers when the bubble began inflating. Likewise no amount of perseverance, hard work, temerity, gumption, or whatever the hell you want to call it, can wish the economy back to the '90s.
- hnal943 12y ago
  I agree that politics is only a fraction of the issue. Washington affects the economy in complicated ways. Still, I recoil at an entire generation of people looking for others to blame for their failure. That's not productive either, and it has a creepy fascistic vibe to it.
  - zecho 12y ago
    It's an open question as to whether this is generation Y's failure, or the baby boomer's.
    - hnal943 12y ago
      The baby boomers have jobs are living in homes. (Some of) Gen Y is jobless and moping. Gen Y clearly are the failures, regardless of whose fault it is.

geebee 12y ago

Your comment really resonates with me, even though I'm nowhere close to a millenial. I graduated in 1993, into a pretty bad recession. It was very difficult to find a job, though (as usual) engineering grads did much better than humanities majors on average. I ended up doing a series of jobs that allowed me to survive financially, but did almost nothing to forward my career. I eventually went back to school to pursue a degree that would lead to better employment. Fast forward to 1998, when the dot-com boom was going on, and it was an astoundingly different situation. I finished an MS (in engineering) and entered the workforce, but I really can't tell you if it was the degree or the timing, because college graduates with degrees in Art History and no experience were having a vastly easier time getting jobs. They didn't pay as well as engineering, typically, but they weren't stuck at the rental car counter or the coffee shop. They were getting jobs in marketing, sales, that sort of thing. Although the market crashed badly a couple of years later, I think that the few years of experience may have made a huge impact compared to people who graduated into the earlier or later recessions. Seriously, I wasn't all that much older than these 1998 graduates - maybe 5 years or so, but the difference in experience was striking. And here's the thing - it can be lasting. By going back to grad school, I managed to get myself considered a "new grad", though I was on the outer edge, age-wise, of this cohort. But without this? I would have been someone applying with jobs, with 5 years of non-relevant work experience. Some employers will be understanding, but they typically go to recent grads for the "zero experience" jobs. During the meltdown that followed, I saw the same thing - recent grads in bad shape. I'd say the difference for the humanities majors is greater, because work experience makes such a difference. An engineering major will usually manage to get something that puts him or her on the career path, even if isn't the easy pickings it can be in boom times. But to a humanities major, it can be the difference between 5 years doing career-oriented work in the marketing department of 5 years stringing together coffee shop and dog-walking gigs. When that 5 years is up, they'll be at a disadvantage to new grads. And if you graduated into a boom, you have a much better chance of clinging to that marketing job, or getting one of the few ones that come available, because you have an incumbent advantage or even just a whisker of experience that makes all the difference when there are far more applicants than positions. All of this has me very sympathetic to "cohort disadvantage". It can be somewhat generational, but I suspect that it actually happens dramatically even within generations. In short, graduating with an English degree in 1998 rather than 1993 can actually make a very big, and very lasting, difference in a career. It makes a difference for engineering majors as well, but it's the people at the margins (like the humanities majors) - where it can really go either way, where the starting point in that vector field really impacts the y-value 15 years later on that x-axis. As a side note, I also read that grads of very elite schools are also less likely to suffer from the cohort disadvantage. Again, my guess is that this is probably because, like engineers, they don't end up on the wrong side of the vector field - they may not get their ideal choice of first job or move up as quickly, but they tend to get enough of a foothold that they don't end up on the other side of a brick wall - as a result, when the next boom happens, they are positioned to take advantage rather than getting left behind. There's also a good chance that they have access to a vastly a better network (say, harvard grads) to get back in even if they have floated a bit for a few years.

msandford 12y ago

> The realities, laid out in the article, are all economic and well researched. Millennials have high debt and low wages with a poor job outlook. The underlying trends have existed for quite some time and appear to be getting worse over time, especially with the recent recession hitting youth hardest. But WHY do these kids have high debt and low wages? They have a high debt-to-wage ratio in some fields and quite reasonable ratios in others. People with STEM degrees as a whole are better off than those with less immediately relevant degrees. If these trends have been going on for some time and the factors underlying them haven't been changing, then why has the primary message been "do what you love" instead of "do something that will keep you alive" since as it seems, the future is kinda bleak right now. > But yeah, let's blame motivation rather than figure out how to improve the system. I was doing EXACTLY the opposite. The problem is that people have unrealistic expectations because they've been set-up by their parents or society or whoever (it's nebulous) to fail. If employment in general is terrible but in some fields it's still good, telling people to "do what they love" is idiotic at best and criminally negligent at worst. Here's a quote from my original post: "But what that cheery, the-world-is-your-oyster message fails to communicate is that life can be difficult and that for a great many people just keeping themselves alive SOMEHOW is really about all that they can do. And that for the entire history of the world minus about 50 years that could be considered Success(tm)." So how exactly am I blaming people's motivation?

zecho 12y ago
The canard is that you've accepted that there's a "primary message" of "do what you love" or "the-world-is-your-oyster" without showing how it has actually affected society. I argue that the perception of such a message has had nothing to do with any of youth's current economic woes. It completely sidesteps the real issues. Let's say nobody told any young child of the 80s and 90s that they were special and the entire job market shifted on them anyway. They'd still be living at their parents' house, because they have no jobs, high debt and not much of a financial independence ahead of them. It's a logical thing to do when your parents have stable incomes and you do not. Please read through my other comments in this thread, but my point is that the entire market shifted, which we agree on. Where I disagree, and frankly, get really annoyed about, is placing the blame on how these students were raised for wholly unrelated economic trajectories. This has nothing to do with expectations and everything to do with realities. Realities that are being dealt with by boomeranging. As for "WHY do these kids have high debt and low wages," I've also discussed, but blaming debt-to-wage ratio for choice of study seems bizarre to me when the problem is school is more expensive than ever and jobs are scarcer than ever, especially for recent graduates. They have high debt and low wages because they have high debt and low wages. An ontology, for sure, but just as likely a vicious cycle: One must have a degree to get a good job in one's chosen field, but having a degree may no longer advance one's position and yet, not having a degree could be far worse. As noted throughout this thread, students have been choosing essentially the same degrees for decades, regardless of job prospects in those fields. The things that changed to create the boomerang problem (assuming we see it as a problem), are all outside of those choices: increasing education costs, poorer job prospects across nearly all fields, etc. etc. If job prospects were related to field of study, you'd expect to see shifts in completed degree fields over the years, but we don't. So back to the "primary message," as you put it. Was it inherent in that message that students get similar degrees as boomers and Gen Xers? It worked for them just fine. Why wouldn't it work for their kids? Seems hardly criminally negligent or idiotic to me and, again, it's completely unrelated to the real economic reality. To me, that framing sounds a lot like "kids these days" and doesn't isn't helpful at all, especially when it appears "kids will be kids" seems the more apt cliche to use when talking about choice of degree.