The Edifice Complex is alive and well on college campuses

Here is yet another article on the Edifice Complex that grips college trustees and presidents across this great land of ours. Meanwhile, more and more colleges are having their credit ratings downgraded and, if anything, the rating agencies are being overly generous in their assessment of the viability of many colleges’ financial prospects. More importantly, as cost structures become even more inflated, college becomes out of reach for more low-income students and becomes a source of long-lasting debt for those who manage to pull it off with student loans.

The great mismatch between college and available jobs

The above chart was provided by Richard Vedder in his recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “Why Did 17 Million Students Go To College?” The table was first published by Christopher Matgouranis in this story about underemployed college graduates that was posted on the website of The Center for College Affordability & Productivity.

Is college too much fun?

Although most college students aren’t of the traditional variety, that is, most aren’t residential students at a traditional four-year school, it’s the traditional group that still define the college experience in the main. It’s the experience that most kids of college-educated people want and get. One of the reasons is, it’s a lot of fun.

There is nothing wrong with fun. And I’m not going to suggest we take the fun out of college. What I am going to suggest, however, is that perhaps we need to rebalance our ratio of fun to work.

Underemployed college graduates: an American tragedy unfolding

Here is yet another story in a major U.S. newspaper (in this case, the Philadelphia Inquirer) about the growing number of underemployed college graduates in America. The question is, what can you do about it?

Fighting the forces of un- and underemployment

Recent college grads today face some of the worst job prospects since the great depression. A survey by the Associated Press found that over 50 percent — about 1.5 million — are either unemployed or in jobs that don’t require a college degree. The AP survey found that recent grads were “more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders, and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians combined. There were more working in jobs such as receptionists or payroll clerks than in all computer professional jobs. More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks, and customer representatives than engineers.” (Quote from op-ed piece by Raghav Singh at ere.net).

Singh goes on to point out:

Underemployment and unemployment varies a great deal depending on the major. Not surprisingly, students who graduated with degrees in the sciences or other technical fields, such as accounting, are much less likely to be jobless or underemployed than humanities and arts graduates.

He adds that about a third of all college students major in fields that have very poor job prospects.

Choose well: nearly 300,000 college grads work in minimum-wage jobs

A college degree guarantees you nothing these days. This report by the Wall Street Journal drives home the point. According to the WSJ, 284,000 American college graduates are working in minimum-wage jobs. The challenging economic prospects facing college grads is a topic about which I’ve written extensively, either directly or indirectly, at here, here, here,here, here, here, here  and here.

This chart published by the WSJ is sobering:

Why are college grads underemployed?

Forty-eight percent of college graduates are in jobs that do not require a four-year degree. Indeed, 37% are in jobs that don’t even require more than a high school diploma. The reason (according to the Center for College Affordability and Productivity [CCAP]): “The supply of jobs requiring college degrees is growing more slowly than the supply of those holding such degrees.” In short, supply is exceeding demand.

If you’re looking at graduating from college in the next 10 years, don’t expect things to get better. In fact, they will probably get worse, in the judgment of the CCAP. If you want to understand the reasons, I recommend reading CCAP’s policy paper issued last month, entitled Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed? But the real issue for you is, what can you do about it?

A bleak job market for college grads and what students can do about it

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today on a new study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity that confirms what we already knew: many recent college graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a college degree. But it may be worse than we thought. According to the report, nearly half of the 2010 graduates are underemployed, holding relatively low-paying and low-skilled jobs.

Unquestionably, the job market for new college grads has been and is bleak. The economy isn’t generating enough jobs to employ all the college grads in their fields of study. Although the situation may improve somewhat if the economy improves its rate of growth, that’s a big if. Robotics and globalization are restructuring the workforce, so there is a real question about the economy’s ability to reach full employment in the near to mid term. In any case, a prudent student beginning his or her college studies should assume the job market will be hypercompetitive when he or she graduates. So what impact should this have on your decisions?