This data is pretty useless without data from other time periods.<p>And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. We use stories of the "I'm $200,000 in debt from my Ivy league B.A. in English and no one wants to hire me!" nature to justify that higher education is becoming irrelevant.<p>But I think we're all missing several pieces of the puzzle. One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA? OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years.<p>I do agree that higher education is broken. But higher education is broken in every single freaking country. The French spend less time in college, but they have a higher unemployment rate than us. Kenya's universities are based on entrance exams that encourages memorization and discourages critical thinking and imagination. Asia's universities are based on elite entrance exams where students to spend up to a year studying for.<p>Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world.
This is horribly confusing "current job" with "lifetime earnings".<p>I took 2 months off last year to go skiing in Colorado with some of my friends who were ski bums. One in particular was about 26, was a web developer with a CS degree, and had been a ski bum for 3 years.<p>During that time he had been a janitor/house cleaner. Was that using his degree? Obvously not. Did it pay the bills and allow him to ski every single day while working in the late afternoon/evening? It sure did.<p>This year he moved back and is going to graduate school and consulting on the side (why he cleaned toilets instead of consulting the whole time still escapes me). He is back on his "real" career after taking that time to do what he wanted to do with his life.<p>Honestly, I don't think it is a bad thing.
"I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning"<p>I'm not sure how that follows from the data. I'd be more likely to conclude that the job market doesn't support the levels of college graduates being produced.
[citation needed]<p>Seriously, is there a central index of janitors somewhere listing their highest level of educational achievement from which a precise number like 5057 can be read out? Did they interview twenty janitors, find one who claimed to have a PhD, and extrapolate? Did they derive the number completely <i>ex anum</i>? Because I'm finding it difficult to believe.
This article, and many (not all) of the comments here, are really missing an important point: that if you don't view a bachelor's degree as vocational training, but rather as the education proper to any free person---i.e. the liberal arts ideal---then you would expect a lot of people with at least bachelor's degrees working in fields that don't, on surface, "require" them.<p>The idea of college (=university) students having a specialisation (a "major" area of study) is not by any means a new one, but the idea that this tightly corresponds to one's career and serves as a sort of vocational training program, that's pretty new. Schooling of that nature used to be found primarily in apprenticeships and vocational schools.
There's a ton of jobs that society deems as bad that are in fact not bad at all. "Garbage men" in certain cities, for example, make quite a nice living.<p>I just think that sometimes we see "Janitor" and think that it's automatically bad. Too often, we don't even scratch the surface or know the whole story.<p>And (honestly not joking), Good Will Hunting is a great movie.
What percentage of those janitors earned their degrees in the US? Are many of them immigrants?<p>If you are calling out the US education system, the questions above have to be answered.
As someone who switched from the "low educated" level to the "higher" one (and I did that myself, not from Uni. or anything else, but just reading on the web and opening my mind), I do value a lot Higher Education.<p>It improves quality. Wouldn't it be better if a waiter in Tunisia speaks English well to improve the tourists experience.<p>The problem is that there is no university for waiters. It seems stupid, but just think twice of it. If you provide them higher language education (how they speak to customers, answer their questions) and formal practice (how they should put the food, ask for payments...). This won't take 3 year, may be only one, but would probably rise their salaries.<p>And so, the waiter, carpenter, bartender... salary increase. This follow up with a high purchase power, more sales, better companies, higher salaries for Engineers, doctors...<p>May be I'm wrong? I'm open for discussion about that.
"[T]here are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees."<p>Not clear what "professional" degrees they're referring to here, so doesn't sound like it's just Ph.D.'s. (MBAs, JDs, MFAs, MPHs?)
His argument is a fallacy.<p>A parking lot attendant or janitor does not require even a high school education. So does that mean we should stop investing in high school education too?<p>There are always exceptional people outside the normal parameters.<p>But the higher the level of education in any social group the better off the entire group will be in the long term, whatever the individual variations.
"there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees."<p>So, the titles wrong. Professional degree != Ph.D. right?
I think there is a net positive effect on society of more people having decent educations and committing to learn past the compulsory levels, even if these skills aren't put to good use in a direct way with a job.<p>What would be their solution, you can't retroactively decide that certain people shouldn't have attended college when down the track they either can't or decide not to take up a job in their field.
This argument is circular, at least with respect to the Ph.Ds. The primary field of employment for those with Ph.Ds is higher education. The deal is they are paid by universities to teach students and do research. When there is less funding for the university and less students to teach, there is also less funding for research. And less money to hire Professors.<p>The fact that so many with Ph.Ds are underemployed is symptomatic of a lack of funding for these institutions. Using that data to claim that it reveals that these institutions are over funded reveals a lack of understanding of the field in question.<p>Furthermore, the rest of the posted argument takes the data out of context. The context is one of the worst economic downturns of the last hundred years. With the highest unemployment and underemployment rates we've seen in a long time.<p>Of course there are tons of people with college degrees working shit jobs. We knew that already.<p>Finally, those who the author calls "higher education apologists" want higher education to be a general thing not simply because it leads to more productive citizens, but rather because of the value society as a whole receives when the standard of education is higher. Especially with respect to our citizen's duties toward our Democratic society.<p>"In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." --Thomas Jefferson
> my feeling that diminishing returns have set in to investments in higher education<p>That's seeing people only as a black box slave-like "workforce", giving them "education" as well as food to sustain your busyness<p>> Now it is true that college has a consumption as well as investment function. People often enjoy going to classes [...]<p>It has many other functions too, for the human beeings beiing "educated". If done well, it can even give them critical thought process, and knowledge about certain topics of their environement. In eastern europe countries, the aboundance of educated people in a beauraucratic regime which did not propose so much interesting life openings contributed to its fall.<p>> [...] increasingly costly and unproductive forms of special pleading by a sector that abhors transparency and performance measures.<p>Just like the banking sector, the pharmaceutical sector, etc... Performance is a word people often use meaning fittness to a metrics relevant to their particular interests.<p>> Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not.<p>Which only means the balance of powers is changing. Care to ellaborate about why and how ? Otherwise it is just saying : specialized labour is less needed by US industry, so less people have to be trained. Ok, agreed (or not), so let's give them education instead.
Higher education is useless without the job market to sustain it. Most people don't spend 50k+ on a college degree to be better "educated". They do so in anticipation of improving their lives, not making them worse. I have a BS in Mathematics and Chemistry and neither of those degrees has improved my life, only limited my jobs to those that require someone to have a degree and of those, the pay is less than most waiters/waitresses make. The more you push for everyone to attend higher education and the less jobs are created, then you have a debt ridden "educated" soceity that can't afford to pay for their student loans. Which then the government has to do something about, which means all the tax payers have to pay for. So now we're all smart and poor. Sounds like a bad plan to me.
The problem is that for a lot of the jobs listed as "underemployment" the nash equilibrium is that a significant percentage of these jobs will always have bachelors degrees. If you can get a receptionist with a bachelors degree, would you hire one that is right out of high-school?
The well-known but thoroughly ignored issue in this article: college has become all-but-a-necessity to get a decent job in the US because having only a high school diploma doesn't even guarantee to an employer that one has basic literacy or math skills.
It would be more useful to know how many people with a bachelor's degree are under-employed against their will. A computer science graduate working as a janitor because he can't find a job is a problem. If after his course work he decides he wants to be a janitor, that's a different story.<p>What their majors were, and what college they were from would also be informative as other replies noted.
Doesn't that 5,057 include "other professional degrees"? Further, are these only from accredited schools? Both could greatly reduce the effect of this particular statistic. That said, it is always disheartening to be reminded of the poor folks who likely shelled out tons of money only to find there were no jobs on the other end.
This analysis would be much more useful if (a) lifetime earnings were factored in as a data point, and (b) schools were reported separately (a PhD from MIT is a lot different from one from University of Phoenix, but the referenced study seems to treat them as equal).
This is surprising but the study quoted says it explicitly:<p>* In general, marginal and average returns to college are not the same...<p>* Some marginal expansions of schooling produce gains that are well below average returns, in general agreement with the analysis of Charles Murray
I agree that higher education is on the brink of major change, but the author presents that data in a vacuum.<p>How about:<p>- What is the historical data set for higher-ed graduates aggregate? During recession?<p>- What fields of study are represented here? I would bet the data skews hard to BAs vs. BS.
Another aspect we have to consider is title inflation. It's no problem nowadays to buy a BA, MA or even doctoral degrees - it dont know how and if those fake degrees have been counted in the statistics.
Are these all graduates of US colleges? I can't find confirmation either way, but it's worth keeping in mind that college degrees from many countries are not comparable to US.
I'd love to see this broken down by major, GPA, toughness-of-curriculum and prestige-of-university. Assuming the claim isn't extrapolated from a single janitor.<p>Not all degrees are equal.
America has better <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility</a> then rest of the world.