Why Are So Many College Graduates Driving Taxis?

Because our lower education system pounds the idea of &quot;you&#x27;re nothing if you don&#x27;t go to college&quot; into everyone&#x27;s heads for twelve years. We&#x27;ve all been told that if we go through college and get the degree, we&#x27;ll be all set in life. I think the millennials have it worst of all so far but it&#x27;s not just them.<p>Somewhere along the lines, college changed from being a stepping stone to the goal in and of itself.. and no one considered what comes after.

I think it&#x27;s clear why. It used to be that most jobs could be performed without any particular major. Instead, a college degree was taken as a generic business indicator that you know how to work. People with degrees in hard sciences could always take entry-level computer jobs with no special training. Technical specialization has resulted in a situation where businesses cannot find enough high technology workers and the students exiting colleges have less useful liberal arts degrees in this economy like journalism. In the past, this was solved by on-the-job training.<p>Today, large businesses often solve this worker shortage by outsourcing the job to substandard contractors in countries with far lower pay bands. Businesses would rather pay to train a cheap, blank slate worker than pay the premium to train an American with a four-year college degree. This can be profoundly short-sighted, but the most recent management school generation is too often wedded to bean counting and manipulating vanity metrics. They often fail to grasp subjective and hidden business costs. HP&#x27;s Carly Fiorina is a classic example. She wanted to cut R&amp;D to zero because she believed it was purely a cost center and produced no profit. If anything cannot be counted, it does not count.

Personally, I think that the real reason why people with degrees are having a hard time getting jobs is that at one time, having a degree meant you came from money. The problem now? this is diluted. More and more poor folk have degrees, and so it&#x27;s no longer a reliable class indicator. (the positive view is that it&#x27;s also possible that class indicators are becoming less important.)<p>The problem was that they confused cause with effect, and decided that we should put a bunch of effort into getting degrees for poor people. This diluted the degree as a class indicator.<p>Now, I don&#x27;t have a degree or rich parents, so obviously, I haven&#x27;t seen the parts of the job market that rely on those class markers. I&#x27;m the riff-raff that those filters are designed to keep out.<p>However, from where I stand? most individual contributor jobs in my industry that I&#x27;m actually qualified for are open to me. In the tech sector, the value of a degree is smaller than actual work experience. (I mean, if you actually &#x2F;learned&#x2F; something while getting that degree, that&#x27;s pretty valuable. But the paper itself is not.) Internships? they are paid. Maybe not paid a lot, but something, and the real companies usually pay substantially.<p>As far as I can tell, unpaid internships are &#x27;class marker inflation&#x27; - &quot;Not only did my parents have enough cash to put me through four years of art history, and the contacts to get me this internship, they could support me while I worked for free!&quot;

There was a mix-up of cause and effect, to some degree. Since early colleges were limited to a very small percentage of the population who tended to have strong parental guidance and even hired tutors, the average academic ability of college graduates was much higher than non-college graduates.<p>The response was that, then, if everyone had a college degree, everyone would be so able. The problem then is twofold:<p>First, people without a strong primary education background went to college, forcing colleges to either lower standards and&#x2F;or spend time remediating (financial pressure from governments to tie funding to graduation rates sure didn&#x27;t help to preserve high standards).<p>Second, the presence of a college degree as an indicator of an unusually high level of prior primary education and academic ability disappeared since so many people have a college degree.

The literal answer is, because there are too many college graduates. The US educational system, and society&#x27;s view of education, is still rigged for a mid-20th-century rose-tinted view of the future that never came to pass, and was never going to.

It&#x27;s called degree&#x2F;credentials inflation, and it&#x27;s caused by a combination of persistent mass unemployment and the message that education can solved it.<p>Now, mass unemployment simply cannot be solved via education - the parable of the 100 dogs and 92 bones was discussed here not so long ago. (The original link was this one, I believe: <a href="http://alittleecon.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-parable-of-100-dogs-and-92-bones-why-the-work-programme-cant-work/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alittleecon.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;19&#x2F;the-parable-of-1...</a>)<p>However, having a good education and credentials does increase the chances that you&#x27;ll get one of the 92 metaphorical bones, so of course it makes sense to get one. But this only really works reliably if your education and your credentials are <i>better</i> than those of your peers.<p>This leads to an arms race which explains why degrees are become simultaneously worth less and more important.<p>Edited to add: The effect on degrees is actually old hat already. These days, it&#x27;s about an inflation of unpaid internship to spice up your CV, at least for those in non-technical fields.

College-style education is both expensive and risky. Expensive not only from tuition but also four years of lost earnings and missed actual experience. Risky because academia is only loosly connected to the working world - so much of what is taught will turn out to be irrelevant.<p>While still unproven alternative education techniques such as online or internships&#x2F;apprenticeships may turn out to be more effective and much less expensive. If employers become convinced traditional diplomas and degrees are unreliable indicators of quality and better alternatives exist, we could see a sudden shift away from traditional education.<p>Would you rather hire someone with a middle ranking college degree or two years experience and a letter of recommendation from their boss? Or a certificate from a reputable online program in the exact skill you need?

&quot;because the demand for cognitive skills associated with higher education, after rising sharply until 2000, has since been in decline.&quot;<p>how about..<p>because the quality of a degree has been falling for decades and it is now widely known outside of government and very large corporations that the skills people have are valuable but the skills a college claims a given person has are fairly unlikely to track reality or to be real world valuable.<p>Said the federal land grant college graduate!

I am still waiting for more trade schools &#x2F; bootcamps and apprenticeships to start opening up in the states.<p>We should be training people for the job that they will eventually hold instead of teaching theoretical scenarios and looking over case studies.<p>Its already started to gain a foothold in the tech industry and I believe it will be even more in demand as college degrees become less valuable.

&quot;If anything, GPS technology may have had the opposite effect.&quot;<p>They&#x27;re clearly drawing the wrong conclusion. GPS makes being a cabbie easier, which makes it less valuable for people to put the time into becoming a skilled professional cabbie, which makes driving a cab a more feasible option for someone who looks at it as a temporary job.

Did the study take into account the rise of private higher education companies that have sprung up in the past twenty years (like the University of Phoenix)? These colleges are publicly traded companies that have campuses all over the country. They have a higher acceptance rate, they focus a great deal of marketing to lower income communities and they notoriously accept people that may not necessarily be ready for college (as long as they can pay the fees). Maybe the story isn&#x27;t &quot;the labor market is so bad that even college graduates are taking menial jobs&quot; but instead &quot;more blue collar workers are getting degrees (that don&#x27;t necessarily get them better paying jobs)&quot;.

There are a lot of ruderless - granted smart - young people out there who were essentially abandoned to the education system by their parents. If you don&#x27;t have any plausible goal in mind when you go to university, is it really surprising that you end up nowhere after university? All the education in the world won&#x27;t help you if, at the end of the day, you just don&#x27;t really want to do any particular job.

&gt; &quot;If cognitive skills became less valuable in the labor market, wouldn’t one expect wages to fall more for college graduates than for others?&quot;<p>Apparent stagnation could also occur if a small proportion of graduates are become significantly overvalued for non-cognitive skills while a majority experience wage stagnation or decline.

The Obama economy.