Colleges Lie to Students to Fatten Wallets

A weak labor market already has left HALF of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge - if they even have any skills an knowledge after years at a do nothing Universities run by tenured academics who grow fat on a largesse of student loans, desperate parents and unmotivated students. 

Workforce entrants with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s ensureing they can never pay off the higher cost of education and mounting student loans. An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the slim chances of those holders of generic think-and-do bachelor’s degrees.

Opportunities for college graduates vary widely. While there’s strong demand in science, engineering and health fields, arts, education and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that eliminated midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Perhaps Obama had it right to blame our problems on ATMs!

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.  Most future bachelor degree job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages. 4 years of University at the College of Do-Little qualifies you as a bed pan emptier.

This, despite the razor, laser focus that new job market entrants possess. (I'm kidding - I can't even write that without giggling).

Here is what one genius "creative writing" grad says:

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.  Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe "languished" for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. (What are they thinking???)

Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage (I bet he wouldn't "languish" if minimum wage was $1 per hour!), says he has received financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career as either a barista, a post-hole auger or a bed-pan maintenance technician.

So what does it mean for the rest of us? It means more out of work non-contributors capable of feeding themselves protesting that "the man" has shafted them, and then ultimately stiffing all of us with their estimated $1 trillion in student loans, money transferred to the academics to teach the kids nothing and deliver worthless McDegrees. In defense of the Universities, the teacher unions have screwed up public education so badly that the precious little snow flakes couldn't graduate in a program more strenuous than "creative writing".

So what does the McUniversity recommend for those students that can't get a job?

You guessed it - more education!

David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, said a bachelor’s degree can have benefits that aren’t fully reflected in the government’s labor data. He said even for lower-skilled jobs such as waitress or cashier, employers tend to value bachelor’s degree-holders more highly than high-school graduates, paying them more for the same work and offering promotions.  Longer-term government projections also may fail to consider “degree inflation,” a growing wothlessness of bachelor’s degrees that could make them more commonplace in lower-wage jobs but inadequate for higher-wage ones.

There you have it. Cold in it's reality and stark in it's application. Most college graduates today will have a less than 50% chance of obtaining a job in a career path that pays less than it did 15 years ago, and will have to pay off double the student loans and pay double for their education.

Or stiff the rest of us in the process.

I said double half caf skinny....