With the help of a small army of researchers and associates (most importantly, Chris Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe, and Chris Denhart) and starting with help from Douglas Himes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) has unearthed what I think is the single most scandalous statistic in higher education. It reveals many current problems and ones that will grow enormously as policymakers mindlessly push enrollment expansion amidst what must become greater public-sector resource limits.
Here it is: approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation’s stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor’s degree or more. (We are working to integrate some earlier Edwin Rubenstein data on this topic to give us a more complete picture of this trend).
How did my crew of Whiz Kids arrive at this statistic? We found some obscure but highly useful BLS data for 1992 that provides occupational/educational attainment data for the entire labor force, and similar data for 2008 (reported, to much commentary, in this space and by CCAP earlier). We then took the ratio of the change in college graduates filling these less skilled jobs to the total increase in the number of college graduates. Note I use the word “increase.” Enrollment expansion/increased access policy relates to the margin—to changes in enrollments/college graduates over time.
To be sure, there are some issues of measurement, judgment, and data comparability. With this in mind, I had my associates calculate the incremental unskilled job to college graduate ratio using different assumptions about the data. Even with alternative assumptions, a majority of the increased college graduate population is doing jobs that historically have been filled by persons with lesser education.
The exact numbers in the initial calculation are broken down as follows: In 1992 the BLS reports that total college graduate employment was 28.9 million, of whom 5.1 million were in occupations which the BLS classified as “noncollege level jobs” while in 2008 the BLS data indicate that total college graduate employment was 49.35 million, with 17.4 million in occupations classified as requiring less than a bachelor’s degree.
An example or two from specific occupations is useful. In 1992 119,000 waiters and waitresses were college degree holders. By 2008, this number had more than doubled to 318,000. While the total number of waiters and waitresses grew by about 1 million during this period, 20% of all new jobs in this occupation were filled by college graduates. Take cashiers as well. While 132,000 cashiers possessed college degrees in 1992, by 2008, 365,000 cashiers were college graduates. As with waiters and waitresses, 20% of new cashiers since 1992 are college graduates. (The sources for all of these data are Table 1 of the Summer 1994 Occupational Outlook Quarterly and the Employment Projection Program “Occupations” tables on the BLS Web site)
Six quick observations on these numbers:
First, the push to increase the number of college graduates seems horribly misguided from a strict economic/vocational perspective. It is precisely that perspective that is emphasized by those, starting with President Obama, who insist that we need to have more college graduates.
Second, the data suggest a horrible decline in the productivity of American education in that the “inputs” used to achieve any given human capital (occupational) outcome have expanded enormously. More simply, it takes 18 years of schooling (including kindergarten and the typical fifth year of college to get a bachelor’s degree) for persons to get an education to do jobs that a generation or two ago people did with 12-13 years of education (graduating more often from college in four years and sometimes skipping kindergarten).
Third, a sharp rise in the dependency ratio—those too old or too young to work relative to the work age population is coming because of the aging of the American population. This means we need to increase employment participation in younger ages (e.g., 18 to 23) where participation is low today because of the rising college participation rate. The falling productivity of American education is aggravating a serious problem—a shortage of workers to sustain a growing population of those unable to care for themselves.
Fourth, all of this supports the notion that credential inflation arises from a perceived need by individuals to demonstrate potential employment competence through a piece of paper, i.e. a college diploma. Employers are using education as a screening and signaling device, at a low cost directly to them (although not costless because of the taxes they pay to sustain much of this), but at a high cost to the prospective employees and to society as a whole.
Fifth, this shows that the current problem of college student employability is not a new, and merely temporary, problem.
Lastly, I am saddened that this is happening. Many of those advocating more access are well meaning and have pure motives, but they are ignorant of the evidence. But higher education is all about facts, knowledge—learning how the world works and disseminating that information to others. Some in higher education KNOW about all of this and are keeping quiet about it because of their own self-interest. We are deceiving our young population to mindlessly pursue college degrees when very often that is advice that is increasingly questionable.
23 Responses to The Great College-Degree Scam
dank48 - December 10, 2010 at 9:29 am
It’s good to see a straightforward discussion of this situation. Not everyone should go to college. Not everyone who does should graduate. Not every graduate should go on to grad school. Not everyone who does should complete that advanced degree. Not everyone who does should teach at the college level. Not everyone who teaches at the college level should be tenured. Et cetera.
The candid look at the complicity of the higher education establishment in this is bracing and encouraging.
gypsyboots - December 10, 2010 at 9:44 am
At the same time, those blue-collar jobs that remain and can’t be exported are requiring ever more training and professionalism–not necessarily a degree, but demanding vocational training.
Today’s blue-collar jobs require at least as much smarts as so-called “professional” careers. Yet even in today’s desperate employment situation, many blue-collar occupations in manufacturing, transportation, etc. have trouble finding the next generation of skilled workers.
The average age of Mississippi towboat pilots and captains is the mid-fifties. This is a career where you can go from being an entry-level deckhand to a pilot making six figures in a few years if you work hard and get the necessary licenses. And this is just one example.
dld18 - December 10, 2010 at 10:17 am
This is a thought-provoking analysis.
You note that “approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less.” I would be interested in an exploration of the impact of graduates from for-profit institutions in that 60 percent, as many of those degrees are vocationally oriented.
ecelibrary - December 10, 2010 at 11:27 am
It’s the education system’s fault that tertiary grads end up as cashiers and waitrons? Not that the education system is perfect, but this is an absurd, blinkered conclusion. Go do some basic economic research and come back to me with a rewrite.
lchblumer - December 10, 2010 at 11:49 am
Did no one else see this? You are writing for the Chronicle for Higher Education, yet you do know know the difference between the word “perspective” and “prospective” (which would have been the correct word to use in describing potential employees)….? It’s no wonder Education is such a mess when even the people writing about it can’t use the English language correctly…
theradicalmoderate - December 10, 2010 at 1:06 pm
The educational productivity drop is a big enough problem on its own, but the major unaddressed problem is that the whole system is still oriented around the old industrial model of education, where the goal was to turn out well-rounded individuals that had the time to learn their jobs over the course of a single-career lifetime.
That era is gone, only to return if something really bad happens between now and then. In the new era, productive individuals will need complete retraining several times in their lifetime to assume radically different careers, as technological innovations and their attendant productivity increases render their previous occupations obsolete. Furthermore, each of those retraining periods has to be short, focused, and highly productive, since very few will be able to bear the double-whammy of loss of income from their old job coupled with the cost of the retraining.
Serving the needs of this new breed of worker requires a wholesale change in almost every aspect of the educational pipeline, including advances in pedagogy (adultagogy? oldfartagogy?), much finer-grained and verifiable credentialing, more extensive shifts away from the campus/classroom delivery model, and, last but not least, the kinds of affordability improvements that can only come from commoditization of the educational product.
Our current economic distress stems in large part from the simple fact that American labor costs several times as much for the comparable value that can be obtained overseas. (If that doesn’t sound like the definition of “bubble,” I don’t know what does.) There are only two ways out of this situation: we either wait for our labor prices to equalize with the rest of the world, or we find ways of making our workers highly specialized, highly valuable “known quantities” to prospective employers. The latter will be a lot more fun than the former.
rasmussenlibrary - December 10, 2010 at 6:26 pm
“…it takes 18 years of schooling (including kindergarten and the typical fifth year of college to get a bachelor’s degree) for persons to get an education to do jobs that a generation or two ago people did with 12-13 years of education (graduating more often from college in four years and sometimes skipping kindergarten).”
Perhaps the real problem is, why does it now take five additional years to prepare someone for the same job? And, maybe even, is it our secondary educational system that is failing to prepare individuals for these jobs that ‘the BLS considers relatively low skilled’ and not requiring a college education?
raincity - December 11, 2010 at 3:48 pm
I wonder if the authors could discuss their findings in light of the June 2010 report by the Center on Education and the Workforce (Georgetown University) entitled “Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Educational Requirements Through 2018.” Something isn’t squaring up between this article and the data and conclusions of the Georgetown report.
http://cew.georgetown.edu/JOBS2018/
formeradjunct - December 13, 2010 at 10:24 am
This doesn’t strike me as a particularly new observation.
dmeagher - December 13, 2010 at 11:22 am
Thomas Jefferson’s view of education as the foundation of democracy and a prerequisite for wise voting is relevant to this discussion, raising the consideration beyond a consideration of employment. However, the likelhood of crushing debt required for many indivudials to get that education complicates the situation even further.
betterschools - December 13, 2010 at 11:24 am
Nice work Richard.
These findings offer further support for requiring all colleges and universities to be completely transparent with respect to program specific impact. It is inexcusable that you should have to mine BLS data with such imprecision to estimate the nature and impact of degrees on students.
I hope you can be counted on to add your voice to those asking the Department of Education to require all institutions of higher education to track and analyze impact data longitudinally and make such available data available — by program — to prospective students.
I also appreciate your noting the extensive limitation in the inferences made possible by the comparisons. To the extent that you seem to be, and others are, interpreting these findings as evidence that fewer citizens should experience college, I think the interpretation is founded on too narrow a slice of empirical relations. These findings point to rich possibilities for further research into the changing nature of jobs and the incremental contributions of education to success in personal and social life.
solipsisticallyyours - December 13, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Hey, let’s compare the entry-level employment statistics of two of worst recessions in recent, draw wide-ranging, retrograde conclusions from it, add a sheen of researchspeak high seriousness, acknowledge limitations that don’t exist ignoring the real ones, and post it up on academe’s highest-profile website to feed the basest of its readers’ self-loathing! It will be a smash!
tunaman - December 14, 2010 at 6:47 am
This is an interesting article, as are articles of a similar nature which quote it (see Lowry at National Review online) that have linked to it.
I wonder though what the sociologists would make of it… e.g. out there in the academic landscape is the valid concept of ‘emerging adulthood’ which explains that a multitude of 21 and older men / women are living at home with Mom & Pop, avoiding responsibility and accepting a lot of low level employments because they don’t want to or haven’t grown up yet (and for other reasons). It is only when they start reaching their late 20s / early 30s, so it is said, that they begin to show more the signs of adulthood – financial independence, living away from home, marriage, children etc.
Google ‘emerging adulthood’ and read what shows up. The chicken & egg question is therefore: is it scarcity of jobs which is producing this behavior (recession aside), or is it an immaturity such that grown children prefer the comforts of home until they eventually come around to taking on more responsibility?
Let’s also admit that university contributes to delayed maturity; these are places where our children can play, study, and/or hook up, without necessarily being engaged to be prepared for the ‘real’ world. Certainly this is true for younger men I have come to know recently. Are the women any more mature than men, given that have been a higher number of women graduates than men over the past decade?
in light of these trends, one of my current goals for my Jr high and younger children is to help prepare them to be as mature as my parents’ generation were when they reached their early 20s. I hope and pray so, that this will give them a ‘headstart’ to becoming productive and contributing members to society.
Thanks!
dokholliday - December 14, 2010 at 12:51 pm
“A specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less.”
William J Mayo
“Given one well-trained physician of the highest type he will do better work for a thousand people than ten specialists.”
William J Mayo
“The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life, the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician.”
William J Mayo
f_r_duplantier - December 14, 2010 at 2:50 pm
There was never any debate in our family over the purpose of college. We all entered the groves of academe to get a well-rounded education, not to acquire a passport to a career. I can still remember vividly the disgust my father displayed when he related to me a conversation he’d had with the university’s director of admissions (DoA?), for whom higher education was simply a means of warehousing young people and keeping them out of the workforce for as long as possible — presumably to protect the previously employed from low-paid competitors. (http://politickles.com/blog/?p=3168)
sanford - December 15, 2010 at 10:57 am
The purpose of college must be to teach rational thinking. This means understanding basic principles, the logical conclusions, empirical verifications, and the need to change the principles due to a better logical understanding or empirical evidence. Instead, college professors sell their thoughts, not focusing on rational thinking. How else can we explain so many left-wing professors, when left ideas violate the rules of rationality? See the new book, Rational Thinking, Government Policies, Science, and Living. See also the book, Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better.
richardrider - December 15, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Tipping, minimum wage and the resulting misallocation of resources
In my ongoing effort to eventually piss off everybody, here’s my outing of the waiter tipping racket in California — which applies to varying degrees to all states. It has caused a huge misallocation of resources (educated people), and predates the current recession.
A common error common in stories about tipping in California. Stetz asserts in passing that “waiters and waitresses . . . work below the traditional minimum wage because tips are an assumed supplement.”
True in many states, which have lower minimum wage for such tip-oriented jobs. Not true in CA.
Waiters, valets and indeed any hourly employee in CA are paid at least the full CA $8 minimum wage — plus tips (if any). This results in CA having some of the brightest, most over-educated waiters in the world.
It is very common for such workers to make a total of $15-$20 an hour — and more. Plus they “get paid” daily, and they usually forget to report the full amount of the tips for tax purposes.
Our ill-advised minimum wage policy results in what economists coldly call a “misallocation of resources.” Educated, intelligent people are performing menial work, wasting their talents doing work best left to less over-qualified workers (who indeed need the work just as badly). The productivity of America suffers as a result.
I’ve seen young dentists forgo starting their profession to remain as bartenders — making hundreds of dollars per night. [Why a dentist would prefer serving drinks over working inside people’s mouths – inflicting pain and earning hatred – is a mystery to me.] Throughout CA, there are talented people wasting their abilities waiting on tables, parking cars and doing other work best left to others.
Few of us have the courage to tip really low to reflect this economic windfall — and to encourage our talented tipees to find more productive work. But at the very least, don’t over-tip.
***
A couple other points:
– 1. Watch your bill. Some restaurants do not highlight the included gratuity when charged. Too many people tip on an already tipped bill. And the waiters too often fail to point out the duplication.
– 2. Don’t tip on the full bill – the part called “sales tax.” The sales tax has nothing to do with the restaurant’s product or service. With the sales tax, we are being “serviced” by the state – like cows being serviced by the local bull.
We’ve actually put waiters, waitresses and busboys in a position where they profit from higher sales taxes – which results in higher tips from most patrons. We’ve already got all the government workers voting for higher sales taxes – let’s not add the legions of restaurant staff to the “raise taxes” side.
***
One other thought (just in case I haven’t yet made an enemy out of ALL food service people).
The generous state of California provides a full minimum wage floor for folks who normally make their living off of tips. Naturally that wage is cranked into the price of the meal. Then we pay a tip on that inflated meal price. In essence, we pay a tip on the hidden extra wage.
‘Vat a country!
sskatz101 - December 19, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Many communnity college students nowadays are woefully ignorant (about some things): I have tried teaching Freshman Composition to 18-year-olds who literally do not know that the sun rises in the east but who know a lot about pop music, movies, video games, & porn. These students graduate from 12th grade with what, in my day, would have been considered 6th grade level competency in arithmetic, history, & writing skills. These students are brainwashed into believing that they must to to college. Once there, they clog the remedial English & math programs. Many of them are simply not capable of college level analytical work. But the system has a solution: ease them along until they graduate with a degree in sociology. Then they can get a good union gov’t job — where it doesn’t matter one whit that they are still abysmally ignorant.
aiyobro - December 20, 2010 at 9:08 pm
Colleges take all the smart kids, turn them into C students then cut off the rest who were either tortured by the bombs who take their problems out on people or b the elitest who dont trust anyone because they’re afraid joe camel will have the same job they do, then the people that fail go on to other subjects to get peices of paper that say that they’re better then everyone else in the rat race, while they work 24/7 so they can say they have a job and not spend a dime on their fellow class mates while they receive filtered media and recycled genres, because they know that its impossible to get a job anywhere unless you go to a private school and have had knowledge fed to you from a spoon since you were born while all the other people focused on dumb things like hand eye coordination and remembering simple generalitiies about stuff.
aiyobro - December 20, 2010 at 9:24 pm
The only jobs are to create destroy and rebuild, all the other jobs are for keeping people in line;)
leereyno - December 23, 2010 at 12:59 pm
How many have degrees in subjects that are of no use to anyone?
A degree in early childhood development MAY be of use to someone raising a child, depending upon whether or not the knowledge they gained from their studies is accurate and honest, as opposed to political radicalism couched in academic terms. But it will not prepare them for an intellectually challenging career in a field requiring mastery of difficult concepts. They are marginally more employable than someone with only a high school diploma, as this study has found.
When someone goes off to college and pursues what might best be called a recreational degree, they are doing themselves a greater disservice than they would by simply not going to college at all.
They are wasting time pursuing education that will not benefit them. The opportunity cost is considerable.
They are wasting money, often a great deal of money, borrowed at interest that they will have a hard time repaying in the menial position their “education” will guarantee them.
They are reducing the likelihood that they will ever actually attain a degree that will be of use to them. Whereas someone who went into the workforce out of high school might return to school in their twenties and get a real degree, someone who has earned a worthless degree will likely spend the rest of their life trying to get a return on that unwise investment.
There was a news story a few months ago about a woman who could not understand how her degree in women’s studies, obtained at a cost of $100,000 in student loans, resulted in her working at Starbucks with no hope for anything better. I honestly don’t know what she thought was going to happen, but somewhere along the line she got the idea in her head that there would be a meaningful career in her future. If she were a fluke that would be one thing, but cases like hers are all too common. Academic departments are flat out lying to their students about the value of the education they are receiving, especially departments whose justifications for even existing are sketchy at best.
I have a friend who pursued at Ph.D in Political Science because he had been assured that there were jobs to be had. In truth a Poli-Sci professor in a tenure track position will be lucky to earn 50k a year. Full professors don’t make much more than that. Because the field is dying, placements are hard to come by in the first place. Meanwhile the starting salary for most Business professors is about 120k a year, with full professors in many disciplines clearing over 200k. Business schools are flourishing. What did he do when he discovered all that? He switched to marketing and is now at UGA making over 140k a year as an assistant professor.
A college education isn’t a college education. It has no value except to the degree to which it prepares someone for what comes after: life, and especially a career. There is no magic pixie dust that gets rubbed on someone just because they came to campus and took a series of general studies courses that ultimately resulted in a degree of some sort. There is no “experience” to be had from this that would make a person better somehow. The days when someone could just “go to college” and somehow wind up with a good job are long gone. No one is impressed by a bachelor’s degree in sociology. That and a hair-cut will get you a job as a bank teller.
Meanwhile there are degree programs that are worth pursuing, and virtually everyone knows what they are. Business, engineering, hard sciences, medicine, law. Fields that, even if you don’t find a job doing what you studied directly, require a mastery of difficult concepts and the ability to apply them. Something an art history degree simply doesn’t provide.
newendeavor - December 23, 2010 at 11:47 pm
“Thomas Jefferson’s view of education as the foundation of democracy and a prerequisite for wise voting is relevant to this discussion, raising the consideration beyond a consideration of employment. However, the likelhood of crushing debt required for many indivudials to get that education complicates the situation even further.” This writer makes a keen observation and may have unearthed the connection between education, the Democratic Party, Socialism, and unemployment.
- Educated minds who are unemployed tend to be liberal
- Expanding education that results in underemployment will create more dependence on Government for debt forgiveness
- Greater socialism will result in strengthening the Democrat’s influence with voters.
- The lack of labor to fill unskilled jobs (while that workforce attends college) will create a climate that favors illegal immigration.
- An increase in illegal immigration will result in population growth rates among certain minorities that will favor social programs that are provided by the Democratic Party.
chairman1057 - December 24, 2010 at 8:18 am
I think it is important to get as much education as you can get, but what the article ommitted and what is the depressing part is that these new grads pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for degrees that are, in reality, worth only a fraction of that. I think it is ridiculous that some profs are paid six figure salaries in fields that are more a hobby that science and impractical in real life. What good are 60,000 graduates in liberal arts every year? I bet that is where the “under-utilized” graduates are.