And all degrees are not created equal, which should be obvious to anyone not dim of wit. Yet our public policies with regard to higher education (Including the president’s latest attempt to further subsidize student loans) insanely assumes that they are.
8 thoughts on ““College” Is Not A Generic Product”
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Sure. It is like I said it is not useless to get a college education but you certainly should carefully consider the subject and place you are graduating in if you have any expectations of getting a job once you graduate. Especially if you want a well paying job.
If I was in the US I would try to get my BSc in some place that wouldn’t be too expensive or some state school and only switch to a more well known school to take my MSc if I felt like taking one. Once you actually have a BSc you easily are financially self-sufficient and the MSc has a shorter duration than a BSc. With a bit of luck you might even find an MSc program where you pay your tuition partly or in full by working for the school.
Godzilla, I don’t disagree with what you said, but I’m not sure your argument fits the linked story. The NYT was suggesting that there is greater income inequality during a recession between people with BS degrees if ones BS is in Economics or Engineering vs Philosophy or Music. I guess the researcher was surprised to discover that people with majors related to an event, such as economics during a recession, would be in higher demand, while people who majored in art history would be in less demand.
There’s not an explicit opinion really given in the piece, but you have to wonder what the mindset of a person is who was surprised by the finding of the research.
I graduated in Computer Science around the end of the dot com boom. I remember a lot of people thought there would be a job shortage in my field back then. While the average salaries did go down after the bust the number of jobs remained high. Why? In an economic depression companies still do software development except it becomes more focused on low-cost software to reduce the amount of menial work and hence boost productivity for business processes rather than developing mass applications that may have no measurable profit whatsoever.
Today the software development industry is in a second boom developing tons of crap software for mobile devices. Software development is *not* in a recession right now. The economic recession was mainly in the construction and banking sector not mine.
IMO the construction bubble was fueled by the articially low interest rates provided by the Fed, ECB and the other national banks. The only way out of this economic morass in the long term IMO will be to raise interest rates much like what happened after the 1970s oil crisis. The thing is the debt levels are so high right now what will happen instead is what happened in Japan with their lost decade thanks to their negative interest rates.
you have to wonder what the mindset of a person is who was surprised by the finding of the research
News articles are written by journalists. Was there anything else you needed to know? 🙂
Low interest rates punish savers and benefit debtors. The government, which controls interest rates, is the biggest debtor of all. It isn’t likely it will increase rates. Raising interest rates isn’t likely to improve the economy. IMO, the best thing the government could do is to cut the regulatory and tax burden on businesses.
“College” may not be a generic product, but a “student” may not be a generic person who may be directed into a technical major because it is perceived to be more renumerative.
You could think that Engineering is an intrinsically prosperous profession as the student learns how to apply Ohm’s law, load a beam, and measure the discharge coefficient of a nozzle. In our increasingly technology using society, an engineer is able to bring things into being, not purely by the labor of one’ hands but by abstract thinking based on a mix of creativity and reason. An engineer creates something of value out of pure thought.
On the other hand, my momma tol’ me that there is a kind of generational social ladder, where the wage earners of on generation perform unskilled farm or factory labor, the next generation learns a skilled “trade”, the generation after that crosses over to the office suite by becoming engineers, whose aspiration is that their children become physicians, attorneys, or corporate executives. Momma went as far to warn me that the prosperity of engineers was linked to preceding rungs on that ladder, that the salaries of engineers in the corporate world was linked to what unions could negotiate for tradespeople, otherwise “they couldn’t get you endure the rigors of engineering school, you would instead find yourself apprenticed to a pipe fitter.”
I am not so sure of the instrinsic prosperity of engineering, where not only is labor “outsourced”, so is engineering design. There is also that brass ring of “starting your own business”, that there are people with the gift to do that is essential to the workings of our society, but how does that work for the mass of people seeking to support themselves and maybe even a family in today’s world.
Some people are forced in that direction to earn a decent living. The “family” farm was always a “small business” and always will be as even the modest compromise with collectivism, the corporation, doesn’t work in farming regardless of what the Left tells us about “corporate farms.” It is just that the families, like the Corleone family, are turning into fairly substantial empires, but they are still connected by blood relations as that is the only way to get the trust level to get as precarious an enterprise as agriculture to work.
Just as with farming, where you have to have a lot of Eddie Albert’s enthusiasm for “fresh air” or you will throw up your hands and give up, you need a certain geek enthusiasm for tech to be an engineer.
Think of the engineering curriculum that tacks on, what is it, an added 20% of credit hours, not leaving much time to partake of a “party school”, at least in the days before instructor evaluation-driven grade inflation. Traditionally men, and yes, it was traditionally men, and perhaps men on the autism spectrum apart from who is that self-taught circuit-design genius (Jeri Ellsworth) who narrates her You-tube videos of sampling demodulators in a Valley Girl accent? Men would have hobbies like amateur radio, model airplanes, modifying cars, they knew they wanted to be engineers, and “all that math and theory” of engineering college was accepted as “boot camp” followed by specialist combat training to follow their calling.
What I worry about is that we have wrecked the economy along with the usual division of labor and skills in that economy, ans students are going to take the sensible course of shunning anything with “Studies” in the official name, and they are flooding into the engineering majors, especially with the encouragement of “pick a major where you can get a job.” Of course there is a Movement afoot that we can make an Engineering degree easier to acquire, both in financial and mental strain, with “blended learning” and “flipped classrooms.” Engineering education Deans and Department Chairs are welcoming this wave of fresh enrollment because the only way to succeed to is to grow — the academic version of build more barns and acquire more land of neighbors who have given up.
We are going to get a lot of students “not cut out to be engineers”, either because they lack aptitude or because (again traditionally), not being math geniuses, they are not drawn by their natural interests and are willing to suffer through “all that theory” without holding it against their instructors. But the current tabula rasa education theories are that if a student cannot learn Engineering, the instructor simply isn’t making the work clear enough or entertaining enough.
There is still plenty of work for people working on things like plumbing. It is perfectly fine to get a trade school job and not go to college at all. I know several people working on trade jobs and they earn about the same pay as an inexperienced engineer. If they have their own small business, with a couple of people working for them, they earn more than a lot of experienced engineers do.
What is not surprising is that in an economic downturn the jobs most highly valued are those further down the needs pyramid. If you have limited disposable income will you still go out for dinner every week or will you start cooking your own meals at home? Will you go to the theater or watch LOLcats on Youtube?
College is not a Generic Product and Students are not a Generic commodity.
Not all students are suited for engineering, very few engineering students are suited for
sales, marketing or business.
Steve Jobs said the most useful class he attended while at Reed was “Calligraphy”.
He developed an appreciation for design.
The general problem is we don’t produce enough jobs that can soak up the kids coming
out of college.
The general problem is we don’t produce enough jobs that can soak up the kids coming
out of college.
It’s mostly a problem because someone gets in the way of that job production. I think you might have heard something along those lines here before.