Category Archives: millennials

Obama to support community colleges as a path to middle-class jobs

Posted on February 15, 2012 | 1 Comment

Now here’s a sign of progress. As the Center on American Progress reported:

President Barack Obama today [Feb 13] announced a new initiative to boost our nation’s community colleges and help workers attain the skills they need to earn middle-class jobs. President Obama’s Community College to Career Fund would invest $8 billion over the next three years to boost partnerships between community colleges and regional employers. This initiative, jointly administered by the Departments of Education and Labor, aims to train 2 million workers for careers in high-growth industries such as health care and advanced manufacturing.

Loyal readers, you know how I feel about community colleges and a quick path to advanced manufacturing. Win-win. And if employers get on board and help schools tailor their training to fit the local demands, it’s even better. (And “local demands” is important in this equation as young people are often looking for work near home, and employers are looking for local talent).

These advanced manufacturing jobs are high-paying with solid career ladders. I’ve been spending some time out at Austin Polytech, here in Chicago, a high school that is working very hard to train the next generation of manufacturing employees. The school, which serves a largely African American student body, has designed a career track for students that leads directly to advanced manufacturing jobs. The people behind the program are leaders in the city’s manufacturing community, and kids leave high school with a nationally recognized manufacturing credential–if all goes well. They also leave with pre-calculus classes and other advanced math because today’s factory worker isn’t stuffing sausages anymore. He or she is running machines that need computer programming to shave off a piece of metal to an nth degree.

And these jobs pay well. Starting salary for a young person out of high school is in the high $30s (without a college degree mind you), and the career path can take one to earnings of $80,000. Not bad for a day’s work.

The thing I like about the Polytech program is that it works with employers directly to place students in summer jobs first and later full-time jobs. And it urges employers to assign the young person a mentor to make sure both the employer and the employee are having a good experience. And, they also ask that the employers pay for continued training–which many employers willingly do. As one human resources director said of manufacturing jobs today, employees in their company are never done learning; constant training is a part of the job.

I tagged along with a student who was doing a mock interview with one of the employer partners, Arrow Gear, in Downers Grove. In this case, the young woman said upfront that she was going to college for engineering. For her, that’s probably a great decision. She loves math and she’s a sharp kid. But as I sat there, with 30 years of hindsight, I couldn’t help think, are you kidding me? Why not work a couple of years at $40,000 and then go to college? You’d have the money to pay for it instead of taking out loans, and you’d also have something truly valuable to bring an engineering degree: real experience in building things.

I know, I know, college is a great idea too. It truly is. But maybe because I came from a family that saw no shame in a hard day’s work, I don’t see a job in manufacturing as a “second place” prize. I see it as an interesting job that pays well and has a lot of learning potential.

Hopefully, the new funding for community colleges that Obama is promoting will help sharpen the classes that colleges offer, and make them more relevant and viable. If actual employers get involved and help shape the curriculum, that will certainly help. Right now, too many students get lost in a meandering stream of classes with a vague idea of “getting a degree.” Perhaps with a more direct, and clear, path from school to work, whether it be in manufacturing or health care (another booming field), more kids will see the wisdom of spending tuition money on something that will get them a foothold on a middle-class life. And perhaps as more kids meet with success, the second-class status that these routes now have will vanish.

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Do young people have too much time to think about only themselves?

Posted on January 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

I spent the weekend in a skilled nursing center with my 95-year-old father, and I met a young person, James, who at age 26 has done more inspiring work than many of us will do in a lifetime. His story makes me wonder about a couple of things, the first of which is whether this slower path to adulthood might just be giving kids a little too much time to focus on themselves–and how we might transform this slower path into something more. Read the full post over at Psychology Today.

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Posted in delayed adulthood, millennials, politics, work and earnings

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His and hers: Six tips for a happy marriage

Posted on December 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

This holiday was a big one for Rex and I. We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary on Christmas Eve. Twenty-five years ago, we took the El down to City Hall here in Chicago and tied the knot in front of a judge. It was a lovely ceremony–just the three of us. I think the judge said a few kind words of luck and we took the escalator up from the basement and out into the empty Loop for a breakfast at Petros diner and later a flight to a beach house in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where my family was waiting, unsuspecting. We sprung it on them at happy hour and had a fabulous impromptu wedding dinner of fresh fish and a “wedding pie” for dessert.

Twenty five years later, Rex and I took the El down to City Hall to retrace our steps, but alas, Christmas Eve was on Saturday this year and City Hall was closed. Petros was closed as well. But it didn’t matter. We were still together in the empty Loop.

And now we’re off to Buenos Aires to celebrate, so the blog will be on hiatus until Jan 10 or so.

But before we go, and without sounding too sanctimonious I hope but with 25 years of it under my belt, here’s my 6 tips for a successful marriage, followed by Rex’s 6 tips:

My list, in no particular order:

  1. Marry a decent person with a sense of humor.
  2. Learn to change. Marriage is about two people. That means your way of doing things butts up against someone else’s equally good way of doing things. And life will throw curve balls. Adapt.
  3. Learn to let it go. In the heat of the moment, take a breath, hold your tongute, and force yourself to laugh (at yourself usually). Do. not. dwell.
  4. Do things together, even things you personally don’t like.
  5. Don’t think the grass is greener on the other side. It ain’t.
  6. Don’t overanalyze things. It’s really not that complicated. Ever.

And here’s Rex’s list–and seriously, we did not compare before we made this list!

  1. Don’t just settle for someone because you think no one who is right for you will come along.
  2. Recognize that relationships start from a sexual attraction but its the emotional attachment that lasts for the long haul. But don’t let the physical die altogether.
  3. Marry someone you like. (see #2–it’s surprising how many people miss this one)
  4. Don’t carry a grudge. Everybody has differences.
  5. Be willing to compromise.
  6. Don’t obsess about things because there are no hard and fast rules.

There’s no secret to a good marriage, if you ask me. It’s just learning to be happy with life however it comes at you. And it’s nice when it comes at you with someone whom you’ve grown to love so deeply.

So what are your tips to good marriage or partnerships?

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Posted in marriage and relationships, personal meanderings

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We’re losing our sense of “we” in an iSociety

Posted on December 19, 2011 | 3 Comments

A few years back, a professor I know asked her Civics 101 students what “public” meant to them. Their answers are telling. To them, public meant poor people. Public housing, public assistance, public schools.

I thought of that as I read the latest salvo against our public schools, in this case the offers by private profiteers of a “choice” to dodge the public schools and flee to the safety of online courses–as chronicled in Lee Fang’s article for The Nation, and Stephanie Saul in the New York Times. It’s just the latest–but perhaps the most damaging– in a long line of retreat from public goods and into the arms of a world tailored to our unique selves.

This steady disappearance of the public systems we take part in daily is for many a sign of progress. But in this headlong race to privatize everything–and its cousin, tailoring everything to our circumstances, we risk losing the very fabric that stitches us together in a society. We risk losing the “public” spaces; the “we” in a rush for the “me.”

The daily interactions in public spaces, whether on a public bus, at the park, on our sidewalks and highways, in a classroom, at the doctor’s office, or at the DMV, are shared experiences, and ultimately meritocratic. Even Bill Gates has to renew his driver’s license. Our interactions remind us what we have in common with others–sometimes others we would not otherwise meet. The rules (wait your turn in line) and customs (say thank you to the bus driver) reflect back on us the order of our ideal society.

Public education is one of the most prominent of these public goods. It is in school that we learn to be part of a society, to share, to exchange, to take turns. It is where we forcibly shed the individual myopia and ego, where we first realize that there are better soccer players or spellers than us, or that not everyone is waiting with bated breath to hear our answer. It is where we realize that some kids have it harder than others.  We learn our ABCs and 123s, of course, but it is the physical togetherness and a shared experience that binds us. It is these shared experiences that make us feel so bound to our “Class of 1992″ or that makes us cheer wildly for our football team. It is this communal glue that provides us with an identity beyond ourselves.

When we whittle away at this public-ness, we run into trouble. When we carve ourselves off from public spaces via experiences tailored to our preferences and income level, it will nudge us ever closer to little islands of privacy–and disconnect us from the larger good. We will buy our way into a “concierge” medical service so we don’t have to “suffer” through a waiting room. We will gate ourselves off in our “own” communities so we don’t have to live next door to someone who might opt for pink flamingos in the yard. Or we can skip the classroom altogether and learn what we want online. The latter has been in the news of late as private corporations rush to offer “choice” to school children and their families through online classrooms.

The latest push to give children a choice to learn online instead of in a classroom is couched in language that suggests they will be rescued from the grip of the public. “Kids have been shackled to their brick-and-mortar school down the block for too long,” Ronald Packard, CEO of K12, Inc., a private company offering online courses (for a fee), told the New York Times, adding that for the first time, every child, regardless of where he or she lives, has a choice. (One hears in that choice a choice to withdraw).

Beyond the question of whether a private company, with a bottom line to attend to, can truly educate all children (aka, the public), there is the question I’ve been clumsily trying to make and that Tony Judt in Ill Fares the Land puts so much better: The “one-size-fits-all” public services, he says, might have had their faults, but “their provision was universal, for good and ill they were regarded as a public responsibility.”

There is no equivalent of a public bus or a public classroom online. In fact, the online communities are the exact opposite of public spaces. We self-select into the online worlds, balkanizing by interests, splintering down to the most specialized slices. You don’t have to ride with someone who is talking too loud, or who is softly weeping with her face to the window, or who is reading a book you never heard of. You might run across those ideas or people online, but you don’t have to sit with them for 30 minutes—time to wonder, to sympathize, and yes to fume. You click and you’re gone. Some will say that’s the exact reason they love the internet, or private taxis. They don’t have to be bothered. It is why we live in gated communities as well. In those havens, we don’t have to brush up against humanity if we don’t want to.

But the atomized “me” worlds that we retreat to are not community. They are not the building blocks to a society with a purpose and a sense of “we.”

If we can buy our way out of public spaces, or if we can tailor those “public” spaces to our own interests and prejudices, then what becomes of the larger purpose of building and sustaining a society? How do we convince people to sacrifice for a larger good? It gets harder, that’s for sure. Just look at the military. Without a national draft–a truly public experience– we have relegated the duty (yes, that old-fashioned word) to a smaller and smaller group doing endless tours of duty. Meanwhile the majority of us, untouched by it, don’t support– or protest– the wars. My 90+-year-old parents, who lived through WWII and its example after example of shared sacrifice, grow wistful at the memory. It was hard, but everybody was on the same footing. Everyone sacrificed. No one was able to buy a toaster. No one. And it was that sense of shared sacrifice that built a stronger society.

While libertarians likely cheer this “less public/more private” thinking, Judt reminds us that “the reduction of ‘society’ to a thin membrane of interaction between private individuals …was first and above all the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Nazis.” And any society, wrote Edmund Burke, that destroys the fabric of its state, will soon be “disconnected into the dust and power of individuality.”

I fear that dismantling has been well underway for far too long. As the students in my friend’s class reveal, “public” is, in their minds, already “the other”—the “they” as Nietzsche put it. We have rushed headlong into a privatized, personally tailored world of a “we” and “they” — devoid of an “us.”

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Posted in education, personal meanderings

The stunted mobility of millennials might be a boon for small towns?

Posted on December 1, 2011 | 1 Comment

Young adults are staying put. Is this good or bad?

At a time in life that is traditionally the most mobile, young people in their 20s are forced by circumstances to clip their wings. A recent report by the Brookings Institution finds that Americans of all ages are not moving as much, mainly because of the recession and the housing collapse. When you can’t sell your house or don’t have the savings to move after a layoff, the options shrink pretty quickly. In fact, mobility is at its lowest point since 1948.

For young people, the constraints are slightly different. For the younger set, those ages 18-25, the lack of jobs coupled with college debt makes taking a risk and moving to Dallas or Phoenix or Atlanta a little scarier. It’s a vicious Catch-22 for many. They’re out of work, and a job pops up in a distant city, but their college loans on top of rent make moving impossible. So they’re stuck living at home with their parents and no job. That makes their personal economy grind to a halt.

Here’s a couple of charts that tell the story. In the graph on the right, the highest bars belong to young adults in their 20s– the “lifeblood of the economy” as the Brookings report puts it. The tan bars in the chart on the right are pre-recession mobility trends by age, and the blue bars are post-recession. Look at that drop for 20-24 year olds especially.

Source: Brookings Institution

So what are the consequences of this? Less risk-taking, for one. More “settling” and running in place. For young people, it’s a tough situation, especially if they’re tied to areas with sluggish job growth, which is many areas these days– or in a home whose value has plummeted. This latter group of homeowners could be particularly vulnerable to foreclosure because they are at an early point in their career, earning less, in less secure jobs, and more than likely have started a family (thus the need to put down some roots and buy a house).

Being stuck with a house that has lost a lot of value or that won’t sell for a decent price means that these young people will likely tough it out, perhaps passing on a job offer elsewhere or clinging to a thankless job because they feel they have no choice.

On the other hand, the rural brain drain might be staunched for the next several years. For a long time now, small towns in rural America have been losing their young people to the sexier big cities. (One of the more intriguing books on this topic is Hollowing Out the Middle.) Their exodus has created a huge problem for these small towns dotting the landscape. I’ve watched as my own hometown, population 1,000, ages. My dad, who still lives in town, plays cribbage every Wednesday with four of his friends. The “young one,” as he tells it, is 84. Dad is 95, and he’s not the youngest.

So perhaps the lack of mobility will have a silver lining for towns like this– the best and the brightest will stay put, and the low cost of living might begin to attract those with college loans that make it impossible to live in the “big city.” I’ve already noticed an uptick in articles about city dwellers who abandon the ship to set up a creamery or a brewery or an art studio in a small town. More power to them. Maybe they’ll bring the needed life to small-town America.

 

 

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Fresh housing ideas could serve young adults well

Posted on November 17, 2011 | 2 Comments

Today’s New York Times takes a fresh approach to the rising numbers of young adults living at home– arguing that by doing so, they’re depriving the economy of a needed boost in spending.

Invoking the famous “paradox of thrift” of John Maynard Keynes, the story quotes the ubiquitous Mark Zandi as saying that each time a new household is not formed, the economy misses out on about $145,000 in spending on things from drywall to brooms. By staying put in their parents’ household to save money, young adults are depriving local landlords, hardware stores, and plumbers of business.

The latest Census reports find that 14.2% of young adults aged 25-34 are living with their parents (or in dorms), up from 11.8% in 2007 when the recession took hold. The number of new households formed has declined sharply since 2007, from about 1.3 million to approximately 900,000 in 2010. Much of this is straight economics: the recession has squeezed everyone. According to Zandi, there should be about 1.1 million more households today than there actually are, a good chunk of this gap is driven by young adults staying put at home.

What struck me about the young man the Times included in the interview–and what we’ve heard in our own interviews–is the notion that renting is throwing money away. AND, the degree that “saving money” is front and center for this generation. Jay Bouvier, whom the Times interviewed, makes $45,000 a year in a secure job but he’s living at home in Bristol, CT, to save up for a down payment. No ramen and roaches for him. It makes you wonder if we haven’t feathered such a nice nest for kids–and raised their expectations of what’s a necessity–that they see no reason to suffer through a three-story walk-up with a shower from 1940 and radiators that clank like the chains of Ebenezer Scrooge.

But before I descend to the “kids these days” fist-shaker, it serves to remind that Bouvier is largely the exception. The recession has hit young people particularly hard. Many are unemployed with college debt hanging over their heads, and living on their own is a non-choice. College graduates are often working in jobs that don’t require a degree, and those with less or no postsecondary education are squeezed out of those jobs as a result. Young men who relied on the construction industry for a decent paycheck are sitting on their hands waiting for the market to recover (the paradox of thrift trickles down). This group– and those without a BA are the majority–is living at home out of necessity, not because they’re saving money for a down payment on a home of their own.

This brings up an issue of housing affordability. A forward-thinking group of architects and urban planners met in New York City recently to brainstorm about housing for a future with a changed demographic. As Michael Kimmelman in Thursday’s Arts Section of the Times reports, most new homes in NYC are designed for nuclear families. Yet only 17% of dwellings in the city are home to two parents raising kids. Young adults are delaying marriage and children well into their 30s, and for all the talk about how many kids are living at home these days, the real story is how much longer people are living on their own today–at both ends of the life course.

The architects and urban planners let their creativity flow with ideas for how to transform current housing to make it more affordable and more communal. Micro-lofts was one idea. Such lofts are about 150 square feet with 14-foot ceilings and a mini-kitchen. They’re clustered around larger communal space with a garden or a big living room. (Think dorms for adults–or more glamorously, hotel living). [Here's some images]

According to “The Tiny House” blog, cities experimenting with small-size suites include “Shoebox Lofts in Portland, Ore., Cubix Yerba Buena in San Francisco, and Moda Apartments in Seattle all have units in the 250- or 300-square-foot range.” Micro-lofts in Vancouver, according to one developer, “Have a fold-down wall bed, and when that wall bed is up, it has a fold-down table. We integrated a workbench with a built-in flat screen TV so that that does not take any room and created a glassy washroom enclosure that functions as a single area — shower, and toilet and sink all in one area.” (Reminds me of the ingenious room design at the Andaz Hotel Wall Street).

Smaller, smartly designed housing that can be built cheaper but not feel cheap is good for both a city’s citizenry and the planet. Denser living leaves a smaller footprint.

All this recalls the work of architect Bertrand Goldberg and his ideas for urban living and industrial design. His Jetson-like buildings (here and here) are typically cylindrical high-rises with pods arranged around a central communal space (for his hospitals anyway). Most famous for Marina Towers in Chicago and numerous hospitals across the country, Goldberg designed for efficiency (a hub and spoke design for hospital floors) and communal living–a city within a city–for residential. At the time (in the 1950s -1970s) he was ahead of the curve. Today’s architects are just following suit and pulling us into the future.

Federal subsidies and a redesign of the mortgage system would be needed to see these ideas get off the ground, but it’s certainly worth the conversation.

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Posted in delayed adulthood, millennials, moving home

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Shocking (and growing) wealth gap between young and old

Posted on November 7, 2011 | 1 Comment

The fallout of this recession on young people just keeps coming. Jump over to Transitions2Adulthood, where I posted a blog on the stark and growing wealth gap between young adults and older Americans. It should give you pause.

What’s so disturbing is how much the gap in net worth has widened over the years. While the median net worth of a household over age 65 grew 42% since 1984, for households under age 35, net worth shrank fully 68%.  Stunning. As I wrote months ago, we must rethink our policies and support young people more as they maneuver these rocky waters.

Some of you out there who have lived through recessions before might pshaw at the prospect that young adults need support. After all, we survived past recessions without any help. Why do they need support?  But the numbers are clear. Trends underway long before the recession– rising college costs, declining wages, eroding benefits, growing inequality– have left us all on shakier ground. A recession as deep and prolonged as this is only piling on risk and hardship, most profoundly for those just starting out in the workforce.

In other words, this one is different because we’re different. Our economy is a much higher-stakes game, and young people relative to retirees have been losing ground. The question is, are the odds of catching up later, in one’s 30s and 40s, shrinking too? The college payoff is declining as wages flatten and college costs rise. Housing values are in the toilet. The things that we count on, in other words, to raise net worth are eroding. Will this gap persist as a result? Only time will tell. Can we as a country afford to wait and see how it turns out? I don’t think so.

 

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Posted in debt, delayed adulthood, work and earnings

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Voices beyond Occupy Wall Street: very little sympathy

Posted on October 28, 2011 | 4 Comments

I had two conversations yesterday with 20-somethings, one still in college and one a recent grad who is now working. Both were unsympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Both thought the protests were too fringe, led by people who did not represent them or reflect their values.

In the first chat, a student in his final year of undergraduate work in New York City, was interviewing me about student debt. As we talked, however, I got the impression he wasn’t enthralled with the protesters, or sometimes even his own generation.

Lurking behind the conversation was a sentiment I heard later in the day over a cocktail with a young woman in her first job out of college. She was hesitant to embrace the motley crew on Wall Street–especially on this issue of student debt–because she felt people go into things with their eyes wide open and shame on them if they don’t read the fine print on their loan papers and get themselves into deep hock as a result. We have free will, she pointed out.

A child of immigrants, she believes firmly in the “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. Her parents, who came here with nothing and some serious roadblocks ahead of them, nevertheless managed to become quite successful in the embrace of America. If they can do it, so can most people, she thought. She acknowledged that the playing field is not always level, but she countered, the opportunities are there if you have the ambition and drive to make it happen.

Both she and the young man were put off by the privilege they saw at the protests. The protesters, they thought, had the luxury of being there because they could afford not to work. Some had even quit their jobs to go to the park and take part–such recklessness proved both their privilege and their disconnect from the mainstream.

They were both put off by the demands of some protesters to wipe out the debt, to forgive the debt 100%. Both said–and I paraphrase–don’t you think if you have to pay something back, you’ll appreciate it more? There was little sense that debt was burdensome (of course, both had the luxury of parents who paid for their school). Both I think felt that the issue was a back door for freeloaders to not have to pay for their mistakes.

Neither, I think, believes the country is in as dire straits as it is. Both are too young and optimistic to believe that anything dire will happen to them if they just work hard and play by the rules. I hope that’s the case. But I fear it won’t be. The country is at a point where many of our past derelictions of duty are coming home to roost. We’ve failed to keep up our roads and bridges, we don’t invest in R&D, we’ve allowed our schools to wither, we’ve allowed inequality to gallop ahead and with it blocked opportunities for too many, we’ve buried our head in the sand on immigration policy and force the next innovators to leave the country after we’ve educated them, and we’ve replaced a modest safety net with a you’re-on-your-own workforce and social life. All of these problems were once collective problems. We used to rally as a country and find solutions. Now we separate like oil in water to our factions of discontent. As Thomas Friedman said recently, we have to start looking hard at these issues as a collective challenge. If we do, we face a tough decade; if we don’t, we face a  lost century.

If one thing came through loud and clear yesterday in those two conversations, it was the notion of individualism. There wasn’t even a whiff of a sense of duty to the social contract among us all.  A collective responsibility has been so washed clean in their minds that it’s a non-issue, not because they disagree with it, but because it does not register, period.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. We are shaped by our surroundings and our moment in history. This generation came of age among the most free-wheeling, libertarian, no-holds-barred capitalism since the 1920s. They also came of age in an era of identity-driven politics: gay rights, women’s rights, black feminist gender rights, forgotten white men’s rights, animal rights, … you name it, the list goes on. So it’s no surprise that individualism and a distaste for “free rides” and slackers resonates so with these two young people. (This history also helps to explain the gentle anarchy that reigns in the Occupy Wall Street protest. How can you find common ground to form a platform when there are so many issues clamoring for attention and a generation who has been raised on free-wheeling individualism?)

We have splintered into increasingly narrow interest bases and as a result have sacrificed the more social view of a life bound together.  That “social contract” doesn’t mean that the slackers get a free ride. But shouldn’t it include a sense that when the weakest link suffers, we all suffer? Whether this generation will agree with that is a question waiting for an answer.

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Engineering vs Liberal Arts: Updated

Posted on October 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

One of the persistently most popular posts on this site is “Engineering versus Liberal Arts.” It seems time then to update it with new information. And a new report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) offers just that.

In my prior post, I wrote that if a young person were hoping to make a decent living, science and engineering were good bets. While wages had stalled in other more generalist fields, like liberal arts, wages were holding their own, and even increasing, in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Alas, this demise of the generalist made me a little sad. But what can you do?

Well, that still holds. People in white lab coats who play with material things—the STEM worker broadly speaking—are in a perfect position. They actually have employers who come begging. STEM workers include the usual suspects, like biologists and pharmacists, but they also included skilled manufacturing, architects, and many health care positions. Employers clamor for these professional problem-solvers and often can’t find enough workers, even in this recession. And their jobs prospects are projected to only grow.

These jobs require education, but not as much as many people assume. Three in ten STEM workers have only an associate’s degree or some kind of technical certificate. And they make good money.

“If you’re thinking solely about money,” says Carnevale, an economist and author, with Nicole Smith and Michelle Melton, of the report, “it might be smart to get a STEM associates degree, rather than, say, a BA in education. A STEM degree or certificate is also “a line-jumper,” says Carnevale. “You can pass people on the career highway with a STEM degree.”

Indeed, in many cases, even certificate holders with STEM occupations make more than people with BA. “A certificate in engineering earns more than an associate’s degree in business or a BA in education,” he says.

Even if you’re not working in a STEM field directly but have training in STEM—think a biology major in sales— “you’ll make more than people in that occupation.”  Farming, fishing, teaching, you name it, if you have a STEM degree, you’ll make more than people who don’t have STEM, the report finds.

What STEM brings to the table, Carnevale says, are the skills that employers want: problem-solvers and critical thinkers. If you think about it, engineers are just professional problem-solvers.

While starting salaries are higher in STEM fields, an interesting thing happens along the way, which diverts many STEM grads into other occupations. With a general education such as liberal arts, he says, one gets the education and then, on the job, learns what is needed to advance.

“That’s where you confront and work with technology,” he says. “School leverages your access to jobs, and learning on the job powers your income.” Eventually, you begin to earn more.

With STEM careers, that path is different. Instead of a generalist education, STEM graduates have very specific preparation. That preparation is what leverages access to careers, and the money is pretty good right away.

These slightly different career highways mean that engineers’ earnings, for example, begin to slow in their mid-30s while liberal arts majors begin to catch up—except if STEM workers move on to other higher-paying occupations like management or sales and marketing, which they tend to do in droves.

This line-jumping gets to one reason we have a shortage of STEM workers, Carenevale says. “If you look at the number of people with high math scores in U.S. education and the number who get STEM degrees, it looks like we’re producing enough STEM talent to fill the jobs.” However, something happens between high school and the workforce that sheds STEM workers. Of 100 students who get a BA, only 19 will graduate with a STEM major. Of those, only 10 will go on to work in a STEM field. The bleeding continues. Ten years later, only eight of those ten are still in STEM occupations.

Although we’re producing a good number of STEM graduates, they don’t end up in STEM occupations, and even when they do, they have opportunities that allow them to move from STEM to better-paying jobs. For some, the STEMS jobs don’t satisfy their interests. For others, there is more money to be made elsewhere.

This is neither good not bad. As Carnevale says, choices are good. Employers are bidding for these workers, and therefore they must pay higher wages to get them and make the jobs more attractive. “It’s not an unhappy problem,” he says. Also, if we were to persuade everyone with high math skills to stay in STEM, the rest of the economy would starve for these skills. “We won’t have enough teachers who can teach math, or enough talented people with good analytical skills.”

So the bottom line? In this day and age of increasingly high college costs, it might just serve young people well to focus on a career in math, science, engineering, or technology of some sort. Get a biology degree. You can career-flip later and still earn more than your colleague with a marketing degree. Better yet, get a two-year STEM degree or a specific  certificate, like an engineering certificate, and leverage it on down the road for a different job, with higher pay.

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Average is over

Posted on October 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

It’s Friday, so it must be Psychology Today time. A reporter called earlier in the week asking, What’s up with men today? Why are they so slow to get started on this path to adulthood? Is it internet porn? Bad parenting? She happened to be lying awake at night flummoxed as to why her son can’t seem to get it in gear at age 25. So today’s post over at Psych Today tries to answer that question (spoiler alert: it’s not internet porn). What is it like to get started in life today in an age of anxiety, when globalism and technology have fundamentally altered how we live and work, and yet our education remains stuck in an 18th century model of time clocks, standardized tests, and hierarchies.

It’s  inspired by a talk by Thomas Friedman I attended this week (at 7:15 in the morning no less) and an interview I did with Cathy Davidson on her new book, “Now You See It.”

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