“A college grad walks into a bar….” Well, actually, the joke should probably start “A priest walks into a bar and is served a drink by a college grad….” After all, one in six bartenders has a college degree. Order some food, and you’ll probably be served by a college grad.
In his blog over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard Vedder has done some tallying up of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data and finds this little nugget:
Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.
Yep, you can be feel pretty good that you spent $25,000 to park that Hummer.
Of course, much of this is a result of the current recession, and some of it is the age-old result of just not being sure what you want to do with your life. But with the cost of college creeping ever upwards, and the numbers dropping out with a bill but no degree rising as well, it does raise the question: should everyone go to college?
We’ve been demanding a BA for some time now as an entree into the work world, largely because, if you ask me, it’s the lazy way of winnowing out applicants. A BA certainly doesn’t convey expertise in the subject matter, unless you’re a historian or opening a philosophy shoppe. (The exception of course is in the professional schools, like engineering, law, medicine). College was designed to teach young people how to think and how to ask good questions–as well as giving them four years to mature. (Those are important skills, don’t get me wrong. Critical thinking is absolutely king.) But over time a BA has become a commodity, in exchange for which you (hopefully) get a job. The message we tell kids is, “go to college if you want to get a good job.”
Kids have heard that message loud and clear. Most kids aspire to college. And many enroll. They do so on the wing and a prayer that if they finish, they’ll earn a lot more than would a person who goes to trade school.
And, if they’re average or above average, they’re right. The return to college is, on average, quite large. But there’s a distinction that is often overlooked in this assumption (myself included). The high returns we read about are average returns. So on average a student with a BA earns much more over a lifetime than the typical person with just some college, or a certificate, or just a high school degree.
But within the folds of that typical story are stories like the bartender and janitor and the flight attendant. Perhaps the bartender wasn’t ready for college, or perhaps he just didn’t have the smarts to hack it. No shame in that. This isn’t Lake Wobegon after all where every child is above average. Yet, he went to college because he heard the message that it was the only way to earn a decent living and have a stable life (college as a commodity again). But that’s not always true. He might not be average. If he’s below average, his return might just be below average as well. He might not have a shot at the high-end job that his dorm-mate had–the straight A kid from an elite high school with well-off and highly educated parents. Instead, he might land in a middle management job. Still a decent job, but not the six-figure salary his roomie is making. And yet he doesn’t pay any less for that degree. Thus, his “return” is less.
Those are the realities of college today, and while it is true that college still pays, it is something that every parent should think about when helping to choose a college. It’s a tough call, because you don’t want to unnecessarily crimp your child’s future, and who knows, he or she may blossom in college. But if a young person has done ok but not spectacularly in high school, if she’s not that interested in Thucydides, maybe he or she could blossom just as easily at a less-expensive state school instead of a pricey private school. Or maybe he could find his happiness as a landscape designer, or a radiologist, or an EMT.
Young people today need to know the odds of their success in a four-year college. If they’re in the bottom ranks of their high school class, they need to be told they have only a 20% chance of getting a BA. And more important–they need to have clear, viable other options. They’re out there. We just need to work harder to make those options apparent and the path to them swift and successful.
When asked in a recent Heartland Monitor Poll whether a four-year degree is a ticket to the middle class, only 46% of young people aged 18 to 29 with a BA or still in college said yes. That’s a serious crack in the dike on the education front.
We’ve been ignoring the story of those less sexy, but decent paying “middle tier” jobs. While some economists say that the workforce now looks like a barbell–with jobs concentrated at the high end, demanding a lot of cognitive skills, or the low end, with dismal pay and no job security. These economists argue then that we should be spurring kids on to four-year colleges to sharpen those cognitive skills, so they won’t end up at the other end, forever scrambling to just keep their head above water.
But Georgetown labor economist Harry Holzer and the Urban Institute’s Robert Lerman argue otherwise. In a recent Brookings Institution paper, “The Future of Middle-Skill Jobs,” they use Bureau of Labor projections to determine where the jobs will be.
Overall, we conclude that the demand for middle-skill workers will remain quite robust relative to its supply, especially in key sectors of the economy. Accordingly, accommodating these demands will require increased U.S. investment in high-quality education and training in the middle as well as the top of the skill distribution
Indeed, of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate in the next decade, only seven require a BA.
I’ve heard from too many young adults who struggle in college or who wonder why they are now fighting for a job as a cashier or a bartender (with a college debt hanging over their head) when they were promised better. And they were. We promised them that. So let’s change this message that college is for all, and let’s give kids real alternatives.
