Jobs and College Education

Oh, I wish all these links were not so depressing:

1. George Will worries that a decrease in mobility between economic classes bodes ill for those who care about limited government:

Today, the dominant distinction defining socioeconomic class is between those with and without college degrees. Graduates earn 70 percent more than those with only high school diplomas. In 1980, the difference was just 30 percent.

Soon the crucial distinction will be between those with meaningful college degrees and those with worthless ones. Many colleges are becoming less demanding as they become more expensive: They rake in money — much of it from government-subsidized tuition grants — by taking in many marginally qualified students who are motivated only to acquire a credential and who learn little.

Lindsey reported that in 1961, full-time college students reported studying 25 hours a week on average; by 2003, average studying time had fallen to 13 hours. Half of today’s students take no courses requiring more than 20 pages of writing in a semester. Given the role of practice in developing expertise, “the conclusion that college students are learning less than they used to seems unavoidable.” Small wonder those with college degrees occupying jobs that do not require a high school diploma include 1.4 million retail salespeople and cashiers, half a million waiters, bartenders and janitors, and many more.

“Most American kids,” Lindsey concluded, “are now raised in an environment that is arguably less favorable for developing human capital than that in which their parents were raised.” America’s limited-government project is at risk because the nation’s foundational faith in individualism cannot survive unless upward mobility is a fact.

2. At Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau, a physics professor, writes about credential creep (without using that term) and the changing job market:

Once upon a time, if you graduated from high school you had a good shot at a “white collar” job. High school grads were rare, and graduating from high school signaled that (1) you probably have better writing skills and numerical skills than most and (2) you have the social capital that comes with having parents who can afford for you to spend your teen years studying instead of earning money or helping with the family farm or store or whatever. Then there was a time that college grads had pretty decent shots at “white collar” jobs, not necessarily tied to their major. Again, it signaled some mix of communication skills, “critical thinking ability” (whatever that means), and social capital (both from having parents who could send you to school and being in the environment that white collar folks are expected to come from).

Now it is no longer guaranteed that a college grad will get a “white collar” job. It appears that the marketplace is unimpressed by most (but not all) Master’s degrees (among the notable exceptions are a few bureaucracies that, by their nature, reward paper credentials). The marketplace is not necessarily any more impressed by vocational-oriented Associate’s degrees. I suspect the cold, hard facts are:

1) Having a degree is no longer exceptional, and we’re reaching farther down in the talent pool.

2) You can only put so much of the population behind a desk, and with IT we only need so much of the population behind a desk.

Meanwhile, at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Paul Campos talks about a similar dynamic, with special reference to the JD:

I see this all the time in the legal world: people find that getting a JD actually hurts their job prospects, not just because they can’t get jobs as lawyers (48% of the national class of 2012 didn’t have real legal jobs nine months after graduation), but because, despite self-serving claims of legal academic administrators and faculty that a law degree is “versatile,” most non-legal employers consider a law degree either a negative or a flat disqualification for a job candidate. (Perhaps the most stark example of this is provided by paralegals who quit good jobs to go to law school, then discover that employers won’t hire people with JDs to do paralegal work).

And, as the quoted letter indicates, in the contemporary panopticon it’s becoming increasingly impractical to take a degree off your resume, while hoping an employer isn’t too inquisitive, or perhaps coming up with some acceptable-sounding explanation for the biographical lacunae. In a googled world, the discreet resume gap is ceasing to exist.

3. It is not too surprising, then, to see applications to both law schools and business schools dropping. Megan McArdle has a post discussing the declining returns-on-investment of an MBA, especially from lower-ranked programs:

An MBA from a third ranked school is usually a good way to rack up a lot of debt without substantially improving your employment prospects. And it’s possible that potential students are beginning to wake up to those dangers, just as they did with law school. There are a lot of unnecessary MBA programs and law schools out there, created by colleges who viewed them as an easy cash cow–the courses are cheap to teach, requiring only a professor and some whiteboards, but starry-eyed students could and did borrow six-figure sums to get what they thought was a sterling credential that would guarantee them a good job.

But that doesn’t mean that the MBA is losing its value–when I returned to Chicago in October 2011 for my 10th business-school reunion, I saw no signs that Booth graduates were having any trouble finding high-paying jobs. Indeed, a top-tier MBA may be more valuable than ever. Just as in the broader economy, the top is pulling away from the rest.

The problem is that third-tier schools had been issuing a lot of degrees, charging tuition that only made sense if you were going to get a Harvard-caliber job. And those jobs aren’t available to the graduates of a small regional program. I’m not saying that those people aren’t good enough for those jobs, or don’t deserve them, but the reality is that the companies offering those glamorous-sounding, high-paying jobs in tech or consulting or finance only recruit at a handful of schools. This was true even when I was in school. But when unemployment was low, it wasn’t so obvious to folks considering an MBA from the University of Louisville. Now it is.

In the summer of 2012 when I wrote a piece on whether there was a higher education bubble, my focus was on college. But it is the graduate schools that the collapse has begun.

The sound you hear is not a bubble bursting, but a bubble slowly deflating. (For a contrary view, via Althouse, see this article in the Washington Post, “Ignore the haters. Law school is totally worth the cash.”)

4. Oh, and legal secretaries are also having a rough time of it:

I come across this Wall Street Journal article on legal secretaries, a profession that has long offered a decent middle class income to women (and a few men) with high school diplomas or associates degrees. Suddenly, that seems to be shrinking…

Partly this is shrinkage in the legal profession, but it’s also the fact that the job of legal secretary is simply less necessary than it once was. In the early 1990s, I worked as a clerk in a law office with a bunch of smart, feisty ladies who could type 120 wpm without errors. They were amazing, and amazingly necessary, because word processors were still relatively primitive, and a bunch of stuff still had to be done on a typewriter. They got salaries that had allowed several to raise three kids on their own, including sending them through college.

These days a computer and a template can do most of the tedious formatting work, and spellcheck and a good proofread will catch the typos. Some of their jobs have been upskilled (in the late 1990s, when I was working as a technology consultant, a lot of the network administrators I met in law offices were former legal secretaries). But others are disappearing, as the associates type their own damn briefs and massive document management systems keep the paper flowing. …

5. The MIT Technology Review has a pair of articles: “It’s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class,” and “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs.” From the second piece:

New technologies are “encroaching into human skills in a way that is completely unprecedented,” McAfee says, and many middle-class jobs are right in the bull’s-eye; even relatively high-skill work in education, medicine, and law is affected. “The middle seems to be going away,” he adds. “The top and bottom are clearly getting farther apart.” While technology might be only one factor, says McAfee, it has been an “underappreciated” one, and it is likely to become increasingly significant.

Not everyone agrees with Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s conclusions—particularly the contention that the impact of recent technological change could be different from anything seen before. But it’s hard to ignore their warning that technology is widening the income gap between the tech-savvy and everyone else. And even if the economy is only going through a transition similar to those it’s endured before, it is an extremely painful one for many workers, and that will have to be addressed somehow. Harvard’s Katz has shown that the United States prospered in the early 1900s in part because secondary education became accessible to many people at a time when employment in agriculture was drying up. The result, at least through the 1980s, was an increase in educated workers who found jobs in the industrial sectors, boosting incomes and reducing inequality. Katz’s lesson: painful long-term consequences for the labor force do not follow inevitably from technological changes.

(H/T: Will Truman.)

6. Alex Tabarrok links to this story in the Telegraph, which reports that the number of domestic servants in London is “booming”: “wherever the multiple between the wages of the rich and the poor grows, so does the number of servants. Much of the time, the towering Georgian and Victorian terraced houses of Belgravia now have only servants living in them – their masters and mistresses are drifting around the world, from yacht to schloss to Park Avenue apartment, in search of pleasure or tax avoidance. Drive round the area at night, and it’s often only the lights in the attics and the basements – the servants’ quarters – that are on.”

7. ProPublica has a couple of articles by by Michael Grabell (here and here) about temp workers. From the June 27 article:

Across America, temporary work has become a mainstay of the economy, leading to the proliferation of what researchers have begun to call “temp towns.” They are often dense Latino neighborhoods teeming with temp agencies. Or they are cities where it has become nearly impossible even for whites and African-Americans with vocational training to find factory and warehouse work without first being directed to a temp firm.

In June, the Labor Department reported that the nation had more temp workers than ever before: 2.7 million. Overall, almost one-fifth of the total job growth since the recession ended in mid-2009 has been in the temp sector, federal data shows. But according to the American Staffing Association, the temp industry’s trade group, the pool is even larger: Every year, a tenth of all U.S. workers finds a job at a staffing agency.

The proportion of temp workers in the labor force reached its peak in early 2000 before the 2001 slump and then the Great Recession. But as the economy continues its slow, uneven recovery, temp work is roaring back 10 times faster than private-sector employment as a whole – a pace “exceeding even the dramatic run-up of the early 1990s,” according to the staffing association.

According to the article, it is not uncommon to find factories or warehouses where temps heavily outnumber permanent workers. This arrangement has advantages for the employers. As Grabell writes, “The temp system insulates the host companies from workers’ compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to ensure that their workers are citizens or legal immigrants. In turn, the temps suffer high injury rates, according to federal officials and academic studies, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below minimum wage.”

Via Erik Loomis, who has some strong opinions of his own on the subject.

8. At Crooked Timber, Corey Robin has a post about the increased use of non-compete agreements, even for low-skilled workers.

9. By the way, in case you haven’t heard, the City of Detroit is filing for bankruptcy.

10. At Balkinization, Frank Pasquale points to this Reuters story about Federal Reserve Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin stopping in on a local job fair near her house. Raskin describes talking to a recruiter about submitting her resume for an IT job:

So I went up to the person behind the booth and they said, ‘we’ve got two kinds of IT jobs here: we’ve got armed security jobs, and we’ve got cyber security.’

So I thought, well, I’m probably not the armed security type, so tell me about the cyber security jobs.

This is how you go about getting it. You take your resume and you put it into a database. And this firm essentially collects resumes and then they kind of troll for government contracts. And when they find a government contract that might use your resume then they call you. Then you might actually get a job.

‘So what I need to do is put in my resume and then I’ll be able to get this job?’ And she said ‘yes.’

And I said: ‘while I’m waiting can I go to some other firms and throw my resume into their databases as well?’

And she said ‘oh no, you can’t do that, because you’re going to sign a letter of intent.’ And that letter of intent is basically an exclusivity agreement that says that by putting your resume in here you agree to not put your resume anywhere else.

I said ‘well, gosh, that’s going to be kind of rough. But tell me: what are the percentage chances that I’ll get a job?’

‘You know, we’re doing pretty well. Maybe a 25 percent chance.’

‘How do these jobs pay?’

‘They pay by the hour.’

‘Do they pay benefits?’

‘No benefits, it’s a straight hourly job. And it’s temporary so it’s going to be until the government contract is completed.’

Apparently it was an “eye-opening” experience.

Update (July 19, 2013, 1:40 PM): re: item 3 above, see also this post by Jonathan Adler, which has links to a number of additional perspectives.

Second Update (July 19, 2013, 2:15 PM): on the subject of law degrees, see also these thoughts by Burt Likko.

Third Update (July 19, 2013, 4:45 PM): the hits just keep on coming: “An improving housing market and rising stock prices appear to have done little to increase the take-home pay of the typical U.S. worker. And while the economy continues to heal faster than that of almost any other Western nation, evidence remains strong that the recovery has done little to boost the fortunes of people in the vast economic middle.” (H/T: Erik Loomis.)