More women choose college over a bad job
While young men will take any job they can get, young women are passing up dead-end jobs to seek more education, reports the New York Times. “The next generation of women may have a significant advantage over their male counterparts,” economists say.
“It doesn’t surprise me that in a poor economy women are ramping up their schooling,” said Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research organization. “The real question is: Why aren’t more men doing that too?”
Of course, women who leave work for college are gambling their investment will pay off. The Times‘ lead anecdote, Laura Baker, quit her Starbucks barista job to pursue a master’s degree in strategic communications at a private university. She hopes to work at a nonprofit.
Including the loans that financed her undergraduate education at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, she will complete her master’s program next year owing about $200,000 in debt.
“I have to have faith that I will eventually get a good job that pays enough to pay my living expenses and pay back my loans,” she said, “and hopefully make me happy in the process.”
Communications specialists with a master’s start at $37,500 a year, estimates PayScale. Nonprofits tend to pay less.
It’s crazy to borrow $200,000 for a communications degree, adds Cost of College. The FinAid loan calculation website estimates a debtor who spends 10 percent of gross monthly income on repaying student loans will need an income of $213, 044.40 to repay $200,000 in student loans. “If you use 15% of your gross monthly income to repay the loan, you will need an annual salary of only $142,029.60, but you may experience some financial difficulty.”
Savvier women are enrolling in community colleges. State budget cuts have pushed up tuition, but it remains a good deal.
Most new students are women at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, one of the country’s fastest-growing community colleges. “We now have 6,000 students on a waiting list because we didn’t have the resources to offer more classes,” President Stephen Scott told the Times.
CC trains dealers for new casino
Ninety percent of students passed blackjack dealer training at Owens Community College and have gone on to craps training at the new Hollywood Casino near Toledo, Ohio. The college partnered with the casino, which is expected to create 600 jobs.
2/5 are unprepared for college or careers
Two-fifths of high school graduates are unprepared for college or the workforce, according to a study (pdf) by Johns Hopkins and University of Arizona researchers.
One-third of high school students complete a rigorous college-prep track that increasingly includes Advanced Placement courses, the study finds. One-quarter take advantage of career-prep programs. The remaining 40 percent are “a virtual underclass” with little chance of success in college or job training, the researchers write.
Workers in high-demand fields can earn more than the average four-year graduate, notes Daniel de Vise on College Inc. Career-prep students are prepared to earn a vocational certificate or associate degree at a community or career college, preparing them for a decent job.
But the structure of American high schools is trapped, the authors write, in a culture that “blindly advocate(s) bachelor’s degrees as the only valuable option and the cure for all social ills.”
“Underclass” students often take courses with college-prep labels that demand very little, the study concludes. Even AP classes may lack the rigor needed to prepare students for college. (If nobody passes the AP exam, that’s a bad sign.)
The solution, the authors write, is to abolish tracking altogether and to reimagine high school as a tool to prepare all students for both college and careers.
The ideal high school curriculum, they argue, would incorporate the best aspects of both tracks: academic rigor and cutting-edge career preparation. Students might choose one of several academic “pathways” that “include both academically rigorous, college-preparatory requirements and challenging professional and technical knowledge grounded in industry standards,” they write.
Many high schools “steer students into various career-oriented pathways that also (in theory) immerse students in rigorous college-preparatory academics,” writes de Vise. While some are rigorous enough to prepare students for college, most are not.
Where the jobs (and money) will be
There will be middle-class jobs for high school graduates — especially as baby boomers retire — but there won’t be enough to go around, concludes the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce’s new Career Clusters report.
In 1973, 72 percent of jobs were open to workers with a high school diploma or less. That will fall to 37 percent by 2018, the report predicts.
About 29 percent of jobs will require “middle skills,” such as a certificate or associate degree or “some college.”
Wages rise with education: Only 36 percent of jobs for workers with only a high school diploma pay $35,000 or more, compared to 54 percent of jobs for associate degree graduates and 69 percent of jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree.
High school-level jobs are found in four male dominated career clusters: manufacturing, construction, transportation, and hospitality. Of these four clusters, only jobs in manufacturing and construction still pay relatively good wages; particularly for those who obtain on-the-job-training.
There will be fewer manufacturing jobs, but retiring baby boomers will create many openings for the younger generation.
Women need postsecondary education to earn a middle-class wage, the study found. Health care is the most promising field for women with a certificate or associate degree.
The highest paying jobs for workers with some college or an associate degree are in manufacturing and in business, management and administration. For example, operations managers with an associate degree average $71,000 and administrative support staff earn $36,100.
In the manufacturing cluster, associate degree holders earn $43,200 as computer and machine repair technicians. First-line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers earned $61,000.
JFF links colleges to real-time jobs data
With up-to-date labor market data, community colleges will be able to align training to employers’ needs in their regions, reports Jobs for the Future. The Credentials that Work initiative, funded by the Joyce Foundation and Lumina Foundation, uses new technology to aggregate and analyze online job ads. Colleges can follow hiring trends, employer demand, and skill requirements.
Credentials that Work colleges using the new technology are:
- Cabrillo College (Aptos, CA)
- Cerritos College (Norwalk, CA)
- Gateway Community and Technical College (Covington, KY)
- Harper College (Palatine, IL)
- Kentucky Community and Technical College System Office (Versailles, KY)
- LaGuardia Community College (New York, NY)
- Owensboro Community and Technical College (Owensboro, KY)
- Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College (Harlan, KY)
- Southern Maine Community College (Portland, ME)
- Texas State Technical College (Waco, Marshall, West Texas, and Harlingen, TX)
Job growth is in low-wage fields
Since the recession’s end, most new jobs are in lower-wage, lower-skill occupations such as cashier, shelf stocker or food preparation worker, according to The Good Jobs Deficit (pdf), a National Employment Law Project report. Sixty percent of jobs lost in the recession were in middle-wage occupations, while 73 percent of jobs added in the weak recovery pay less than $13.52 an hour, the report finds.
Source: National Employment Law Project analysis of Current Population Survey
The number of lower-wage jobs is close to the pre-recession peak, while mid-wage jobs are 8.4 percent below the peak and higher-wage jobs are 4.1 percent below their former peak.
The lowest third of the nation’s occupations pay $7.51 to $13.52 an hour, according to the report. That would equal $15,621 to $28,122 a year for a full-time worker. In the middle third, workers earn $13.53 to $20.66 an hour or $28,142 to $42,973 a year. High-wage occupations in the top third range from $20.67 to $53.32 an hour or $42,994 to $110,906 for yearly full-time work.
Real wages are down 0.6 percent since the recession’s start, the report concludes: Median wages fell 2.3 percent for the bottom third and 0.9 percent for the middle third. Wages rose by 0.9 percent for workers in the top third.
Degree doesn’t help illegal immigrants
Even if they earn a college degree, young undocumented immigrants end up in the same jobs as their parents, concludes a University of Chicago survey, which focused on young adults who came from Mexico before the age of 12. Without legal immigration status, they typically work in construction, restaurants, cleaning and child care services, says Professor Roberto G. Gonzales.
“This is a population of young people who, because of their legal integration through the school system, learned to work hard and pursue the American dream,” Gonzalez said.
“But as they reach adulthood, they are cut off from the means to live the lives for which school prepared them.”
Gonzales’ study will be published in American Sociological Review in August.
California will let immigrants who came illegally as children apply for private college scholarships under what’s called the Half Dream Act. The new law will allow undocumented students who qualify for reduced in-state tuition to apply for $88 million in private scholarship funds administered by the University of California, Cal State University and the California Community Colleges.
“It was a good step forward, but the glass is still half-empty,” said Ivan Ceja, 19, a Fullerton community college student who was illegally brought to the U.S. from Mexico as a baby.
A second bill, which would open access to public scholarships and grants, is tied up in the Legislature. Like the U.S. Dream Act, its chances are slim.
Illegal immigrants receiving in-state tuition as California high school graduates make up less than one percent of enrollment in the state’s three-tier college and university system, officials say.
Most new jobs require no degree
Do we need more college graduates? asks Andrew Gillen. Eight of 10 “fastest growing occupations” require at least a bachelor’s degree. But the “occupations with the largest job growth” chart tells a different story: Only 4 of the 10 jobs with the largest numerical growth require any postsecondary education; these numbers swamp the numbers in the fastest growing category.
Gillen’s chart looks at the education requirements of the top 30 jobs by growth and number of jobs, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
There will be lots of jobs for people without college degrees, but many — take home health-care assistant, for instance — pay poorly.
Many Americans are undereducated, but college credentials won’t fix that, writes George Leef of the Pope Center on the National Association of Scholars blog.
. . . why is it that, despite entreaties from leaders from Obama on down, copious subsidies, and repeated admonitions to students that college will give them a big earnings premium, the college enrollment stats have been flat for some 15 years? I think it’s because lots of marginal students doubt that they will benefit from college. Maybe they’ve heard from friends or family members that many graduates wind up with low-level jobs anyway.
Marginal students probably have friends and family members who’ve tried college but failed to earn a degree.
Cost of College contributes a graph on which industries are gaining and losing jobs and a link to a Wall Street Journal story on what’s hot and what’s not. Hint: Expect more bartenders with bachelor’s degrees.
Study liberal arts, get a job
Liberal arts classes aren’t frills, writes Rob Jenkins, an English professor at Georgia Perimeter College. Students prepare for success in the workforce by learning to write, analyze and solve problems in liberal arts classes.
Many Americans learn at a two-year college most of what they will ever learn—in a formal setting, at least—about writing, critical thinking, the history of our culture and civilization, the environment, and human behavior.
. . . Employers rank communication and analytical skills among the most important attributes they seek in new hires, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Perhaps those of us who teach those very skills at community colleges should embrace the integral role we play in preparing the nation’s workers rather than rejecting the idea of work-force development as somehow beneath us.
Communicating clearly in writing is a key to business success, so ”one of the best things we can do for students is to require them to write—a lot,” Jenkins argues.
Employers complain that many workers have difficulty thinking for themselves.
How many of us actually require our students to analyze material in an in-depth way (as opposed to providing them with convenient study sheets)? How many of us require them to draw inferences, make connections, reach and defend conclusions? Our liberal-arts courses are the ideal places to teach those cognitive skills that students need to be successful in the workplace.
Finally, liberal-arts instructors should connect what students are learning in class to the “real world.”
