Many young college graduates in the U.S. are either unemployed or underemployed, working at jobs that don’t call upon the skills or knowledge they acquired while getting a bachelor’s degree. And many are burdened with student loans they can’t repay.
President Obama has set a goal to raise our college graduation rates to become first in the world by 2020, but there are some hard economic realities. Technological change and outsourcing are shipping many jobs overseas to low-wage countries or eliminating them altogether.
Higher education once was seen as a way to polish a person’s social and cultural skills and capital, a necessity for the leisured class. But now it is pitched as a necessity to get a high-paying job and enter a professional or technical career.
What happens when those promises are unfulfilled? Will young people still be willing to pile on the student debt?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The idea that college was a necessity for all, or almost all, has been fostered for quite some time. Maybe it’s to keep full employment for college personnel. I guess manufacturing jobs weren’t needed. My daughter is one of those underemployed at Macy’s and she has a bachelor’s degree in Music for Sound Engineering.
We need to start to get smarter about tailoring our college degrees. College education is still, in many ways, a relic from the days when a grad with a liberal arts degree could be virtually assured of a career. I am not advocating college as vocational training at all, just in favor of making college more rigorous and focused so that our grads are actually prepared for the kinds of jobs our economy actually stands to create. Additionally, college tuition is exorbitant to the point of unsustainability. The US price/cost model is social Darwinism at its most barbaric.
danschorr.blogspot.com
Even people with degrees in STEM fields end up working at Starbucks et al.
One of the factors is that hiring in tech fields typically has a pretty long lead time – weeks or months.
Another factor is that often HR departments want someone who is a perfect fit for a very niche job – so a Ph.D. in physics doesn’t quite align to what they had in mind, even though a physics Ph.D. is often very malleable and able to self-teach in technology very quickly.
Then once you take that Starbucks job – because your wife has cancer and you need the health insurance NOW – it’s really really hard to get HR to hire you.
And heaven help you if your company goes out of business or your project ends and you’re over 50.
Maybe the students with high grades should get their teaching credentials, because my hair stylist heard via another client, who works in the education department at MS, that the biggest problem facing education today is the glut of C students entering the field. Now this is 3rd hand information that my hair person was really excited to tell me, because the MS really broke it down for her to understand. To summarize, in the next 10 years millions of teachers will be retiring, and the new teachers (part of the “entitlement generation”) with C grades in hand will be the ones in the classrooms. Meanwhile, the smart young people interested in education will have gone into research. My hair person is concerned, because she naturally wants her child’s future teachers to be smart. It was just a quick free bang trim, or I would have asked a lot more questions about this view of impending crisis, and what the MS person’s ideas of to do about it. I mentioned a good start was for news media and society to start treating teacher with more respect, because what is happening now is not making teaching as a career very attractive.
In response to this and your post on Chinese unemployment, Langston Hughes poem seems fitting:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Below is the body of a letter I sent to President Obama. It outlines the situation many 20 somethings find themselves in these days. Thanks for listening.
Dear Mr. President:
I am an elementary school teacher in Howard County, Maryland and the mother of two young adults. I am writing concerning their student loans and I write this with tears in my eyes.
With limited resources I helped my children attend Salisbury University, a state university, at which they excelled and received an excellent education. They received some scholarship funds, worked, and took out student loans to cover the balance.
My son went on to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA and received a Masters Degree in Philosophy. He received an assistantship there to help with living expenses, but he had to, in addition, take out more loans. Unable to find employment upon graduation, he completed a year of service with AmeriCorps in Boston and will begin a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this fall. He has a passion for teaching philosophy.
Upon graduation with honors from Salisbury University, my daughter was unable to find a full-time job and continued working part-time at the retail job she had while attending college. After a year she decided to go back to school to pursue her passion – being a librarian. She received a scholarship from the University of Pittsburgh and paid the balance with student loans. She finished her Masters of Library and Information Science last year but has been unable to procure a job as a librarian. She is currently the Library Media Paraeducator at a school in Howard County earning well under what she is qualified to do. She may go back to school once again this year working toward a teaching certificate, although her true spirit lies in public librarianship and working for the community.
All that said, my reason for writing is about their school loans. My son currently owes about $23,000, and my daughter’s liability is near $50,000. My daughter will pay nearly twice the principal by the time she is done. They need your help. I know there are others in worse shape, but they need your help also.
When my children took out their loans, the interest rates were some of the highest. The rates have since lowered. But, unlike other types of loans, student loans cannot be refinanced. Some of the rates are as high as nearly 8%. No one is paying 8% for anything right now. They would be better off refinancing the loan as a mortgage, if that was possible.
There are movements petitioning to waive student loan repayment, but I am not about that. I am looking for a fair shake for young adults caught in this down economy who will be paying for years to come yet, perhaps, never reaching their full earning potential. When she was running for your office, Hillary Clinton spoke about the cheap loans she and her husband used to attend school. What happened to those cheap loans? Isn’t educating our populace what America is about?
My children did what we, including the government, asked them to do. They worked hard at their education and pursued it with gusto and excitement about their future. They want to work and they want to contribute and they want to pay their fair share of taxes.
Please, find a way to help them. Allow them to refinance at today’s lower rates.
Thank you for your service to our country and for listening to a proud mother’s anguish.