In America today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees. Over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees. So do thousands of janitors.
As Richard Vedder notes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “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.” This fact is “incompatible” with “the relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership . . . . Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.” These depressing statistics are also discussed at The Economic Collapse Blog.
We wrote earlier about the college debt bubble, and how greedy, government-subsidized college administrators are charging obscene amounts of money for largely useless and ideologically-slanted “educations.” (100 colleges now charge $50,000 or more in tuition, compared to just 5 colleges in 2008-09, and federal financial-aid subsidies effectively reward colleges for increasing tuition to levels that would evoke outrage in other civilized countries.)
Image credit: Honeywell-Nobel Initiative’s flickr photostream.
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Is the fact that these janitors, waiters, and other lower income positions have degrees a tragedy? I think not. Some people attend college to improve their intellectual quality of life: they want to learn how to think for themselves, not necessarily to make a bucket of money upon graduating.
I am sure that individuals with PhDs did not intend to become janitors, but some students go into college without really having a career goal in mind. For example, I have several friends who majored in the humanities who wanted to become baristas or waiters after graduating. They romanticized the notion, seeing it as a more noble task than becoming an accountant.
Perhaps I'm being a bit idealistic but I think that, if the janitors, waiters, and parking lot attendants are enjoying their line of work and leading fulfilling lives, we should not judge them on the fact that they didn't get the perfect job straight out of college. Especially in this economy, students need any job they can get.
Some people go to college just for an easy lay.
Have we met somewhere before? (and NO, it was NOT in college…)
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