Killing Time or Jes’ Graduatin’?

In 1978, according to a Gallup Poll, 38% of Americans thought of a college education as a very important step in a young person’s life. By 2010, well into the recession, three quarters of Americans prioritized that higher education. In a profoundly impaired job market, where employers are choosier than ever and where good jobs, particularly entry-level employment, are rarer than hens’ teeth except in a few critical technical fields, education is increasingly the ticket that even allows a job-seeker to be considered seriously.

The dirty little secret about the recent “new” jobs that seem to reflect improvement in the overall unemployment statistics is that the vast majority of these positions are at the bottom end of employment skills, low level attendants in healthcare, food service workers, retail clerk (and many of these are part-time), etc. Perhaps with the superstorm clean-up there will be new construction jobs that employ additional low or semi-skilled individuals, but the future of this country – which includes a workforce with the ability to carry/repay the deficit and to support a increasingly graying retired population – depends on our ability to generate new industries, foment innovation at every conceivable level and to manage those businesses that are working with increased efficiency. And those vectors require a vastly more educated America.

Perhaps sensing the need to have academic credentials in this competitive environment and knowing that the time spent in futility looking for a good job would be better spent in upgrading skill-sets, younger Americans are graduating from college in droves. For those who find jobs, great, and for the others, perhaps they will be force to reinvent themselves… and America in the process. Whichever way the weathervane may turn, the numbers of new American college graduates is impressive.

“This year, for the first time, a third of the nation’s 25- to 29-year-olds have earned at least a bachelor’s degree. That share has been slowly edging up for decades, from fewer than one-fifth of young adults in the early 1970s to 32 percent last year… The share of high school graduates in that age group, along with the share of those with some college, have also reached record levels. This year, 90 percent were high school graduates, up from 78 percent in 1971. And 63 percent have competed some college work, up from 34 percent in 1971.” New York Times, November 5^th.  For those who have not achieved what may be minimum requisites in education, time could not be more bleak… They face competing with graduates for jobs that used to require no particular education.

The particularly good news in this mix is a reversal in a trend where educational costs were rising so fast that younger people were being forced to drop out of the system. Until 2007, educational trends were going the wrong way, and while we will have to deal more realistically with student loans and tuition pricing if we are to sustain positive growth, looking at what almost happened can be sobering: “Over the past few years, education experts have warned that the United States had undergone a worrisome ‘education reversal,’ in which older Americans are more educated than younger ones. For example, in 2007, the share of adults aged 45 to 64 who had graduated from high school or earned a bachelor’s degree was slightly higher than among 25- to 29-year-olds… But now, [a Pew study] found, ‘the education reversal that arose in the first decade of the 2000s has vanished or been reversed by recent improvements in the education attainment of young adults.’” NY Times. With demand for college graduates increasing faster than supply, this reversal is a hopeful sign in a very stagnant period.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there is good news in some sectors for which we should be very grateful.