A study shows that the push to provide more people with college educations is counterproductive and was fundamentally misguided:
Almost half of all recent college graduates are working at jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
While it might have been rare to see college graduates in these low-quality jobs a few years ago, they’re increasingly the norm these days. That same New York Fed study found that more and more recent college graduates are taking low-wage jobs and working part-time while fewer and fewer of them are working full-time at high-quality jobs.
Wharton School professor Peter Capelli tried to figure out whether the problem in the labor market is because the jobs don’t require the skills that candidates are offering or because workers don’t have the proper skills that employers are seeking.
Here’s what he found. The main problem with the U.S. job market isn’t a gap in basic skills or a shortage of employees with particular skills, but a mismatch between the supply and the demand for certain skills. There’s a greater supply of college graduates than a demand for college graduates in the labor market.
This mismatch, according to Capelli, exists because most jobs in today’s economy don’t require a college degree.
“Indeed, a reasonable conclusion is that over-education remains the persistent and even growing situation of the U.S. labor force with respect to skills,” Capelli said in his study.
The worst thing is that the expense of these unnecessary educations make it harder for women to do the one thing American society actually needs them to do, which is to get married and have children. Which, of course, may have been the real objective all along.
You don’t need to know the difference between first-wave feminism and third-wave feminism, or what Sun Tzu meant by “Heaven” to work at Starbucks. Education doesn’t create jobs, in fact, many new jobs are created by men who dropped out of the educational process in order to start new companies.
I’ll bet proportionately fewer jobs have been created by people with PhDs than by non-graduates who started college but never finished.