To hear President Obama and a lot of other liberal intellectuals talk, the solution to the jobs crisis is for everyone to get a college education as if this in and of itself will create more jobs. It won't. It's not as if jobs are going begging for those with college degrees. On the contrary college graduates are not able to find work in their fields and are instead working at Starbucks or driving taxi cabs. It's utter nonense that the collegification of the US will produce full employment.
What's happening instead, as more and more young people get college degrees, is that employers are upgrading their demands and requirements for those that they do hire. A job that didn't used to require a college degree, that could be performed perfectly well by someone without a college degree, now requires a college degree. And a job that used to require someone with a BS or BA degree now requires someone with an MA or a MS degree and on up the food chain. Employers are eager, since there is an oversupply of labor at all degree levels, to extract the most qualified out of the masses applying for jobs these days. They can cherry pick. They literally have their pick from tons of applicants. Right now there are five applicants for every job in the US. And that's an average. In some fields there are many more than that.
And the currently unemployed are having an even more difficuilt time finding a job because of discrimination against the unemployed. In an article Disturbing Job Ads: 'The Unemployed Will Not Be Considered' we find the following:
Still waiting for a response to the 300 resumés you sent out last month? Bad news: Some companies are ignoring all unemployed applicants.
In a current job posting on The People Place, a job recruiting website for the telecommunications, aerospace/defense and engineering industries, an anonymous electronics company in Angleton, Texas, advertises for a "Quality Engineer." Qualifications for the job are the usual: computer skills, oral and written communication skills, light to moderate lifting. But red print at the bottom of the ad says, "Client will not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason."
In a nearly identical job posting for the same position on the Benchmark Electronics website, the red print is missing. But a human resources representative for the company confirmed to HuffPost that the The People Place ad accurately reflects the company's recruitment policies.
"It's our preference that they currently be employed," he said. "We typically go after people that are happy where they are and then tell them about the opportunities here. We do get a lot of applications blindly from people who are currently unemployed -- with the economy being what it is, we've had a lot of people contact us that don't have the skill sets we want, so we try to minimize the amount of time we spend on that and try to rifle-shoot the folks we're interested in."
There are about 5.5 people looking for work for every job available, according to the latest data from the Labor Department.
Sony Ericsson, a global phone manufacturer that recently announced that it would be bringing 180 new jobs to the Buckhead, Ga. area, also recently posted an ad for a marketing position on The People Place. The add specified: "NO UNEMPLOYED CANDIDATES WILL BE CONSIDERED AT ALL." When asked about the ad, a spokeswoman said, "This was a mistake, and once it was noticed it was removed."
Ads asking the unemployed not to apply are easy to find. A Craigslist ad for assistant restaurant managers in Edgewater, N.J. specifies, "Must be currently employed." Another job posting for a tax manager at an unnamed "top 25 CPA firm" in New York City contains the same line in all caps.
There has been a structural change in the job market which a lot of people don't want to acknowledge or consider. Jobs that could be done by those with little or no education have been off-shored. Those jobs that couldn't be offshored are being done by illegal immigrants. These are the jobs that "Americans don't want to do" supposedly. But an American without a job might want to reconsider one of those jobs that Americans don't want to do. From the Wall Street Journal:
Students are borrowing dramatically more to pay for college, accelerating a trend that has wide-ranging implications for a generation of young people.
New numbers from the U.S. Education Department show that federal student-loan disbursements—the total amount borrowed by students and received by schools—in the 2008-09 academic year grew about 25% over the previous year, to $75.1 billion. The amount of money students borrow has long been on the rise. But last year far surpassed past increases, which ranged from as low as 1.7% in the 1998-99 school year to almost 17% in 1994-95, according to figures used in President Barack Obama's proposed 2010 budget.
The sharp growth is "definitely above expectations," says Robert Shireman, deputy undersecretary of the Education Department. "But we're also in an economic situation that nobody predicted." The eye-opening increase in borrowing is largely due to the dire economic environment, which is causing more people to seek federal loans, he says.
The new numbers highlight how debt has become commonplace in paying for higher education. Today, two-thirds of college students borrow to pay for college, and their average debt load is $23,186 by the time they graduate, according to an analysis of the government's National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, conducted by financial-aid expert Mark Kantrowitz. Only a dozen years earlier, according to the study, 58% of students borrowed to pay for college, and the average amount borrowed was $13,172.
So what do all the savants recommend? Why going back to school, of course. In a mistaken notion that they can claw their way to the top of the heap by getting more education, by acquiring even more degrees, people are taking on even more student loan debt in a futile effort to gain entry into the job market for even fewer jobs. The smart thing to do would be to find out where, if anywhere, the jobs actually are and then prepare yourself for those jobs. But that's not too hard to figure out actually. The jobs are in the military-industrial complex, banking and health care, three sectors that really need to be reined in or cut back, and, if that happens, jobs in those sectors will diminish. Until then, one can hold their nose and jump in.
According to CNN, 70% of the new jobs being created are in retail, cashiering or food preparation and pay less than $10. per hour. So if you want a job saying "want fries with that" or helping someone find just the right blouse, you might be in luck. And a college degree is no guarantee that you'll not end up making grande mochas at Starbucks.
Alternatively, one can prepare themselves for a job in the new green economy if such an economy ever develops. Oil interests are using their money to see to it that it doesn't so this too looks dicey. But the general point I'm trying to make is that a college degree is no panacea when it comes to employment, and for some people to be making the case that you deserve to be a failure because you can't find a job and don't have a college degree is deplorable. It's as if they're saying, "Of course, you're a failure. You don't have a college degree. What do you expect?"
The private and online colleges and universities are using this line to shore up their profits. They recruit their students with promises of glorious salaries once they get their degrees. In the meantime, they will be taking on massive amounts of student loan debt. Then when they graduate, many are finding that either they can't find a job or, if they can, the pay is not sufficient to make their monthly payments on their student loan debt.
Albert Einstein's critique of the Great Depression was prescient in the sense that one could say it today about the Great Recession:
This is from page 403 of Einstein, His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson:
"Nor was his critique of the current world crisis one that would appeal to ardent capitalists. The economic depression, especially in America, seemed to be caused, he said, mainly by technological advances that 'decreased the need for human labor' and thereby caused a decline in consumer purchasing power."
The same could be said today. Automation, robotization and computerization have stripped many jobs out of the economic system and this has resulted in the centralization and concentration of assets and economic power in the hands of a few large corporations. Deunionization has also caused the weakening of the forces of labor with respect to the forces of capital. The plain truth is that the capitalist system has a declining need for human labor except of the most menial type with a few positions at the top for the super well educated. What they really need are human consumers. The problem is that a consumer without a job is a non-consumer.
So if there is no demand because consumers lack jobs, there will be a limited amount of products manufactured. Even if demand is ramped up by the government just handing out money as has been done recently, companies won't necessarily hire new workers. They will just run the machines longer. And start-ups don't offer any salvation either because they are able to automate and computerize even as they start up. It doesn't take years for them to shed labor in favor of automation; they are able to take advantage of labor saving technology from the start. Therefore, I don't think the traditional roll of start-ups in creating jobs necessarily holds true any more.