

Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level - ckinnan
http://www.bls.gov/emp/emptab7.htm

======
pj
Ooohh... It just dawned on me right now, why all the higher education hatin
lately.

Lots of young kids just graduated from college and they can't get jobs, so
they're thinking, "Aw crap... I just went $100,000 in debt and I can't get a
job. What the hell did I just waste 4 years in school for? School sucks. I was
lied to. This wasn't worth anything. I'm screwed."

My heart goes out to you. It's not your fault that the economy sucks. It's not
your fault that the world told you you'd get a job if you went to college.
It's a pretty sick carrot to dangle in front of you.

Your education though, does have a value. But so does work experience. Your
degree does give you an advantage over those without degrees, but it doesn't
give you an advantage over those with degrees _and_ work experience. Even
those with work experience can't get jobs right now and they don't have
parents they can move back in with. Imagine how screwed _they_ are.

The year after you graduate is often the scariest, most depressing you will
have experienced thus far in your life. My friends from college a year or two
behind me, they'd graduate and phone me depressed. They'd ask themselves and
me, "Why did I just go through that? I'm lonely. All my friends moved away. I
work with a bunch of old people."

It's normal. It's normal to feel this way. I think college creates a lot of
hope in us. The world makes us think that if we just make it through college,
life will be easy, but getting that degree is only the start. Don't look at
Matt Damon, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs and think you could have been like
them, why didn't you drop out sooner. Those guys are the exceptions that prove
the rule.

Make the most of your time now. Get experience. Keep your skills up to date.
Go travel if you can afford it. Expand your mind. Keep working hard. It _does_
pay off.

~~~
gaius
That is why it's such a problem graduating into a down economy. If you can't
get a job in your field, when the economy turns around, say it's in a few
years, you will actually be at a _disadvantage_ compared to fresh graduates.
Fresh grads get a lot of slack, especially at big firms, they get put onto
"graduate training schemes" and "fast-track programmes" and so on. In many
companies there are only two entry routes, graduate or experienced. The
experienced hires do the work, and the managers are from the graduate scheme.
If you miss the window of the first and aren't yet the latter, you're a bit
stuck. It's not the end of your career, but it's a disadvantage that will take
years to work out.

~~~
garply
Why is this a problem? These people should just allocate their time to the new
opportunities created by the downturn. I have several friends who are
unemployed recent grads and they seem to be just sitting on their asses,
sending out resumes, waiting for the economy to turn around. Why they aren't
starting their own projects or seeking consulting work (I believe consulting /
temping is somewhat counter-cyclical?) I can't quite figure out.

Seeking employment at a large company is only one investment strategy and
perhaps not the best one right now given the fierce competition caused by the
downturn.

~~~
nostrademons
Consulting/temping is very much pro-cyclical. The consultants and temps are
the first to go when the economy goes down, and the last to be hired back.

Playing devil's advocate here (your suggestion is exactly what I'd do, and
it's worked fairly well for me), but...

One reason they don't may be that it's almost _never_ rational to start a new
project over sending out a resume. The resume offers the possibility of
immediate monetary payoff for relatively little work, and while the chances
are low (particularly in this economy), they're certainly higher than the
chances that your new project will succeed. The latter has no immediate
monetary payoff, requires lots of work, and has risks that are so varied that
you don't even have a framework for evaluating them.

It's only when you put a lot of these risks together in sort of a "career
portfolio" that it makes sense to take them. Any individual project will
probably fail, but together they give you the skills and experience that will
a.) get you hired and b.) let you succeed more often with these independent
projects.

Alas, in my experience most people don't take such a long-term view of their
careers...

~~~
garply
That consulting is pro-cyclical surprises me - I always figured that large
corporations had some people who weren't terribly efficient and that in a
downturn they would be cut and their workloads would be outsourced to a 3rd
party, whom the employer wouldn't need to offer perks and raises and who would
have to pay full FICA him/herself.

~~~
nostrademons
It's a huge pain to fire an employee - there're dozens of potential "wrongful
termination" lawsuit hitches, and if you run into any of them, you've just
cost the company more in legal bills than you'll ever save in that employee's
salary. For that reason, companies usually will keep full-timers even if they
aren't quite as efficient as consultants or new hires, because the costs of
getting it wrong and inviting a lawsuit don't outweigh the marginal benefits.
Unless the employee is grossly incompetent, in which case you both save more
in lost productivity, and there's a lower chance of a successful lawsuit...

------
sschronk
Note to recent graduates about the value of your degree:

I graduated right after 9/11. Right after. I remember when I was in school
that our local paper had 5 pages of jobs open in my field. Good paying jobs
even for those with no experience. By the time I got my diploma in the mail, I
had not had one single phone call. Those 5 pages of ads had been reduced to a
single column on the back of the sports page.

I remember going over and over to the University career center week after week
trying to polish my resume, going to mock interviews.

At one time, I had started calling companies up and offering to work as an
entry-level engineer for minimum wage if they would just give me a place to
use my skills.

No such luck.

In the end, I got a job working in a warehouse for very little money. Over
just a few months, the economy go a little better and I ended up getting a job
as an engineer for a tiny firm that went out of business.

After I did get some experience, I have found it easier and easier to obtain a
job. Even to the point I am at right now where two groups at my current job
are in a fight to win me over for a new assignment. Even in this terrible
economy.

Here is my advice:

Your degree _is worth something_....

Don't take the economy personally. They don't want to hire you right now
because they can get an expert cheap instead. This will change with time.

Right now is a great time to think about Graduate School. When you graduate
you will be light years ahead of your peers. Promotions will come much easier
for you later down the road with a graduate degree.

Please don't give up. Your loans can be deferred. Spend some quality time with
your friends and family.

------
mrkurt
You have to wonder how much selection bias skews this. It seems like "those
who would complete more school" isn't that far off from "those who are
ambitious and willing to work hard". Without schooling, I wonder how well that
second group would perform. Pretty well, I'd think.

~~~
by
Similarly, there is no indication they have adjusted the results for IQ.
According to some estimates "each IQ point raises worker productivity
1.76-2.38%" where I take "worker productivity" to mean lifetime earnings.
[http://www.ehponline.org/members/2002/110p563-569grosse/gros...](http://www.ehponline.org/members/2002/110p563-569grosse/grosse-
full.html)

------
tokenadult
The direction of causation may be wrong here, because economists of education,
sociologists, and other persons familiar with the data are well aware that
young people from well-off families are much more likely to begin higher
education and much more likely to complete it than poor young people.

Here are some links about the issue. The overall picture in the past decade
has been that high-ability, low-income students are at a clear disadvantage in
the college admission process compared to low-ability, high-income students.
(The links below are in approximate chronological order of publication, from
oldest to newest.) Is anything changing recently about this?

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_mz007.htm)

<http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0621.pdf>

<http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf>

<http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf>

[http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg-
affacti...](http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg-
affaction.pdf)

<http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html>

[http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-
leveragi...](http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveraging/4)

<http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510012>

<http://www.equaleducation.org/commentary.asp?opedid=1240>

[http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....](http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap.pdf)

<http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html>

[http://www.ihep.org/publications/publications-
detail.cfm?id=...](http://www.ihep.org/publications/publications-
detail.cfm?id=117)

[http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11...](http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11/10/colleges_reach_out_to_poorer_students?mode=PF)

[http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hkBGMsvJKR...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hkBGMsvJKRKaL67qxkOCaDByDJFAD94R70G02)

------
nostrademons
I'm kinda wondering what the variance is on these numbers. I'd imagine that
the doctoral numbers have quite a few tenured professors and industrial
researchers making six figures, but the median is shifted downwards by a large
number of postdocs making $30-40K.

If having a masters basically guarantees you a salary of $60K, but getting a
doctorate means you have a 50% chance of making $30K and a 50% chance of
making $100K, I think a lot of people would rather get the masters...

~~~
yummyfajitas
There aren't that many tenured professors making six figures. I suspect the
PhD numbers are high due to the quants making 7-8 figures.

The Ph.D. distribution is probably concentrated towards the bottom with a few
spikes (guys like D.E. Shaw) raising the average.

~~~
nostrademons
Well, this is a median, not a mean, so the quants can't raise it that much. A
bifurcated distribution with a couple peaks could though, which is why I was
thinking tenured professors + industrial researchers + Googlers on one end,
with post-docs on the other.

------
Oompa
I'm not sure if this should surprise anyone. Of course higher education is
worth it for most people. It's just if you're a programmer, after you learn
basic programming skills, a lot can be easily self taught.

~~~
bbgm
But programming by itself is not knowledge. It's a means to solve problems.
It's a very important and critical skill and like any other, it's difficult to
become a master, but how are you applying it?

For example, let's say you are trying to solve a problem in crystallography.
You need to be a good programmer to come up with a nice refinement algorithm,
but without a fundamental understanding of the problem you're trying to solve,
you're not going to be able to solve it. The same goes for financial modeling,
or some other kind of optimization problem.

In any field you have to keep teaching yourself new skills, since the
technologies and approaches change. Even the foundational knowledge changes,
but what education helps you get is a core understanding of depth that allows
you to adjust. There will always be those who can do it without getting a good
education, but those are rare, and in the worlds I've lived in, almost non-
existent.

~~~
gaius
Yes exactly. It's easy to learn a new language or API. But it's not easy to
learn CS on your own. It's not like you can just sit down and read Knuth from
cover to cover. And it's not easy to learn domain knowledge on your own
either, you have to be around practitioners.

~~~
Retric
You can just sit down and read Knuth from cover to cover. The problem is most
people that don't get a CS degree also avoid reading Knuth on their own.

I think one of the large gaps between those groups on average is those without
a CS degree think theory is useless. When you are forced to learn the theory
you end up using it constantly. However, when you see a theory without the
associated experience it seems useless. So it's hard to know what to study on
your own. For most people it's the rigorous nature of a good CS program that
forces them to put forth the associated effort.

~~~
gaius
You go to Knuth when you have already learnt the vocabulary, tho'. If you
can't frame your problem in the language everyone else in your field uses,
reference materials and search engines are of very limited use. You might not
even be able to discuss it with your colleagues except by them basically
taking over the problem and studying it from scratch themselves.

------
dpcan
It's not the education that matters, it's how you use it.

