

1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed - keiferski
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-2-graduates-jobless-underemployed-140300522.html

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ZephyrP
This is interesting to me.

I'm 20 years old and I'm not in college nor do I plan to finish a degree (and
if it wasn't for technology greats like Peter Thiel and PG advice, I might
still be making a $100,000 mistake). I'm a fairly normal guy, I've been out of
high school for 3 years now and I'm making slightly less than Bureau of Labor
Statistic's 2010 Median Income for 'Software Developers', which I believe is
more than enough to not be considered underemployed.

I see a lot of psychic pain in my peers about how hard work is or the labor
market is so difficult, but to be frank the failures I see are directly
attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane
pleasure.

I'm afraid young people of today are losing the real virtues of life like
living with passion and taking responsibility for who you are. The ability to
make something out of yourself and feeling joy in life is more alive today
than in any other point in human history.

I see a lot of active rejection of the ideals of hacker culture, perhaps
epitomized by my generation's obsession with video games (which, incidentally,
I think could be argued as more detrimental to human wellness than even the
most societally hated and destructive addictive stimulants like
methamphetamine or cocaine)

This is really a shame, as one thing that comes out of hacker culture is a
feeling of a real kind of exuberance about your work. Your work is yours to
create. I've read the college labor statistics with some interest, even fear.
But when I read them, I can't help but think that something essential about
our generation and present technological zeitgeist is being left out. As if
somehow our work is simply just a confluence of forces far beyond our control,
framing college graduates as fragmented or marginalized which opens up a world
of excuses.

From Chaitin to Stallman, when hackers talk about the meaning of work, they're
not talking about abstract decisions, they're talking about doing something
that has concrete consequences. It may be true that there are seven billion
people on the planet, never the less, your work matters in material terms.

In short, I'd encourage any young person my age to not write themselves off as
a victim of societal forces. It's always our decision who we are and what we
do with our lives.

~~~
rudiger
Can you elaborate on how video games are more detrimental to human wellness
than certain drugs?

~~~
drivebyacct2
What a weird and incredibly false dichotomy. I smoke a bunch of pot, play a
bunch of Halo, have had internships with 3 major corporations, worked as an
independent contractor last summer and have a 6-figure job lined up when I
graduate. On top of working 12 hours a week with 15-18 credit hours during my
Junior and Senior year, I also have 5 side projects that will either make nice
additions to my open source portfolio or could potentially become products if
I gave them the attention they need.

I think ZephyrP is blinded by his good fortune to not understand that: one,
software developers are in crazy demand compared to, for example, "creative
writers"; and two, that the economy IS quite bad right now and that this is a
generalized extension of the unemployment problems across the country.

That having been said, when it comes to things like video games and drugs, I
think Zephyr's point about "you have to make your own luck" logic is right
(granted I have no idea why there is a pot-shot in there about video games). A
person's work ethic is the root cause and "video games" and "drugs" are silly
remarks for people that don't understand or see that there are plenty of us
who can indulge and still live perfectly productive lives.

Further, I don't know of any indication that "video game" playing is trading
off with employment. At all. On the other hand, there are probably thousands
of statisticians and economists who could give you very specific reasons for
the downturn in employment and show a trend that will probably make it's way
across all segments of society including college grads.

Also, people need to understand that they need marketable degrees and they
need to understand that employers are learning that all degrees are not equal
and you _ABSOLUTELY MUST_ have the skills that your degree assert and you must
be able to communicate well and articulate why you deserve a job.

~~~
ZephyrP
You're right, it's somewhat unfair of me to demonize video games. I most
certainly did not mean to demonize drugs, our society places an unfair stigma
on them that is entirely a result of some rather ancient belief systems.

To be direct, I take this pot shot at video games because I see so many peers,
filled with unbelievable intelligence, ambition and ideas waste everything
they can give the world and themselves by spending their lives in front of
video games. Video games are not bad, they are an interesting artform and
provide unique cultural dialog. They are however something that people have
moved beyond using to relax, contemplate or fill the boring spaces in their
life, it becomes them.

As the other poster stated, because of their reward systems they can suck very
intelligent people incredibly deep into what amounts to a terrible vice.

~~~
drivebyacct2
I think I agree with you about human behavior and things being drains on
peoples' productivity, but frankly I'm sure not if it's anywhere near "big
enough" to be relevant in this particular conversation.

I have some friends that are extremely intelligent that fall into "addictive
ruts" that I think cater to their ADD. In my opinion, it's embarrassing for
them (the ones I have in mind) because they run their mouths about these big
ideas and then play "Tiny Tower" on their iPad (which I suppose qualifies as a
video game) and don't really excel as much as they could. I mean, they're
doing fine for themselves but I'm floored at how I can write 500 lines of code
for something and they've not moved from their chair/iPad.

At the end of it all though, I still don't see anything to make me believe
that this is unique to our generation. _Anything_ can and often is a
distraction, whether it's video games, drinking, being out doors. I know
people that fail classes they were more interested in their rec football game
than studying. I don't think these things account for this _enormous_ gap in
employment.

I'm just imagining the line-graph of "overall unemployment in the US", on top
of the linge-graph of "job availability in the US". I'm sure if you placed the
graph of "college grads with jobs exiting college" you would find a very large
correlation between these three graphs.

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commanda
I'm not sure why college students aren't told that a degree in
anthropology/english/women's studies is not going to give you marketable
skills, while a degree in nursing/engineering/computer science will. Perhaps
incoming freshmen should be given better guidance?

~~~
jforman
"Do what interests you" is very common and very bad advice. I studied social
anthropology for a semester because it "interested" me — but only in theory,
not in practice. The computer science degree I eventually received has yielded
a far more interesting career than what my friends in
psychology/philosophy/sociology have experienced, on average.

~~~
Homunculiheaded
Is it really bad advice? I can't think of a single good software developer I
know who chose the field simply out of pragmatics. Any time I've met someone
in a field because they felt it was necessary they typically hate what they do
are are likewise not very good at it (with some exceptions).

It's incredibly myopic for a people who are passionate about something that
also happens be a reasonably well paying profession to tell other people that
they shouldn't follow their interests.

If anything I think people get stuck because they don't follow their interests
strongly enough.

~~~
jforman
I suppose I should clarify: people generally interpret "do what interests you"
as "study what you think you will enjoy studying" when they should really be
asking themselves what they will enjoy doing as a career.

Social anthropology was interesting to study, but at some point I realized
that actually embarking on a career as a social anthropologist would have been
terrible for me. I like learning about different cultures, not studying a few
scientifically. I can do that as an amateur.

When I sat down to decide what to do instead, I thought, a) I like making ASP
pages for our newspaper, b) you can go into a lot of fields with a CS degree,
and c) there is a clear path for making a tangible impact on society. It turns
out, that was pretty sound reasoning (despite ASP pages being entirely
different from CS): I've worked at Microsoft, in computational biology, and
now at a publishing startup. I've never lacked for engagement (except toward
the end of my time at MSFT), and the problems I'm able to solve in our economy
are a larger part of that than the practice of the discipline itself.

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magicalist
This seems like the most important line in the story:

"About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the
age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at
least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-
com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and
IT fields."

Headline in 2000: "Even with incredible economic performance, nearly 1 in 2
new graduates are jobless or underemployed"

Not to get in the way of the AP's narrative and everyone's self-
congratulations for picking a profitable major.

------
YuriNiyazov
They should learn Ruby on Rails.

* Yea, this sounds like I am being an asshole, but really - the gap between how many developers are needed and how many are available is probably hundreds of thousands.

~~~
patio11
They should. They'll also find it helpful to learn what a command line is and
how to operate it. Oh, and HTML -- got to know HTML. And Javascript seems to
be pretty popular these days... at least enough to operate jQuery. Then
there's SQL, because even Rails developers will get their hands dirty at some
point. Of course, we wouldn't want to _start_ them with data programming
because they've got imperative programming, object oriented programming, and
MVC architecture to get on top of first. We'll start with simple syntax that
as many as 1/4 of you will understand after a week of classes: "a = 10; b = 5;
c = a + b; #What is the value of a now?"

After they get through that a quick course in Linux system administration with
a refresher on the file system metaphor ("Its like Facebook... actually, no,
it is wholly unique to your experience and every person you'll be working with
has forgotten that _twenty years ago_ it confused them, too, so expect not-so-
good natured ribbing when you ask questions."), and how to use Google,
StackOverflow, Github, and a version control system designed by a supergenius
who doesn't care what your fingers think about getting bitten.

Sweet, that gets us to Hello World.

OK, now let's start doing useful work: meet your new friends, the letters A,
P, I and the number "countless." Here's the Stripe API, go charge credit
cards. Ugh, wait, you set the name value of the credit card text field in your
HTML, which results in the credit card number getting written to
production.log, thus causing us to fail PCI compliance. _Don't you know
anything?_

Seriously: I think young college graduates would be very, very well served by
skilling up on things that are commercially valuable rather than the blather
that comprises a lot of what passes for education. That said, "just learn Ruby
on Rails" perhaps does not appreciate how much of a gap there is between the
bottom half of the US college-bound population and an engineer capable of
commercially valuable work.

~~~
kabuks
I just taught 20 people ror. It took 8 weeks. They worked their butts off, and
now two thirds of them have entry level dev jobs.

The talent gap is big enough now that it doesn't take much for someone who is
talented and motivated to get to a point where they are getting paid to
continue to learn.

~~~
patio11
Thumbs up for you personally and for innovation in the space.

------
Quizzy
I'd like to throw in the practicalities of survival income that many college
applicants fail to appreciate because they are so used to living off their
parents' dole. The following are steps that young people ignore until it's too
late:

1\. Before living your dream or doing "something you love", you have to make
your survival income: the first $1500 for food, shelter, transportation. So
where does this steady $1500 come from, and is working the necessary hours to
make $1500 going to leave you with enough time to invest in that "dream"?

2\. So before graduation, have you established your fall back $1500
contingency plan? Do you have a skill (vocational or otherwise) that you KNOW
will bring you that monthly $1500? Step TWO is where I believe high school
counseling has failed America's youth. Everybody should leave high school with
a $1500 skill, whether that be bookeeping, welding, sales, waiting tables,
cashier, etc. It is imperative that upon graduating high school, you are able
to count on having survival wage skills.

3\. Does your college major allow you to skip step two because it is in such
demand that the employment rate for your industry is healthy? Back in the
early 90's, CS graduates were not having an easy time and were considered the
bottom of the totem pole among engineering majors (in my school they weren't
even considered engineers, but rather a soft science more akin to biology,
insultingly enough). Again, this is the fault of high school counselors who
fail to make foresight an essential part of the planning process - this whole
"major in what you love" crap just leaves graduates with a sense of
disappointment when they are unemployable. Always temper "major in what you
love" with the caveat "as long as you already have a skill to pay for
food/shelter/travel".

4\. What's your exit strategy from your survival job? Plan this every day as
you're waiting tables (bartending, welding, dancing,...).

4\. Knowing that high schools (both public and private) are too highbrow to
ever consider vocational training for their top students, it's up to parents
to fully prepare their children. When my son is old enough, his summers will
be spent honing a vocational skill so that he will have an employable skill
that any society will find useful such that if he wishes to travel the world,
he can always pick up a local job should the circumstances demand it. Two come
to mind: welding (easier and ubiquitously needed) or electrician (harder, but
more lucrative).

This long rant is a part of my disatisfaction with the high school paradigm as
currently constituted. The current paradigm is a crapshoot that ill prepares
students for the rigors and realities of survival in a world that could care
less if they were once a valedictorian or All-State track star. I have known
many former high school heroes turned zeroes after college, and it's a fall
from grace that their parents have never ever prepared them for because in
their world, their kids will always be special.

------
moocow01
"Learn to program" is probably going to be a repeated answer here but I'm not
so sure this attitude is going to be doing any good. Enticing people into
technical professions that do not have the inclination is not going to make
things much better - instead your going to end up with a significant band of
people disinterested in their work. We all know how much "negative" work can
be done by bad apples in software.

The problem is that everyone has natural competencies, personalities and
cognitive methods and only a relatively small sliver have the type that will
fit software development. If you think I'm saying were special, I am not.
Every discipline has a relatively small sliver of people who will be naturally
inclined to do it and enjoy it.

The real problem is us... meaning society. We currently aren't culturally
organized in a manner to take advantage of everyone's abilities and part of
the main reasoning I'd say is a lack of diversity in terms of what is
appreciated and rewarded. From my limited perspective our culture seems to
have a maniacal focus on money and a growing monoculture that is focused on
how to become a millionaire at whatever cost. Right now software development
seems to be a good way to get rich partly due to our monoculture's love of
video games, apps, business processes etc. so our industry gets green lit for
now so to say.

The problem is that there is a lot of important stuff to us humans all living
a better life that the majority falsely considers unimportant and lowly for
the most part because of its current low correlation to the almighty profit
... things like culture, art, anthropology, farming, geology, architecture,
care-taking, etc etc The sad thing is that we have swaths of people with great
skills and inclinations that should be going into these different segments but
essentially can't because we collectively don't appreciate people doing these
things.

In other words if you ask me our real jobs problem is that we don't have
diverse enough "consumers" who appreciate the interesting niches different
humans fill.

------
RandallBrown
A bachelors degree is NOT (and should not be) a guarantee you will get a job.
Yes, 30 years ago, a bachelors almost guaranteed you a job. That's because
nobody else had one.

That's not really the case any more. More and more people are going to
college.

Students know their psych degree is worthless when they graduate. They know it
2 years before they actually do graduate. They didn't go to college to become
something, they went to college just because that's what people do now.

The people I know from high school that are successful now went to school to
become something (doctors, lawyers, software developers, photographers). The
ones that are waiters and waitresses just went to college and took classes.

------
hokua
Too many people confuse a college degree with functional skills. College is a
good place to gain functional skills, but in the age of grade inflation, a
degree does not imply you've gained any.

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pbreit
I don't like headlines like this that conflate two quite different situations
(ie, "jobless" and "underemployed").

Ebay used to do the same thing when it would report that x00,000 people sold
on Ebay "full time or part time". Kind of a big difference so not that
meaningful a stat.

------
nandemo
Just a few weeks ago:

"After grad job slump, big hiring is back at U.S. colleges"

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/01/us-economy-
hiring-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/01/us-economy-hiring-
college-idUSBRE83007N20120401)

------
gexla
I love this. The U.S. is a leader at everything. I live in the Philippines and
everyone is crazy about getting cars. People in the U.S. now hate their cars.
Countries such as China and India are churning out gobs of college graduates
while people in the U.S. are beginning to question the value of a college
education.

Anyone who sends out 4 resumes a day is obviously doing something wrong. As a
web developer, I probably couldn't expect to land anything if I were to apply
for 4 gigs every day. The problem with learning marketable skills in college
is that apparently college students aren't learning how to market.

Get yourself out there, talk to people, network, make friends, build things!
All these activities increase your surface luck area. Sending out resumes is
doesn't really help with any of the above, though it probably doesn't hurt to
send one out every once in a while if you are more targeted with it than
sending out 4 a day.

------
ronaldj
The value of college when you enter the job market depends on what you make of
it while you are there. Most people can probably finish one way or another,
but that doesn't guarantee passion or valuable real world skills. I also
believe that the 'name' of your school matters a lot too.

------
rgc4
1 in 2 new college graduates are idiots.

------
rsanchez1
I wonder if this has anything to do with how it seems that every time someone
talks about colleges better preparing young people for a career, there is
always someone here that responds saying that college is not all about getting
a job, but about a "cultural experience". I guess you need something to
justify the expense now.

~~~
invalidOrTaken
Absolutely. This phrase is a distortion of the "liberal education" (that
included calculus, biology, chemistry, and physics) provided by universities
of the past. From what I can tell, universities used to have a much smaller
student/professor ratio, and had a bit more "disciple" in the study of a
particular discipline.

Presumably that ended with the G.I. bill, but no one particularly minded
because factory jobs were plentiful.

So when baby boomers of yesteryear look back at their college experience, and
try and figure out what they got out of it, can they point to stellar
education that they use every day? If they majored in Communications, probably
not. Do their jobs require collegiate-level knowledge or skills? If they're in
marketing or sales, probably not.

So they remember that they smoked their first joint there, and met that one
foreign kid from Uzbekistan, and throw in the first awakenings of independent
thought that come from living on one's lonesome for the first time, and call
it a "cultural experience of self-discovery."

I malign communications and the so-called liberal arts a bit, but that's not
completely deserved. If done right, they actually seem about on par with
mathematics in terms of usefulness---abstract and useless at first, but a
fantastic base for further study, _providing_ that that further study occurs.

~~~
majelix
> If they majored in Communications, probably not. Do their jobs require
> collegiate-level knowledge or skills?

How many dev jobs do you think require, say, integrals or compiler design?

