Our Overeducated Workforce: Who Benefits?

[unrepentant progress]

Here’s the disagreement: BLS says the total number of jobs requiring “postsecondary education” of any sort is 33% now and will grow to 35% by 2022 (jobs requiring bachelor’s degrees will grow from 22% to 23%; those requiring associates degrees and other postsecondary credentials from 11% to 12%). Carnevale says the total is now 59% and will grow to be 65% by 2020, but he has an unusual definition of “college jobs.”

Carnevale dispenses with the BLS’s tedious job descriptions based on surveys of more than a million employers. Instead, he uses well-respected public opinion surveys and finds that many college graduates with jobs that BLS says do not require bachelor’s degrees tell surveyors that they are paid more than non-college-graduates doing the same or similar jobs. Carnevale thinks that when this happens, that person’s job should count as a “college job”: “Employers are still willing to pay more for the college degree – a symbol of a worker’s attainment of the knowledge, skills, and abilities that improve productivity.” Thus, if a barista at Starbucks with a college degree makes more than a barista at Starbucks who does not have a college degree, then that should count as a “college job” because the first barista has benefitted economically from his/her college education.

Well, that is one way to look at it, and a very creative one! But I’m glad the BLS doesn’t count that way. The NY Fed didn’t use Carnevale’s approach either, and as a result, found that though college graduates as a whole average substantially higher incomes than those without college, in 2013 one of four college graduates earned $27,000 or less.

You can probably guess how Sallie Mae, the giant of the college-loan industry, benefits from Carnevale’s reading of the need for more and more “postsecondary education” and from the Lumina Foundation’s mission to double the proportion of higher-educated workers. But watch Poorer by Degrees anyway. It paints a disturbing portrait of how some folks make money by exaggerating the American Dream.

More: http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/our-overeducated-workforce-who-benefits/

[daleanime]

1. Kick....

[MisterP]

2. it's like with the claims of "STEM shortage": you gotta look at *who's* repeating that message

[unrepentant progress]

3. Exactly

[Igel]

4. Health correlates with education.

Who benefits from increased health?


The way dementia progresses is inversely correlated with education.

Again, who benefits?


Best to ask not just, "Who among those we distrust benefits?" and ask instead, "Who's the primarily beneficiary?"


Sallie Mae benefited to the tune of thousands of dollars from me. I'll benefit, most likely, to the tune of years of better health and life. They benefited. I benefit more.