Towards the end of the first chapter in Tinkering Toward Utopia, Robert Kuttner is quoted as saying that “improving the schools and reforming job training are…relatively easy. The hard part is improving the kinds of jobs that the economy offers.” While I’m not sure how “easy” educational reform is (especially in light of some of this semester’s readings), I know from first-hand experience (and I’m sure I’m not alone here) that this is at least somewhat accurate. There was a joke heard constantly during my undergrad years: “I have a degree in English. Would you like fries with that?” We all got a big laugh out of it until we actually graduated and discovered that it wasn’t a joke. Ha ha.
While working as the general manager of a movie theater (a job that sounds way more fun than it actually is), I found myself constantly being questioned by my superiors as to why exactly I couldn’t find employees who could do simple mathematics and behave like civilized human beings. My answer was always the same: “Well, we’re only paying them $6 an hour. And you get what you pay for.” Their response was always, “We shouldn’t pay people more than $6 an hour to make popcorn.” And things would continue in the same fashion, week after week.
To their credit, my superiors’ hearts were in the right place. They weren’t trying to attract college grads. But they did want smarter employees (except in my case, where I’m pretty sure they wanted someone dumber than I was doing the job); they were just unwilling to pay for qualified people. And, again, this was a movie theater. The primary qualifications for working at a movie theater are the ability to tear a sheet of paper in two and toast a piece of bread without burning it. It’s not like they were asking a lot. But who in their right mind is going to work for $6 an hour? That’s right, no one. Which is why all of our employees were out of their minds. And also why we were always trying to hire new people.
Then there was me, overqualified and constantly finding (and pointing out) flaws in the company’s overall business strategy while wanting to drive pencils into my eyeballs out of abject frustration. So, on one hand, we had popcorn jockeys who acted like the Abominable Snowman from the Bugs Bunny cartoons, and, on the other, we had management members who were overqualified for their work and only took the job because they couldn’t get an actual job in their degree field, quickly leaving once they realized that this could never be an actual career. If this isn’t indicative of a gross imbalance, I don’t know what is.
I don’t know that every degree program is like this, but it seems that there are far more qualified people these days than there are jobs from the when they finish college (and I’m speaking in pre-economic meltdown terms. I’m sure the situation has gotten far worse since then). Just as Kuttner implies, grads are overlooking the number of dead-end (in this case, $6 per hour) jobs available and dwelling instead on the difficulty of finding a job they went to school to learn how to do. And why shouldn’t they? While educational reform is essential in improving our society, it is only one component and should not be, as Tyack and Cuban point out, a “scapegoat” or “panacea” for the ills of the world. The job market needs some serious reform, too.
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4 comments:
I agree with you, but the educated person must be able to do more than perform in their area of study. If your education has taught you anything, it should be how to analyze your situation and come up with solutions. My field in the early eighties was health care management. Believe it or not at that time hospitals were laying off nurses. The Medicare system had changed its reimbursement method, so hospitals were scarred that they could no longer make a profit. My education had taught me how to "think outside the box." I understood the field and a wide variety of exposure to different kinds of people. Hospital personnel offices would not even take my resume. What did I do? I learned how to type fast enough to get a clerical job in the industry where I wanted to work. I eventually secured a secretarial job for a Senior Vice President of a health insurance company. Once in that position, I used what I knew to make proposals to my boss. Withn two years I was promoted and had my own department.
Don't be discouraged. Think about what you know and how you can solve an employer's problem. If you can do this, you will find work. Stop looking at all the traditional avenues and start using those thinking skills that you exercised in your education.
I'm not exactly saying that I'm against "thinking outside the box" as far as the job market goes. I worked at this particular job for 11 years total, during which time I was promoted (ahead of several people with seniority over me), eventually taking over as complex manager. This happened because I was extremely good at what I did and I constantly demonstrated this to my bosses. What I'm saying is that I didn't NEED a degree to do this work, and the only reason I accepted the job (which paid me a comparatively small salary) was because I was unable to find a job doing what I had a degree in. The problem isn't willingness to work or demonstrate ingenuity at a job, it's getting trained to do something and then discovering that all that training (and the money spent obtaining it) was sort of unnecessary because there aren't enough jobs to go around.
Nice post, Brian. One thing that's going on in this post and comments is a discussion about the relationship between education and getting a job. Is that necessarily what an education is for? There's also the credentialing issue -- plenty of jobs want you to have a college degree, even if the skills associated with the degree aren't necessary to perform the job. It's the credential that's supposed to mean something. Have we gone too far in that direction?
Well, I will say that having a degree gave a fair amount of personal satisfaction, regardless of the job I was doing. So I'd say there is value to education beyond the goal of "finding employment." I have applied for a few jobs that required a degree, most of which were in a writing/editing field. The movie theater job...well, let's just say that the fact that I had finished college seemed to be more a novelty among my contemporaries than anything else. So as to the general value of a degree to prospective employers, I'm not really sure.
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