25 years old and deep in debt

[CountDeMoney]

I blame you for not going out and getting certifications.  Degrees are just the cupcake, they're the baseline.  You need specific certifications.  That's the icing. 
Law degree?  Ha!  That's nothing without your Cisco and Microsoft certifications.

Degree holders without certifications are just well-read sales associates at the local retailer of your choice.

[MadImmortalMan]

In fifty years, our grandkids will spend more time chasing certs than actually doing their jobs. This shit is out of control.

[LaCroix]

I'm detecting a faint subtext--it's possibly my imagination, but I am curious if you're pissed about my LSAT crack a little while back.

oh no, not at all. my lsat score was laughably bad. i just personally found it funny.

[CountDeMoney]

oh no, not at all. my lsat score was laughably bad. i just personally found it funny.

Between moving between two different school districts with different curriculum, and being forced by my parents to repeat Algebra I in 9th grade when I didn't need to repeat it--yanking him out of Little League didn't work, maybe extending his sentence will!--there was math stuff on my SAT I had never seen before.  Easiest test I ever took, finished first by over an hour.  It was the prettiest Scantron test sheet in all its cascading symmetry. 

[LaCroix]

Between moving between two different school districts with different curriculum, and being forced by my parents to repeat Algebra I in 9th grade when I didn't need to repeat it--yanking him out of Little League didn't work, maybe extending his sentence will!--there was math stuff on my SAT I had never seen before.  Easiest test I ever took, finished first by over an hour.  It was the prettiest Scantron test sheet in all its cascading symmetry. 

i dropped out of school three times between 12–16 and had a HS gpa of 1.7~ before dropping for good. i forget my SAT score, but it was equivalent to a 22 on the ACT, iirc. i like rubbing it in my best law buddy's face, who's ranked a spot lower than me but got a 33 

[sbr]

The test to finish my electrical apprenticeship and get my license was the easier test I ever took.  Back then it was ~35 questions and you needed 70% to pass. 

I got to the testing site a bit early and sat in my car and read over a practice test I had taken during my code review class; the guy who gave the class had a huge database with a ton of questions that had been asked on previous tests.  At least 20 of the questions on the real test were word for word identical to the practice test, including the multiple choice answers being in the same order.  I knocked all of those out in about 5 minutes, then spent about 30 minutes in the code book answering the 10 easiest questions left, guessed on the remaining questions and got up and turned in my test.

I could feel the death stares from behind me as I turned in the test and left the room while most people were still on the first page.  Ended up passing by 2-3 questions.

[Monoriu]

In fifty years, our grandkids will spend more time chasing certs than actually doing their jobs. This shit is out of control.

It is better for them to be chasing useless qualifications, than rebelling against the regime 

[mongers]

In fifty years, our grandkids will spend more time chasing certs than actually doing their jobs. This shit is out of control.

It is better for them to be chasing useless qualifications, than rebelling against the regime 

See it's replies like this that make me think, you're trying too hard, so you have to be a pro-democracy activist or maybe a deep-cover CIA operative. 

[Monoriu]

See it's replies like this that make me think, you're trying too hard, so you have to be a pro-democracy activist or maybe a deep-cover CIA operative. 

:lol:If that is all you can think of, obviously I have not been trying hard enough

[CountDeMoney]

For Ide, to start his weekend right.  It's focused on women, but it can pretty much fit anybody.

Why Sally can't get a good job with her college degree
By Joann Weiner

Poor Sally. She has spent tens of thousands of dollars and four long years to get her college degree and has $26,000 in student loans to pay off, yet she can't find a job that puts her degree to good use. Sally and her parents may be asking whether college was "worth it."

Sally epitomizes many of her fellow college graduates who wonder why college graduates can't find good jobs.

The experts give all sorts of explanations for Sally's plight.

One of the most perplexing and frustrating explanations is that Sally is over-educated.

Think of the psychology major who brewed your Starbucks coffee this morning, or the Uber driver with the degree in philosophy who took you home last night.

Almost half of all recent college graduates are working at jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

While it might have been rare to see college graduates in these low-quality jobs a few years ago, they're increasingly the norm these days. That same New York Fed study found that more and more recent college graduates are taking low-wage jobs and working part-time while fewer and fewer of them are working full-time at high-quality jobs.

Wharton School professor Peter Capelli tried to figure out whether the problem in the labor market is because the jobs don't require the skills that candidates are offering or because workers don't have the proper skills that employers are seeking.

Here's what he found. The main problem with the U.S. job market isn't a gap in basic skills or a shortage of employees with particular skills, but a mismatch between the supply and the demand for certain skills. There's a greater supply of college graduates than a demand for college graduates in the labor market.

This mismatch, according to Capelli, exists because most jobs in today's economy don't require a college degree.

"Indeed, a reasonable conclusion is that over-education remains the persistent and even growing situation of the U.S. labor force with respect to skills," Capelli said in his study.

Given all the non-economic benefits to a college education, it's hard to call having too much education a "problem," but in light of Capelli's findings, it's worth noting that women are the ones who are getting educated.

Women now earn about 60 percent of the roughly 1 million bachelor's degrees granted each year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And about 30 percent of all women above age 25 have a college degree or more, according to the Census Bureau. (About 80 percent of women age 25 to 29 have a high school degree.)

Those degrees, however, aren't translating into good jobs.

Which means that maybe Sally's problem isn't because she's not qualified for the job, but, instead, is because Sally has skills that employers don't want.

Maybe the U.S. economy isn't generating the types of jobs that require a college degree.

A look projected job growth shows that good jobs will be hard to find. At a median wage of $83,580 a year, the occupation with the fastest projected job growth, industrial-organizational psychologists, pays well. But, there's not much demand for this type of psychologist. The field will generate only 900 jobs in 10 years, according to the Department of Labor's Occupational Outlook.

The next fastest growing occupation, personal care aides, will generate a lot more jobs — more than 58,000 a year compared with 90 a year for the specialized psychologists — in that same time period. That occupation, however, isn't very appealing to Sally with her bachelor's degree. A personal care aide doesn't need a high school degree, much less a college degree. And the job pays commensurately for this level of education: $19,910 a year.

More generally, the occupations with the fastest growth — personal care and home health aides and skincare specialists — tend to pay low wages. And, as the National Women's Law Center's report underpaid and overloaded: women in low-wage jobs noted, women make up a disproportionate share of the fast-growing, low-wage workforce.

This job growth is sort of good news for women. The jobs don't pay well, but at least they exist.

In what should also be considered good news, highly educated women aren't taking very many of these low-wage jobs. Women with at least a bachelor's degree make up only 5.5 percent of the low-wage work force, according to the NWLC.

This leads to a second explanation for Sally's plight: She may be under-educated.

Given the woes of the underemployed college graduate, it's paradoxical that one reason that Sally may not be able to get a good job is because she doesn't have enough education.

Yet, a close look at the educational requirements for the jobs with the fastest growth shows that many of these jobs aren't open to mere college graduates.

Consider psychology, where women make up nearly 75 percent of degree holders. As indicated above, the field of industrial and organizational psychology is projected to be the fastest growing occupation over the decade. Not only is it fast growing, it's also high paying. A typical IO psychologist will make $83,580 a year. However, getting a job as an industrial and organizational psychologist isn't a piece of cake. There are very few new jobs opening each year and the job requires several years of education beyond the bachelor's degree. Depending on the specialty, psychologists must be licensed, obtain a doctorate in psychology, complete a multi-year internship, and pass a professional exam before they can practice psychology.

In fact, if they don't have an advanced degree, graduates with a bachelor's degree in psychology will likely be working as a human resources assistant, mental health technician or sales associate.

That may be the reason why a recent survey by Payscale showed that almost half of all graduates with a degree in psychology were underemployed. The reason they feel underemployed is because with a median salary of $38,200 they feel they are underpaid.

This analysis leads to a final reason why Sally can't get a good job with her college degree.

She has the wrong degree.

Students with traditional liberal arts degrees frequently find themselves underemployed, while students with degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) have little trouble finding good jobs in their profession. Nine out of the top 10 least underemployed majors are in STEM (law is the exception).

Women, however, aren't studying STEM. Biology is the only STEM degree among the top 10 most popular bachelor's degrees for women, and it comes in slightly above English language and literature as a preferred degree. Moreover, women aren't making up for this gap by studying science and technology in graduate school — not a single STEM subject makes it among the top 10 master's degrees for women.

Putting these three explanations together — too much education, not the right level of education, the wrong degree — paints a worrisome picture for the job prospects of college-educated women.

On the one hand, a college degree provides a needed credential to get a job, even if that job doesn't require a college degree. But, on the other hand, if a woman wishes to move up on the pay scale, she may have to consider dropping her liberal arts degree in favor of a more technically-oriented degree, like engineering or physics. Barring these changes, women may find that they are very well-educated, but not necessarily very well compensated.

[Ideologue]

Given all the non-economic benefits to a college education, it's hard to call having too much education a "problem,"

I hope this jackass gets ground glass in her next frappucino.

[Ideologue]

Women, however, aren't studying STEM. Biology is the only STEM degree among the top 10 most popular bachelor's degrees for women, and it comes in slightly above English language and literature as a preferred degree. Moreover, women aren't making up for this gap by studying science and technology in graduate school — not a single STEM subject makes it among the top 10 master's degrees for women.

I take it back.  I just hope she gets slugged in the jaw by someone whose non-economic benefits to wasting four years of their prime somehow just can't bring a smile to their face when they have to, economically, pay their PAYE education tax every month.

[CountDeMoney]

Because I didn't feel like starting another shit thread.

On Leadership
What employers really want? Workers they don't have to train
By Peter Cappelli September 5 at 8:09 AM

Not that long ago, an idea began to circulate that the U.S. economy was going to run out of workers. Consulting firms began pushing the idea, citing each others'reports as evidence. Reporters wrote about it. And a great many people in the private sector and the government swallowed the concept whole. By the mid-2000s, many big employers and even some government agencies were preparing for the Great Labor Shortage to set in by 2010.

While the idea seems preposterous now, something similarly absurd is happening again. Raise your hand if you've heard this: There are good jobs out there for people who have skills. But employers can't find people to hire because high schools are failing and college students aren't majoring in the hard subjects where the jobs are. The economy, as they say, is facing a skills gap. (The latest jobs report, out Friday, shows the lowest hiring numbers in eight months.)

I've recently reviewed all the papers and stories on this question, and there is no more truth to this notion than there was to the labor shortage idea. It got popular attention with media reports about a handful of employers in the depths of the Great Recession who could not fill job openings. Then came a series of papers issued by consultants and business associations asking employers whether they were having difficulty hiring employees. Many were, but the investigators didn't ask what was difficult, or investigate why.

The real issue is that employers' expectations — for the skills of new graduates, for what they must invest in training, and for how much they need to pay their employees — have grown increasingly out of step with reality.

The first problem with the skills gap argument is that the employer reports, which form the entire basis of evidence, are about overall hiring rather than jobs filled by recent graduates. In other words, the complaint is really that companies are having trouble finding applicants at all career levels with the right work history, rather than not having enough recent graduates with the skills to be hired. Because the vast majority of job seekers have been out of school for decades, the complaints are really unrelated to what schools are doing now.

When employers are specifically asked about recent graduates, their complaints have nothing to do with academic skills. They often express the same concerns older generations have always had about young people — they are not conscientious enough, they don't listen, they expect too much. Although you'd never know it from the news, the actual evidence on student achievement shows that U.S. students have actually been doing better over the past generation. Drop-out rates are down significantly, and scores on the standardized National Assessment of Education Progress tests show improvement in both math and English scores.

And while companies may complain young workers aren't getting the right degrees, students are actually increasingly pursuing vocational majors that they hope employers will like. Business majors, for instance, outnumber liberal arts majors by as much as seven to one, depending on the definitions used. And since 2001, science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees have increased at a rate equal to or greater than the overall increase in bachelor degrees being awarded.

These complaints reveal an unsettling truth: What employers really want are workers they don't have to train. One of the studies I reviewed from the Chronicle of Higher Education asked employers specifically what they were looking for in new college grads. Only one of the top five priorities had to do with candidates'academic experience, even though this was for new graduates who have yet to take a full-time job.

Companies simply haven't invested much in training their workers. In 1979, young workers got an average of 2.5 weeks of training a year. While data is not easy to come by, around 1995, several surveys of employers found that the average amount of training workers received per year was just under 11 hours, and the most common topic was workplace safety — not building new skills. By 2011, an Accenture study showed that only about a fifth of employees reported getting on-the-job training from their employers over the past five years.

A few of the employer surveys I reviewed do offer some more credible answers for why employers might not be finding the applicants they want. A surprising number admit they aren't paying enough: Some 30 percent of U.S. employers in a 2014 survey by ManpowerGroup said job seekers were looking for more pay than was being offered. Still, just 14 percent said they were increasing starting salaries to fight the problem. Some employers also recognize they're having trouble anticipating their own skill needs.

If something new really has happened, it's that employer practices have changed. More companies are hiring from the outside rather than growing their own talent from within. This in turn has led to declining tenure among employees, who are more willing to jump ship. The real challenge we face is that if everyone is hiring for the ability to do a job, rather than for the potential to do it well, how does anyone get that initial experience?

Unfortunately, a great many policymakers have bought the skills gap view. Their conclusion is that we should make schools more responsible for training job applicants. Several state legislatures, for example, have been considering proposals to push college students into majors where employers want to hire.

We should rethink this fast. Schools are not good at providing what employers want, which is work-based skills and experience. Instead, employers need to be much more involved, not just in telling schools what they want but in providing opportunities for new grads to get work experience and learn the relevant expertise. We need a different approach: one where  employers are not just consumers of skills, but are part of the system for producing them.

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor professor of management at The Wharton School and Director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources.

On Leadership
Our irrational, harmful bias against the unemployed
By Peter Cappelli
May 5

The persistent high level of unemployment in the six years since the Great Recession began is fast becoming the defining theme of this generation — and a leadership imperative that can no longer be ignored.

Friday's news on job growth is good: an increase of 288,000 jobs this past month, bringing the unemployment rate to 6.3 percent, well down from its 30-year peak of 10 percent. The number of discouraged workers who want a job but have given up trying to find one is unchanged, however. When we include those in the mix, we're still left with about three available candidates for every job vacancy out there.

The three and a half million people who remain "long-term unemployed" — that is, who have been out of work for more than six months — represent more than a third of unemployed workers. This is the highest it's been since the Great Depression. Being out of work that long creates many problems, such as a loss of housing or health care, that not only cause hardship for individuals and their families, but also place even more burdens on public and private support systems.

Yet the tools for addressing the long-term unemployment problem are within our grasp. And chief among them is for employers to move past the stigma that the unemployed are somehow less qualified to hold a job. That bias persists in corporate human resources departments, but it is unsupported by evidence.

It's maddening to see such imaginary fears become real barriers to solving our employment crisis. A field study by Northeastern University economics Ph.D. candidate Rand Ghayad and another led by Kory Kroft at University of Toronto sent out fake resumes to employers. The studies found strong evidence that employers' willingness to consider applicants dropped like a stone after the candidates had been unemployed for six months. The companies actually preferred candidates with no relevant experience to those with a background in the field but who'd been out of work for a stretch.

Corporate leaders haven't always viewed unemployment this way. Traditionally when the economy improved and created new jobs, businesses would look to the ranks of the unemployed to fill them. Until the mid-1980s, the term "layoff" actually referred to a temporary job loss — and employers were expected to rehire these workers as soon as the economy turned up again.

But by the 1990s, that stopped happening, and the term became a euphemism for permanent job losses instead. This coincided with the "jobless recoveries" that have accompanied every recession since then.

So if employers are not rehiring from the ranks of the unemployed now, how do they fill new jobs? By hiring from each other. This nonsensical game of musical chairs (I hire your workers, you hire someone else's, and then they try to hire mine) would seem to be unsustainable. Sooner or later, one might think, employers will start to see the unemployed as a valuable alternative.

But in fact, they haven't. Vacancies are simply staying open longer as employers wait to find individuals who are willing to move from other companies. And it has become so prevalent for employers to reject unemployed job candidates outright that last year the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission threatened to start investigating these cases.

Why won't employers take long-term unemployed candidates more seriously? The reason has much to do with simple bias, and little to do with hard evidence.

One myth about the unemployed is that something must be wrong with a person who lost his or her job. The economists Bob Gibbons and Larry Katz found evidence of this when they studied how people who were laid off because their plant closed — an event that clearly wasn't their fault. They had an easier time getting rehired than those who were laid-off for other reasons.

Meanwhile, the most intense bias against the long-term unemployed seems to be the result of yet another myth: If they were good, someone else would have hired them by now. All it takes is for enough hiring managers to think this same way, and no one would ever get a job.

The final reason for bias against the long-term unemployed is the notion that their skills must have gotten out of date by not working. That might be true for surgeons, whose manual dexterity can decline quickly, or maybe in tech fields where software has advanced to a new generation.

But few jobs are like that. Studies have found that the performance of new hires who had been unemployed for a long time was no different than that of new hires who came directly from jobs elsewhere. In fact, most jobs are so routine that taking a break from them — a sabbatical — is actually a good thing for improving work performance. Ironically, so few employees learn new skills on the job these days that it's much more likely that an unemployed person might have expanded his or her skill set, either by taking classes, mastering new software or learning new marketing techniques in the course of extended unemployment.

Ruling out job candidates because they have been unemployed imposes big costs on both citizens, who remain without jobs and income, and on the economy — not to mention on employers who are losing out on an entire population of talented candidates. There is no justification for doing it. In fact, it's a form of discrimination.

Responsible business leaders should, at the very minimum, tell their human resource departments to update their hiring policies so they don't filter applicants based on current employment status. The biggest problem is likely to be overcoming the prejudices of hiring managers, who often have little information about the real predictors of job performance and so rely on these false assumptions that unemployed candidates probably aren't good performers. A simple statement from leadership that this is not the case is often enough to change their approach.

Moreover, corporate leaders should support policy changes that provide tax credits for hiring the long-term unemployed. The credits would incentivize employers to look past their own biases, and would cost the government nothing unless an eligible candidate is hired. I reviewed the research for a group called the National Employer Opportunities Network, and we found that such tax credits are a cheap and ultimately beneficial way to move people off government programs.

Plus, in the process, it may actually increase total employment — and help stop the pointless game of musical chairs that hurts rather than helps everyone.

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School and Director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources.

[Zanza]

Video on how automation will replace most human jobs including e.g. a lot of lawyers, doctors and white collar workers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

[FunkMonk]

You folks might find this podcast interesting, if you have an hour to spare.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html

Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the value of a college education. Caplan argues that the extra amount that college graduates earn relative to high school graduates is misleading as a guide for attending college--it ignores the fact that a sizable number of students don't graduate and never earn that extra money. Caplan argues that the monetary benefits of a college education have a large signaling component rather than representing the value of the knowledge that's learned. Caplan closes by arguing that the subsidies to education should be reduced rather than increased.