25 years old and deep in debt

[Valmy]

Oddly my company keeps hiring more and more people.

Yeah and I know a guy under 29 who has a job so clearly no crisis.

[garbon]

Oddly my company keeps hiring more and more people.

Yeah and I know a guy under 29 who has a job so clearly no crisis.

I wasn't going that far. I merely was objecting to Seedy's continual hysterics.

[CountDeMoney]

Besides, business has learned after 2008 that if they can weather the contractions they suffered and still stay in business and show a profit with less employees, why bother expanding, investing, hiring?  The lesson learned was we can earn more with less.

Oddly my company keeps hiring more and more people.

Yay for you.  I know a company that doesn't, so we're even.

[garbon]

Besides, business has learned after 2008 that if they can weather the contractions they suffered and still stay in business and show a profit with less employees, why bother expanding, investing, hiring?  The lesson learned was we can earn more with less.

Oddly my company keeps hiring more and more people.

Yay for you.  I know a company that doesn't, so we're even.

Actually, I don't know how it helps me any. I already have a position.

[CountDeMoney]

I merely was objecting to Seedy's continual hysterics.

Yes, the net job losses from 2008-2012, and finally breaking even in December 2012, are indeed hysterical.

[CountDeMoney]

Actually, I don't know how it helps me any. I already have a position.

Once again:  yay for you.

[Eddie Teach]

Actually, I don't know how it helps me any. I already have a position.

Your company being successful and not having to lay people off.

[Phillip V]

Young and Educated in Europe, but Desperate for Jobs

'Five years after the economic crisis struck the Continent, youth unemployment has climbed to staggering levels in many countries: in September, 56 percent in Spain for those 24 and younger, 57 percent in Greece, 40 percent in Italy, 37 percent in Portugal and 28 percent in Ireland. For people 25 to 30, the rates are half to two-thirds as high and rising.

Those are Great Depression-like rates of unemployment, and there is no sign that European economies, still barely emerging from recession, are about to generate the jobs necessary to bring those Europeans into the work force soon, perhaps in their lifetimes.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/world/europe/youth-unemployement-in-europe.html

[Savonarola]

As it turns out educating women was a mistake after all:

ALISON WOLF'S 'XX FACTOR': HAS EDUCATION MADE WOMEN LESS EQUAL?

Alison Wolf is standing on 118th Street in front of Columbia University in New York City's Upper West Side, flagging me down with a waving arm. I'm late to meet her. She has the British cell phone from which she's just called me in one hand and is cursing her American phone company for screwing up her service. Finally finding each other, we take the elevator up to the top of the building and sit down in an expansive, empty classroom to talk about Wolf's new book.

In The XX Factor (Crown), the British economist and journalist argues that the rise of feminism and the highly educated, empowered woman has created a small, female elite 15 percent that's quickly becoming segregated from the rest of womankind. Gone is a common female bond, instead replaced by two distinct classes:  the 85 percent of women who lead home-focused lives and gendered jobs —ones that have traditionally fallen to women — and the well-educated 15 percent at the top, whose work habits and career choices are more parallel to men's. "Feminists once talked of 'the sisterhood,' but educated, successful women today have fewer interests in common with other women than ever before," Wolf writes.

"I've always been interested in how education worked for women and has been good for women, and I started digging into this," Wolf says to me, leaning forward over the table. "What it made me incredibly aware of was that education really had created a pathway for the top 15 percent, but for the rest of the 85 percent, it wasn't clear to me that it really had created any social mobility ... On the one hand, [women] like me were, through education, moving into 50 percent of professional jobs, other people were working in these either male or female environments."

The book is an extensively researched work that dives into the habits of these XX women, underscoring the allegedly growing divide between them and less-educated females in terms of their professional, sexual, marital, financial, political, and childbearing habits. One of the most glaring trends she observed was that women and men in these elite classes marry each other more, which increases income gaps and makes harder social mobility. As this divide between classes increases, it creates a self-sustaining cycle, Wolf argues. Whether or not you agree with Wolf's theses, it makes for a compelling, timely read.

Wolf's own story doesn't sound like a far cry from the XX women she describes. On the university-bound path from her early days in Newbury, a small town in southern England, Wolf attended Oxford and the University of Neuchâtel, then spent her early career as a policy analyst in the U.S. She is currently a professor at King's College in London. She is married to the economics journalist Martin Wolf — also Oxford-educated. As Wolf notes in The XX Factor, "Successful women don't like to marry down."

"When you look at marriage patterns, elite men and women make more stable marriages — as well as particularly self-reinforcing ones," Wolf says.

Wolf is a fountain of information as she talks about the trends she found in her research, almost gushing facts and statistics. For a moment, I feel less like an interviewer and more like a student in her lecture hall, and I have the urge to pull out a pen and pad and start taking notes should I miss something invaluable.

Wolf tells me that her book didn't originate from a set theory she set out to prove; instead, the concept germinated from "following her nose," digging deeper into patterns she began discovering in her research, particularly in politics. "It was realizing that women vote for the same reason men do — they vote out of anxiety, self-interest, and all the rest of it," Wolf says. "Why did women vote differently than men? Why did they see their perspectives as so different? And it was very much related to the fact that so many of them were working low-paid, part-time, service jobs — they had a really different, gendered work life, whereas at the top, where we do all the wingeing about gender, we really didn't have a gendered work life at all any more. That was what made me wonder, Well, suppose I just followed my nose."

Wolf says that one of the things that surprised her most was when people were analyzing stats, they often overlooked data inside the female group for graduates versus non-graduates — and that's where she started to see dramatic discrepancies within the gender. "It didn't make sense to talk about 'women' anymore most of the time," she says. She argues that we need to talk about two groups of women.

So, how do we address the massive chasm that Wolf argues has been put between the elite and the other 85 percent? Wolf says the trends that she's examining haven't begun to finish playing themselves out, so it's hard to forecast the right solution for eliminating the issue.

"I don't think you can close the gap by doing something to the labor market, and I actually think this is about worldwide changes and about the disappearance of manufacturing. And I don't think that education is ever going to be a miracle, because the top families will always have more access," Wolf says. "Truthfully, what one can and should try to do is redistribute more. One of the results of this is that people at the top are earning amounts that are just obscene and there is really no reason why we can't have very comfortable lives and pay more tax."

She favors tax breaks for small businesses and points to Japan for a model of creating jobs for its citizens that could "easily be done by machines instead." And, despite their precarious economic standing, she cites Italy as a good model for an economy in which small industries are encouraged.

Wolf also advocates tightening up education, saying that the elite have to get out of private schools and back into the public systems. She credits Canada and Australia as large countries doing a relatively good job with public education. "They have good teacher training, they have good very, very well-established curricula that they've changed gradually. They don't have anything like [the U.S.'s] center cities or even English center cities ... The point is that you have stability, you train your teachers, and you actually get rid of the bad ones. You have parents who are motivated, you do your very best to keep the public schools good enough that the professional classes use them. No system can do really well with its public education system if a significant part of the elite have opted out."

Should the elite feel guilty about leaving most of women in the dust after reading The XX Factor?

"I don't think they should feel guilty — they should feel grateful," Wolf says. "We should be much more appreciative of the women of the first half of the 20th century for the time they put in volunteering and doing things that none of us do. I don't think we should feel guilty about taking our chances to do well. I do think we should feel more aware of how tough everyone else is finding it, and I do think we should be willing to pay higher taxes, and that when we get into our 60s and we stop working flat-out, instead of spending time on cruises, we should be willing to put a lot more back in."

The 85% will eventually evolve into the Morlocks.  WAKE UP AMERICA!

[Ideologue]

How are they going to become Morlocks without a solid STEM education?

As Wolf notes in The XX Factor, "Successful women don't like to marry down."

Or laterally.  At the end of the day, the only thing that might yet save humanity from its own horrible instincts is genetic engineering.  Though we have not yet seen it, we can dream, and it may be possible to create a type of human actually capable of love.

We'd probably murder it.

[Savonarola]

Public universities should be free
Americans are losing access to higher education because they have forgotten what "public" means

Public education should be free. If it isn't free, it isn't public education.

This should not be a controversial assertion. This should be common sense. But Americans have forgotten what the "public" in "public education" actually means (or used to mean). The problem is that the word no longer has anything to refer to: This country's public universities have been radically transformed. The change has happened so slowly and so gradually — bit by bit, cut by cut over half a century — that it can only really be seen in retrospect. But with only a small amount of historical perspective, the change is dramatic: public universities that once charged themselves to open their doors to all that could benefit by attending — that were, by definition, the public property of the entire state, as a whole — have become something entirely different.

What we still call "public universities" would be more accurately described as state-controlled private universities — corporate entities that think and behave like businesses. Where there once was a public mission to educate the republic's citizens, there is now the goal of satisfying the educational needs of the market, aided by PR departments that brand degrees as commodities and build consumer interest, always with an eye to the bottom line. And while public universities once sought to advance the industry of the state, as a whole, with an eye to the common good, shortfalls in public funding have led to universities treating their research capacity as a source of primary fund-raising, developing new technologies and products for the private sector, explicitly to raise the money they need to operate. Conflicts of interest are now commonplace.

Should public universities be free? Only because our public universities have been so fundamentally privatized over the last forty years does the sentence "Public universities should be free" even make sense. Of course they should be free! If an education was available only to those who could afford it — if an education is a commodity to be purchased in the marketplace — in what sense could it really be called "public"?

Let there be light

In the early 1960s, California formulated a "master plan" for higher education — a single name for a set of interlocking policies developed by University of California President Clark Kerr. The idea was that any Californian who wanted a post-secondary education would have a place to go in the state's three-tiered system. Students could go to a community college, for free, and from there, they could transfer to one of the many California State Universities or Universities of California, where no tuition was charged — only course "fees" that were intended to be nominal. New universities were swiftly planned and built to meet the dramatic increase in demand expected from the incoming Baby Boomer and the state's population growth; as more and more citizens aspired to higher education, California opened more and more classrooms and universities to give them that opportunity. The master plan was not a blank check, but it was a commitment: any Californian who wanted a post-secondary education could get one.

Today, that is simply not true. For one thing, institutions like the University of California have not grown to meet the rising demand; year by year, bit by bit, as the state's population has continued to grow, a larger percentage of California students have been turned away or replaced by out-of-state students (who pay much higher tuition). In fact, university officials are quite explicit about the fact that they are admitting more out-of-state and international students (and fewer Californians) in order to raise money. Historically, about 10 percent of the U.C.'s student population was out-of-state, but that number has more than doubled since the 2008 financial crisis (In Michigan — which has been hit even harder than California — out-of-state enrollment in the University of Michigan system is closer to 40 percent.)

If this country can build the world's largest military and fight open-ended wars in multiple theaters across the globe, it can find a way to pay for public education.
Most importantly, as tuition steadily rises to the level of comparable private universities, the word "public" comes to mean less and less. Indeed, when Mark Yudof was appointed president of the University of California in 2008, he was known as an advocate of what he had called in 2002 the "hybrid university": an institution that retained some of the characteristics of a public university, but which would draw the bulk of its revenue from student tuition.

Yudof's vision of the "public" university would have been unrecognizable to the architects of the master plan: instead of providing the tools for the state's citizens to better themselves, state universities are to survive by thinking like a business, selling their product for as much as the market will bear. From the point of view of a higher education consumer — which is what its students have effectively become — the claim that the U.C. is "public" institution rings increasingly false with every passing year.

For my parents, by contrast, distinction between public and private was very clear. Both baby boomers and the first in their families to get college degrees, they went to public university because it was affordable, while private university was not. By that definition, are there any public universities left? Schools that are at last partially funded and controlled by elected officials, usually at the state level, are nominally "public" while the broad range of universities that are not owned by the government — from non-profit corporations like Harvard to explicitly for-profit corporations like the University of Phoenix or Udacity — truly inhabit the private sector. But if the price tag is the same, if the product is the same, and if the experience is the same, what difference does a university's tax status make? A university that thinks and behaves like a private-sector corporation — charging its consumers what the market will bear, cutting costs wherever it can, and using competition with its peers as its measure of success — is a public university in name only.

Open roads and toll roads

A better way to compare public and private would be to consider the difference between public roads and toll roads. Some toll roads are owned and operated by state governments, and some by the private sector. But does the driver care who owns the road? I doubt it; the important thing is whether the road is free and open to all, or whether it can be used only by those who can afford to drive on it. The same is true of public and private universities: a university is "public" only if those who need to use it can do so.

In this sense, it seems to me that the malaise that afflicts our public universities is not really about about dollars and cents. If this country can build the world's largest military and fight open-ended wars in multiple theaters across the globe, it can find a way to pay for public education, as it once did, in living memory. But doing so has ceased being a real priority. Affordable "public education" is no longer something we expect, demand or take for granted; to argue that public education should be free makes you sound like an absurd and unrealistic utopian. Meanwhile, we take it for granted that roads should be free to drive on, a toll-road here or there not withstanding. You provide the car and the gas; the state provides the road.

This used to be how we thought about our public universities, before they became exorbitant toll roads: if you had the grades and the ambition, there was a classroom open to you. But if every road was a toll road, no one would expect to drive for free. If every road was a toll road, the very idea that the government would build and maintain a massive system of roads and highways — and then let anyone use it (for free!) — would seem fantastical, ridiculous, even perverse. Anyone expecting the right to drive anywhere they pleased, for free, would be branded a utopian, a socialist, a deluded and soft-hearted liberal demanding a free lunch. That's the world we live in when it comes to highways: when the roads that drive our economy and make modern life possible get too crowded or too congested, we expect the state to build new roads. When the old roads wear out, they are re-paved; when a tree or a landslide obstructs a thoroughfare, the state clears the way. When there are not enough classrooms, on the other hand, the state no longer builds new universities; it simply charges more.

For most of the twentieth century, when the overwhelming majority of this country's public universities were built, it was simply common sense that a growing college-age population had to be matched by a growing system of accessible higher education, something that — as everyone agreed — only the government could provide, and which only the government did provide. They were explicitly chartered to bring a college degree within the reach of as many citizens as possible and to advance the greater good by disseminating knowledge as widely as possible. Without that common sense, that bipartisan consensus, our public universities would never have been built in the first place. And judged by that original standard, there are few, if any, public universities left.

Aaron Bady is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas and formerly a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an editor and blogger at the New Inquiry.

We just haven't had a good malaise since the Carter administration; until this very day.

[CountDeMoney]

Too funny, or too sad?  You decide.

A Whopping 95% Employment Rate For U.S. MBA Grads

So much for those anti-higher education naysayers who contend the MBA is a degree that has diminishing value. And so much for the few disappointed MBA holders who assert that the degree isn't worth its escalating costs.

Today a new survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council found that nine out of every ten MBAs in the Class of 2013 were employed in September. Overall, the employment rate for two-year MBAs hit 92%, up from 90% last year and 85% in 2009. It would have been even higher if not for some sluggishness in Europe where 18% of graduating MBAs were unemployed in September.

For U.S. citizens who graduated from two-year MBA programs, moreover, the employment rate was a whopping 95%, the highest level in the past five years and up from 91% last year.

The new GMAC report — based on responses from 915 members of the Class of 2013 from 129 business schools around the world — continues to also show widespread satisfaction with graduate business education. GMAC said that 96% of the responding Class of 2013 rate the value of their degree as outstanding, excellent, or good, and the same percentage of the class would recommend a graduate management education to others. Three of every four members of the class say they could not have obtained their job without their graduate business education, according to the GMAC survey.

The median starting annual salaries offered to U.S. citizens who graduated from a full-time, two-year MBA this year was $90,000, with a bonus and additional comp of $10,000. That's up from a median base of $86,700 last year. Of course, these numbers are for U.S. graduates of a wider sample of business schools. Graduates of the very top business schools earned substantially more.

Stanford Graduate School of Business, for example, recently reported that its Class of 2013 MBAs earned median salaries of $125,000 – $35,000 more than the GMAC number — with median signing bonuses of $25,000 and median guaranteed bonuses of $30,000. Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina said its Class of 2013 MBAs had median pay of $100,000, with $25,000 signing bonuses and $17,000 guaranteed bonuses.

Compensation obviously varies greatly by geography, school, program, industry and work experience. U.S. citizens who graduated from part-time MBA programs reported median annual salary of $85,000, GMAC found. Citizens of India who graduated from full-time, two-year MBA programs reported a median starting salary of just $34,988. Europeans graduating from full-time, one-year MBA programs reported the highest median starting salaries in the GMAC sample: $101,093.

GMAC says the survey is based on a 19% response rate, which is fairly consistent with previous polls. It does not calculate a margin of error for the poll which asks graduates if they are employed in September, which can be between three or four months after graduation depending on when commencement was held. Employment includes MBAs who are self-employed, but not those who are no longer looking for a job.

[Valmy]

Young and Educated in Europe, but Desperate for Jobs

It is a pretty serious crisis.  As it turns out the birth rates in Europe were too high.

[Savonarola]

For once an article that doesn't say all young adults are lazy, spoiled deadbeats

In search of perfection, young adults turn to Adderall at work

The prescription ADHD medication is becoming a popular resource as a performance-enhancing drug for the brain

Ella Benson was a junior in college the first time she took it. With a class assignment due, she was offered the drug as a means to stay up all night and crank out something respectable by morning.

It worked, and Benson now says it was the first time she "really connected" with something she was working on.

"It was the first paper I wrote where I felt like I came up with an idea that was meaningful and important," she said. "I got an A on it."

An A for Adderall.

Now, at 26, Benson is a professional writer who reports for a major news publication and has had her byline in The New York Times. She keeps an "emergency stash" of Adderall nearby for when she's working on a big story and has to stay awake all night. 

Benson (whose name, like all the people in this story who discuss their ADHD drug use, has been changed to protect her identity) is typical of a growing population of young adults who went to college in the 2000s. As they age out into the workplace, they're taking with them the ADHD med habits they developed in college — and finding the drugs still work.

While it is tempting to chalk up the rising use of ADHD drugs among young adults to a generational trend of lax morals and blind eyes towards addiction and other health risks, a more complete explanation suggests an environment that encourages stimulant use. A hugely popular New York Times op-ed written by Tim Kreider pointed out what is fast becoming the modern condition: guilt and anxiety over any minute not spent working or promoting that work.

In this culture of perfection, in which the worst thing someone could be is not busy, many young adults have latched onto a drug that makes them go faster, harder and stronger at work.

"When I take Adderall, I think, 'This must be how really successful, smart people are all the time,'" said Jonathan Collier, 27, who works in a senior position at a New York production house. "I wish so badly I was one of those people."

In his 2008 book, "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell theorized that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill and share the kind of success enjoyed by "those people" — the Bill Gateses and Paul Allens of the world. His theory may serve as both an explanation and a product of the current culture. Gladwell, after all, came to the conclusion that the way to succeed is to put the blinders on: to ignore all the distractions inherent in contemporary society and to single-mindedly and doggedly pursue a goal.

Dr. Henry Abraham, a psychiatrist who has treated doctors, lawyers and other high achievers, said stimulants now are used often in a way that is closer to sports medicine than it is to psychiatry: to enhance performance. That's because the working world — like college before it, and, for some, prep school before that — is a competition, and people are looking to get an edge. Everyone wants to get those 10,000 hours, but not everyone is wired to do it naturally. So, many turn to Adderall and other ADHD drugs.

The modern brain

It's unclear how many adults take ADHD drugs, but it is evident that use is skyrocketing. According to IMS Health, in 2007, 5.6 million monthly prescriptions for ADHD medications were written for people ages 20 to 39. By 2011, that number had jumped to 14 million, a staggering 150 percent increase. Anecdotal evidence also shows a large number of people illegally taking ADHD drugs without a prescription.

"I think part of the increase in the rate of (ADHD drug) prescriptions," said Dr. David Meyer, a professor of psychology, cognition and perception at the University of Michigan, "is that people both younger and older are coming to feel totally overloaded with bunches of information and are trying to cope with the increasing demands as best they can."

Our brains have mechanisms of executive function, similar to a computer operating system, he said. These mechanisms keep people's situational awareness up to speed and coordinate progress on various real-world tasks. But these executive functions are under constant attack in the modern world.

"Even a 10- (or) 20-second interruption can make you lose your situational awareness entirely," Meyer said.

In many of the information-based jobs available to young professionals, those interruptions are not just unavoidable collateral damage; they are baked into the job itself.

"I'm expected to consume so much media and data every day on top of what I'm already supposed to do," said Cristina Long, a 24-year-old public-relations professional. "I need to stay ahead of the trends."

Long was hired to click everywhere and look at everything, all the while creating cohesive results.

The active ingredients in Adderall target the parts of the brain responsible for executive function. In other words, Adderall solves the very problems the modern world creates. Long now uses the drug daily, as do the many adults who don't have ADHD but are seeking an edge in the workplace.

'Cosmetic neurology'

The drugs are so popular because they work.

"Adderall opens up time for you," Collier said, emphasizing that using it enables him to get all his work done and still have time to work on other projects.

Long said the stimulant clears her thoughts and helps her produce better work.

For Benson, taking Adderall is like playing a video game and getting an extra life. She said she gets more done and is a better writer.

All three said using the drug made their lives better.

At the same time, Benson admitted she struggles with her use.

"I feel uncomfortable using it to write," she said. "It would mean that what I consider my greatest skill is a lie."

So she now stays up all night writing, then, if necessary, takes Adderall the next morning to get through the workday.

Benson's complex relationship with the drug illustrates problems Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, has highlighted in connection to what he refers to as "cosmetic neurology" — the use of drugs like Adderall for performance enhancement.

Essentially, Chatterjee argues that the advances in cognitive neuroscience and neuropharmacology mean the question of to what extent we want to create and live in a drug-enhanced society may no longer be relevant. That way of life is already here, and society must now account for the moral implications it brings.

Like cosmetic surgery, cosmetic neurology will likely be available only to those with the disposable income to afford elective medicine, expanding the already wide gap between the haves and have-nots. Drugs like Adderall already tend to circulate among the wealthy — those who come from competitive universities and have access to health care that covers expensive prescriptions.

An added concern is that the growing use of stimulants in the workplace will produce a new work environment in which use of neurological enhancement through pharmaceuticals is just one more thing expected of the perfect worker.

Benson said using the drugs doesn't make her feel guilty. Collier agreed, saying, "It's more about being honest with yourself — if it's something you're comfortable with."

But not everyone feels comfortable with it, yet they might feel compelled to use such drugs because of the pressure to keep up.

"Everyone is in an arms race of accomplishment," Chatterjee said.

How can society account for the coercive nature of a culture of perfection?

Dr. Todd Essig, a psychologist in New York, said medical professionals must address neurological performance enhancement openly and facilitate safer use and better oversight of such drugs rather than sweep it under the rug.

"Adderall is just the tip of the iceberg," Essig said. "There are lots more drugs coming down the pike. The way we set up our cultural model for dealing with psychologically performance-enhancing drugs is a real serious question."

EVERYONE IS A ROBOT!

[Valmy]

People are weird about using drugs for anything but fighting disease.  I mean so what you use a drug to help your brain function better?  But it seems this is abuse for some reason.  I do not get that.