college isn’t what it used to be

A recent story on BusinessWeek.com shines a light on the fact that a lot of graduates are struggling to pay back their student loans. They went to colleges expecting to get degrees which will land them in stable careers that pay enough to get out of debt and start a long, rewarding life. Instead, they’re getting low pay, few employment options in their field and a career is something they can only dream about. If you’re one of the younger generations you know this firsthand. Careers are things for people in their 30s and 40s. You’re just out there trying to pay the bills and unsure if your degree will ever be of any real use.

Put away the world’s smallest violin, this isn’t going to be a post about the plight of today’s new college grads. Instead, we’re going to focus on the very real challenges for people who have to go to college today and tomorrow. The simple idea of getting a degree, getting a job in the field for which you trained and building a career from part-time intern up to a cushy post in middle management doesn’t work anymore. It’s been altered by new technology, outsourcing and the kinds of unpredictable shifts in economic focus that leave entire fields of study in limbo at best and obsolete at worst. Simply put, four year degrees aren’t keeping up with the economy and if you pick a profession today, there’s no guarantee that the market for it won’t shut closed just a few semesters from your planned graduation date and leave you pondering whether to change majors as a junior or just take your chances and hope your grades will get you hired.

So on the one hand, many jobs require a degree. But because the economy can’t wait for a four year phase and people working longer than ever aren’t rushing to retire and make room for an army of new grads to take their place (especially in a deep, brutal recession which took the legs from under their 401k plans and placed their target retirement date between “maybe someday” and “never”), there are a lot of people with degrees and very little chance of getting a job. Even if you graduated suma cum laude, it’s really hard to get hired for a job that doesn’t exist. Or a job that’s slated to go overseas at half the cost. Unless you have the ability to predict what jobs will be in demand four years from now, you’re making an educated gamble when enrolling. And the government isn’t going to make it easier for you to get your education, actually steering you to take on mode debt and apply for more and more student loans.

Whenever state governments need to save money, one of the budgets they can cut with almost no resistance is higher education. Cutting deeper and deeper into the money slated for a state university or aid that goes to some private schools, they force colleges which rely on this type of funding to raise tuition as well as room and board. This is not to say that colleges flawlessly spend the money they have already and there aren’t places where they can save, but in reality is that a deep enough cut from the state means that you’re now paying more for your degree. As tuition goes up and pay for jobs goes down, the debt load you have to take grows. In the past, a student waiting tables for five years could pay off his or her education. Today, years after years of nearly double digit tuition hikes, make this idealistic scenario very improbable. Sure you can go out and get scholarships, but scholarships very rarely pay for more than half of your bill.

So where does that leave us? If you go to college and end up in worse financial shape than you started and with very few other career options, then why go to college? It’s almost like to enter the corporate world, you have to go through a hazing that lasts for decades. We can look down on the new grads and preach that they should’ve chosen their professions better but unless we can reasonably expect college students to have powers of precognition and outdo economists in predicting the future of the global economy, all we’d be doing is rubbing salt into the wound while acting high and mighty. The new grads aren’t being integrated into the economy as many past generations were and that’s a point of concern. We have to ask ourselves if we’re basically outsourcing and mechanizing millions of people out of the workforce and consider revamping our current approaches to globalization.

Rather than trying to compete with a low-cost foreign workforce, companies could instead cut their costs with efficiency and innovation, something that new grads would be very good at doing. Or rather than just sending orders for electronic components overseas, they could set up their own high quality, hyper-efficient assembly plants. We need to start thinking of how a new generation of college grads would find jobs and how to sustain our economy beyond a year to year time frame. One key to that is realizing that globalization the way it’s being practiced now is a one way street. In a truly globalized economy, our grads would be able to hold jobs in other nations and help them keep up with international demands for their services. But instead, these nations issue protectionist edicts which restrict all work to local residents and the only foreign workers they will allow are employed by multinationals. We need to reply by paying attention to our own economy and figuring out how to make it competitive without immediately trying to ship a division or two overseas because it’s an easy way to cut costs.