Funding Endless Degrees Doesn’t Actually Help People

Bill Clinton helped kickstart the idea that manufacturing jobs weren’t coming back so everyone should just get a college degree. Obama shifted that to ‘learn to code’ and now it turns out that AI can do a lot of the basic coding even if it’s sloppy vibe coding. Besides most of Big Tech chose to use third world labor for the grunt work rather than hire Americans. Now ‘learn to code’ has disappeared, but college degrees are still being pushed.

The trouble though was that while college grads have higher levels of employment, this tends to be distorted by comparing them to people with high school diplomas or less as a complete group, rather than people in that group who pursue actual careers, over crime and all the other stuff that lowers their numbers.

College grads on the other hand are quite often not working based on using their degrees in their chosen fields, but because being a college grad is treated as a substitute for being a productive and reliable employee, and so college grads are more likely to get hired for work that doesn’t require a degree.

Roughly half of college graduates end up in jobs where their degrees aren’t needed, and that underemployment has lasting implications for workers’ earnings and career paths.

That is the key finding of a new study tracking the career paths of more than 10 million people who entered the job market over the past decade. It suggests that the number of graduates in jobs that don’t make use of their skills or credentials—52%—is greater than previously thought, and underscores the lasting importance of that first job after graduation.

And the growing glut of college grads, their lower quality, has meant more employers looking for people with higher degrees and more people going to grad school.

This is working out about as you would expect.

The unemployment rate for workers under 35 with a master’s degree has rarely been higher in the past 20 years, according to the Burning Glass Institute, a labor-market think tank focused on the future of work, which analyzed data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics going back to 2003.

What next? Funding PhDs for everyone?

That will put more money into the failing higher education machine, create more debt and then spread it out to taxpayers who will bail out the grads without fixing this model.

A saner proposition is to stamp out college degree requirements for jobs that don’t require it, something we used to do in the sixties, and something that some liberals are on board with, to break the cycle.