Skills and jobs mismatch? Some worrying data from US

We’ve just had our school’s yearly conference which included some quality expert speakers and on a number of occasions it was noted how education is an “escape” for those in developing countries to escape the poverty trap and in developed countries to climb the social ladder. This has led to concerted efforts by politicians to promote education for all and push for an increasingly higher number of school-leavers into tertiary education.

However, as this New York Times article explains, students are leaving university with lots of debt and no guarantees of well paid work. One graduate has $100,000 worth of debt and little prospect of work. Only at the end does it tell us that her degree is in “Interdisciplinary Religious and Women’s Studies”. Now I’ve heard there are degrees in Surf Science and The Beatles and my guess is that we may not be equipping all of our young people with the skills that our economies need.

Data from this article suggests there’s “over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees)” in the US and “there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s”. Are we simply saddling graduates with lots of unnecessary debt for them to be janitors and parking attendants? And US higher education is in for big changes “at a time when resources are scarce, when American governments are running $1.3-trillion deficits, should we be subsidizing increasingly problematic educational programs for students whose prior academic record would suggest little likelihood of academic, much less vocational, success?”

On a more positive note, in the UK , economics graduates are fourth in the rankings of graduate earnings and if you’re lucky enough to have an economics degree from Cambridge, you’re quids in!