LOWER-PAYING JOBS FOR COLLEGE GRADUATES

“If higher education serves primarily as a sorting mechanism,
that might help explain another disturbing development: the tendency of
many college graduates to take jobs that don’t require college degrees.
Practically everyone seems to know a well-educated young person who
is working in a bar or a mundane clerical job, because he or she
can’t find anything better. Doubtless, the Great Recession and its
aftermath are partly to blame. But something deeper,and more lasting, also
seems to be happening.

[Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz
theorize] that technological progress generates an ever-increasing need
for highly educated, highly skilled workers. But, beginning in about 2000,
for reasons that are still not fully understood, the pace of job creation in
high-paying, highly skilled fields slowed significantly. To demonstrate this,
three Canadian economists Paul Beaudry, David A. Green and Benjamin M. Sand,
divided the U.S. workforce into a hundred occupations, ranked by their average
wages, and looked at how employment has changed in each category. Since 2000,
the economists showed, the demand for highly educated workers declined,
while job growth in lower-paying occupations increased strongly. ‘High-skilled
workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform
jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers,’ they concluded, thus ‘pushing
low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder.’

“Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor
market where college graduates didn't previously tend to compete. As Beaudry,
Green, and Sand put it, ‘having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high

paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less
educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.’"

                       

                       

Cassidy, John, “College Calculus, What’s the Real Value of College Education?” New Yorker, September 7, 2015, pp: 80-84.