Click here for the other side of Point-Counterpoint: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it: The appeal of a diploma.”
Despite gains made by the Dow Jones and other indices over the last year, the economy is in the dumps, leaving today’s college graduates without living-wage jobs and barring them from America’s once vibrant middle-class. Demand for college grads is low and even lower for the skills in which they concentrated (i.e. the dithering humanities). Let’s face it folks; it’s no secret that a BA is BS these days.
Traditional undergraduate degrees are obsolete. Journalism majors have no place to go. Print media, which used to provide lucrative careers, is walking the tightrope above extinction.
Newspapers and magazines can’t furlough, pay-cut, buyout, and layoff staff fast enough to keep up with declining circulation and revenue. The way in which information is delivered and received has moved from ink to the internet, loosing scores of personnel at every outlet.
Even the formerly august New York Times isn’t hiring any fresh fedoras out of America’s socialist journalism departments – no matter how bright and shiny the “Obama 2012” pins sticking out of them are.
It is the plumber and other skilled tradespeople who are doing very well in certain areas of the country. (Yuppies, hipsters, and urbanites, take note) A 2008 Time article reported that in large cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Boston, self-employed plumbers can earn up to $250,000 annually. In Cincinnati, the article continues, master plumbers with several years of experience can make upward of $100,000 per year. Interestingly, Ohio was one of the recession’s most critically wounded victims. Apprentices earn considerably less (roughly $45,000). However, at $23 an hour, that still bests your recently graduated local barista with an expensive haircut and not even a whisper of a career prospect on the horizon.
Today, college is a buyer’s market. Prospective students are lured by how much there is to do on campus rather than how much there is to learn,by how many bars, clubs, cafes and social events are planned during the academic year. A July study released by the Delta Cost Project reports undergrads spend thirteen hours less per week in class and studying than their counterparts in the early 1960s. Universities today allocate much more of their budgets to recreational activities and administration rather than instruction. To be fair, what university can’t use another deputy-assistant-vice-chancellor at 150 grand?
In addition to waning classroom time, according to a 2006 Associated Press report more than half of students enrolled in four year colleges in the U.S. lack “complex” reading comprehension skills. These include having difficulty analyzing editorial content in newspapers (are you following me?), understanding credit card offers, and calculating the tip at restaurants. Fortunately, the AP notes, most students are able to identify locations on maps. Imagine paying the $50,000 per year price tag at Boston University, Boston College, or Babson (none of which are top tier) without a guarantee of being a proficient reader upon graduation?
Furthermore, endowments have withered in recent years. Consequently, in order to maintain profitability, colleges are changing their business models. For example, the University of Massachusetts campus “revamped” most general education courses by making them four instead of three credits. Beginning this semester incoming classes will be required to complete only ten as opposed to thirteen gen-eds. In an effort to justify the change, the university says these classes will be more rigorous. I’ll let you know after a few weeks in my science class, which has been affected by the new system. According to the professor, additional quizzes and readings will be assigned. However, there will be no supplemental “face time” or class time.
In reality, the move is a shrewd cost-cutting, revenue-generating maneuver. It will allow the University to accept more freshman (the most profitable class from a business perspective) without hiring more professors. Average class size will not decrease, which means attending lectures will still feel like being at a small concert. Furthermore, in order to execute the plan, the University of Massachusetts Faculty Senate created two bureaucracies: The General Education Task Force and the General Education Revision and Implementation Committee. How much of a stipend did it take those paper pushers to sign on to that scam? The bottom line: your college degree has suffered another blow.
Support for our current administration is generally high on most college campuses. Ironically, President Obama’s inability to affect a positive change in our economy is having a devastating effect on most universities: their budgets, their faculty, and particularly their graduates. So would we all be better off scheduling a mass noon walk out? Put down the Macbook, and pick up a wrench, or a blow torch, or a wire stripper? Try not to think about our peers who went to community colleges. We branded them as losers, but remember them now as economic geniuses who predicted the fallow job market to the letter and insulated themselves from the smother of educational debt.
Shane Cronin is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
