It's basically signs of a terrible economy for the majority. We have an outrageous cost of housing and people don't want to give someone a living wage who doesn't have their indoctrination compliance paperwork( liberal arts college degree) I've always said a person shouldn't have to go to college to make a living.
Yes, for the bottom 80% in the United States, economic conditions have been somewhere between subpar to mediocre for the last 20 years.
I agree that a person shouldn't have to go to college to make a living. People don't have to do that. There are trade school options. However, the USA gave away too many of its factory jobs. High school graduates used to be able to get jobs in factories. Now high school graduates are looking at low wage service sector jobs. Due to this, high school graduates must choose between a trade school certification or a bachelor's degree.
College should be reserved for technical/scientific training, not gender studies and sociology undergrad degrees. We have people getting masters degrees to become a social worker. That should require a GED and a 6 month certificate program that is paid by the employer.
As the number of people who go to college increases, the value of the degree decreases proportionally. That's why you have people graduating college and going to work at starbucks. We've basically extended high school for 4 years.
How is an 18 year old adult supposed to make a living? Or even a 22 year old who only has a hs diploma? Very few options. Maybe the trades and that's about it. 40 percent of jobs are service economy jobs like walmart/waiter. There is no getting around that. This will only get worse. The answer imo is to get rid of college as a requirement for basic jobs
College is very expensive and time consuming and also creates CHEAP labor(students will work for cheap), therefore reducing the market wages being paid. Supply and demand again.
I agree that a master's level degree for social work is a complete waste.
College graduates working as baristas at Starbucks became a common thing with the late 2000s recession. That's a sign that there are too many college graduates. Most bachelor's degrees are useless. The useful college degrees are STEM degrees and some Business discipline degrees, though there's a good argument that there are too many BA/BS degree holders in Business and Business-related disciplines.
If someone with a bachelor's degree is waiting tables, that's a bad sign.
Between ages 18-29, pretty women with a high school diploma/GED working at Hooters or Twin Peaks are often outearning women with bachelor's degrees who aren't as pretty.
Why is college a requirement for basic jobs? There's no reason for that to be the case. However, some high schools have a completely useless curriculum and are generally a waste of time. Many K-12 public schools are nothing more than government funded daycare. A lot of high school graduates are not even capable of working jobs in the modern economy. K-12 education was designed to prepare workers for basic factory jobs, the ones that got outsourced and offshored in the 1970s-1980s.
When there are recessions, employers do pick up people with bachelor's degrees and advanced degrees for less. I finished my MBA in the 2007-2008 school year, right as the economy was going the toilet. The only jobs I could get in 2008 were jobs that paid way less than what a typical MBA graduate would make. It took many years to recover from graduating into 2008 and is part of the reason why I don't have children today as a 39 year old. 2008 was a major setback in my life.
People are worse off economically than prior generations. That's unheard of in America. We also have record number of people who don't even finish at the BA level, but are going on to graduate studies in Liberal arts areas So many females do this nowadays. The debt for this is nuts and if you cancel all the debt then the government/taxes have to pay. Really crazy stuff.
Gen X was the first US born generation to experience this. I remember reading as far back at the mid-2000s (before the 2008 crash) that the first half of Gen X (late 1960s-early 1970s births) wasn't doing as well econonomically as their Silent Generation parents at similar ages. Much of the 1st half of the Millennial generation graduated into the mess surrounding 2008 and few years after, so they haven't doing as well as their Baby Boomer parents did at similar ages.
All this extended adolescence has caused the average age a woman has a first child to be approaching 30. This is actually starting to get dangerous. The ability to get pregnant and complications all start rising. The main reason this is happening is due to extended educational requirements.
The only reason that number isn't already over 30 is due to women with less than a bachelor's degree. Women with a bachelor's degree or higher typically don't give birth until after their 30th birthdays.
Right now, in my local area social circle, there's a flurry of pregnancies among 32-35 year old women having their "Last Call" babies and some of these pregnancies were the direct result of expensive fertility treatments. Some of these 32-35 might be able to squeeze in a 2nd, late 30s pregnancy, but that's even debatable.
I don't think extended educational requirements are as big of a cause of women drinking the feminist Kool-Aid and pursuing bachelor's and advanced degrees for their dreams of white collar office work. Feminism tells women that they can have all it all -- the fantastic white collar job, the husband who earns more than they do, and the 1-2 babies they want. Usually, women can't have it all and have to sacrifice some element of that feminist dream. When women encounter this, they are very unhappy. This is why there are 30 something women screaming "Where Have All the Good Men Gone?".
