<p>So nobody here has yet criticized anything she actually said in the article.</p>
<p>Disappointed that the politics is preventing a rational discussion here. I have no idea what her political beliefs are and didn’t read into any politics in her story. The writer raised some good concerns That I hope someone herr on CV can address.</p>
<p>What do you tell your child?</p>
<p>They get a degree, and they can’t get a job. "In the United States, nine percent of computer science majors are unemployed, and 14.7 percent of those who hold degrees in information systems have no job. [li] Graduates with degrees in STEM - science, technology, engineering and medicine - are facing record joblessness, with unemployment at more than twice pre-recession levels. "</p>[/li]
<p>Or, they get a “job”, but it’s unpaid, like my niece, a college graduate who has a fulltime “internship” as an administrative assistant to a Broadway producer. How have we come to a situation where people can hire young college graduates and not pay them?</p>
<p>What do you tell them? Work hard, and you’ll get ahead? All too obviously a lot of young people who did the right things and worked hard are not getting ahead. They can’t find a job, or they find a “job” that’s unpaid, or they find a paying job and it has no raises and no benefits.</p>
<p>[*] This statistic must be for young people with these degrees, not all people with these degrees.</p>
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<p>I certainly did.</p>
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<p>Wow. The labels “leftist” and “conservative” have absolutely no relevance here.
Read Kendzior’s posts and the allegiance/connection to Al Jazeera becomes very obvious.
If you can’t see that, I don’t know what else I can say.</p>
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<p>You are missing the point.
Kendzior has a very specific overall agenda.
Whatever she writes is going to be through that prism.</p>
<p>IBTL</p>
<p>So she is a regular columnist at Al Jazeera’s web site, and she is either a “leftist” or some part of a hidden conspiracy not to be named…</p>
<p>In any case, others have written about similar things (see #10 and #14 for recent examples), and it is not exactly a unique view in the US that the job market prospects for new entrants appear to be weaker now than in the past.</p>
<p>Waiting for this thread to be locked in 3,2,1…</p>
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<p>That’s not a reason to dismiss the whole article out of hand which you seem to be doing. Filter what she wrote through your prism and then decide how you feel about the points made.</p>
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<p>“I paid for a phd in Anthropology and I am a journalist. Waaaa”</p>
<p>Her writing style combines Larry King’s USA Today column with a Twitter feed:</p>
<p>It is easy to decry a broken system. It is harder to figure out how to live in it.
I get a good feeling when I see a police officer on a horse.
Survival is now a laudable aspiration.
I will not return to a restaurant that doesn’t have skim milk at all times.
Changing your major will not change a broken economy.
I’ve never been a big fan of daylight savings time.
We live in the tunnel at the end of the light.
When James Patterson doesnt have a new book coming out, thats big news…</p>
<p>My take on the entire situation is that recent grads who can’t find jobs need to create their own. In other words, don’t rely on “the man” to give you a job, find a job that needs doing and do it yourself; be an entrepreneur. People don’t seem to talk about that much any more, rather they look only to what corporations won’t give them in terms of jobs, wages and benefits.</p>
<p>Bay, you strike me as an outgoing kind of person, to whom entrepreneurship would come easily. Not everyone is like that. Blithely saying, “Everyone should be an entrepreneur” ignores the fact that a lot of people, people with plenty of useful skills, aren’t cut out to be entrepreneurs. I, for example, would be absolutely terrible at entrepreneurship.</p>
<p>It’s as if I said to you, “Can’t get a job? Why don’t you just learn to program? If you simply pick up C++, Python, Matlab and Java, and some html, you’ll never lack for a job. No problem!” Learning those languages would be no problem for me (and I really ought to pick up Java one of these days), but most people just can’t program no matter how hard they try. Saying that the out-of-work should learn to program, or should become entrepreneurs, ignores the fact that some people aren’t cut out to be those things. The solution for 13% unemployment among people 20-24 is not to tell them all to be entrepreneurs or computer scientists. It won’t work.</p>
<p>CF,
I’m talking about college grads, as I thought that was the subject of the article. Are you telling me that a college grad can’t figure out how to provide a service or product on his/her own? That is sad, considering street vendors with little education seem to be able to do it, but on a different level.</p>
<p>Bay, there are people who are born ro be leaders (entrepreneurs) and those who are born to be followers (employees). There is nothing wrong with being good at either category. But expecting a leader to be a good follower or vice versa isn’t always realistic. How many businesses fail within the first year? At least 70% if not more. For a college grad who spent the last 4-6 years learning how to be an employee, IMHO, they would most likely fail. I do not expect a college grad to figure out a service or product they could provide other than their labor.</p>
<p>Then they need to start learning how to be entrepreneurs. It is ridiculous to emerge from one’s educational cocoon expecting the world to provide you with what you need. You need to figure out what the world needs, and prepare yourself for that. If you can’t adapt, you deserve to fail.</p>
<p>Way to give us a false dichotomy, Bay. Emerging from college ready and willing to work BUT NOT AS A DAMN ENTREPRENEUR is not the same as “expecting the world to provide you with what you need.”</p>
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<p>Well she kind of did. </p>
<p>What do you do with a degree in Anthropology? And you have a masters in Central Eurasian Studies? And you are a journalist?</p>
<p>Those are there pretty non-remunerative scenarios. Yet she has found a deep pocket patron interesting in publishing essays without paragraphs. That’s creating your own job.</p>
<p>Ah, the new American dream… go to college, emerge in debt, then hope, hope, hope that you too, can rise to the glorious heights of a career as a street vendor.</p>
<p>Yes. We have left it all in such great shape for our kids. Maybe we can charge them some more for the things we got so cheaply. </p>
<p>Such an entitlement generation. </p>
<p>They really need to learn to vote, before the baby boomers take what little they have left.</p>
<p>All I can add to this is that it seems odd to me that some folks want to blame the difficulty in getting jobs on the graduates, even those who have chosen the fields that have been pushed as “practical.” So it’s not enough to criticize people who chose useless humanities majors, we now are criticizing STEM majors, including CS people, who didn’t learn to be entrepreneurs?</p>