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<p>The only reason we have a budget deficit is because we try to spend without taxing - America has among the lowest tax rates among human societies on planet, yet other countries with tax rates 20-30% more than ours are much happier than us. </p>
<p>And if we stopped giving hundreds of billions in corporate tax cuts along with obvious bailouts, that would bring our budget back to stability.</p>
<p>So business woke up and said “hey, let’s offer our employees 15 to 20% less”. After all we’re just trying to maximize profits. And those employees, being consumers that represent 70% of our economy, will have 15-20% less to spend. That decreased spending will lead to more layoffs, downsizing, and “rightsizing”. Sounds like a plan to me.</p>
<p>There is nothing my husband likes less than hiring an MBA, except maybe working with a consulting firm filled with them. He would much rather hire an fine art graduate or English or any of those other “worthless” degree people. They do think out of the box, look at things differently, etc. His firm was built on MBAs saying, “What, you can’t do it that way!” and in some ways revolutionized the industry, built a better mousetrap.</p>
<p>There is no such thing as a useless degree and, in my definition, education should not be a trade school but a process of enlightening a person’s mind, view of the world, and overall knowledge and thought process.</p>
<p>This conversation comes up whenever we’re in a recession and disappears during profitable times. I’ve heard it all before and it is the creative person who will succeed best in the end.</p>
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<p>I distinctly disagree with this, but I do understand where you’re coming from. I work a lot with prospective arts and sciences students and I’m very upfront with them about the realities of a liberal arts degree. It’s not a direct path (or at least most aren’t) to one job, but if you think about the realities of the work force, “direct path” jobs don’t really make up a majority of the educated work force. Engineering, Architecture, Engineering- sure, it’s a degree field aimed at one specific career that hopefully they’ll be good at, or they’re out of luck and don’t an education that allows them much flexibility for other careers if they can’t cut it at the field their degree is in. The illusion that a business degree = a career in business is common and unrealistic. I have friends with humanities degrees that hold higher positions in companies than some of the B.S.B.A crowd, and their degrees have nothing to do with business. Their degrees do attempt to give them a broad base of knowledge and a good communication, writing, and critical thinking skill set however, and many employers value that. </p>
<p>A much greater concern of mine is advance of knowledge. When we become a society that only values trades, we lose focus and respect for non-technical research and advance of “pure” knowledge no longer matters (and as a result, funding drops, and it grinds to a halt). Arts, culture, and history are as important to our identity as a society and culture as the type of fields we work in. </p>
<p>Ultimately, success is all about the person- not what degree they obtain. An engineering, business, or nursing degrees by no means guarantee success. I have a degree in a pure science and found a job before I graduated, while my M.E. friends are still searching for jobs 8 months after graduation, even with co-op experience and career placement service helping them out. By your logic, this isn’t possible. I’m a very pragmatic person despite most of what I’ve just said, but to say that a non-vocational or technical degree shouldn’t be allowed because it doesn’t translate into a specific career path is a very cynical viewpoint that I certainly hope colleges never cave in to.</p>
<p>-Matt</p>
<p>The impact of salary deflation makes geography and COL a significant part of the job market calculus. In May, my graduating son got job offers from competing employers – both at the top of their field – identical salary, but one was in NYC and the other in Richmond. Guess where he’s working.</p>
<p>BigG, your statement was that **every nickel **any company makes in profit is the result of the effort of some employee. I disagree mass production of products no longer requires a plant with thousands of assembly workers. It takes far fewer workers when you have computers running the machinery. In my area a wheat farming family can have less than a dozen Combines to plant and harvest thousands of acres of wheat thus less than a dozen people to produce a bi-annual/annual crop. Talk with anyone in medical office billing and they will tell you 10 years ago there was .6 to .8 FTE position/provider. Now, 90% of those offices are out sourcing their billing to agencies with elaborate automatic systems - where a dozen people can produce the billing for hundreds of offices and small clinics.</p>
<p>My original point is that sometimes people fail to realize an employees cost to a company goes beyond just their salary, and when the burden of that employee’s salary, benefits, payroll related taxes and insurances exceeds a certain threshold, companies will find a way to replace the worker. This might be with in-house automation or out-sourcing (domestic or foreign).</p>
<p>Recent college grads have always had to balance desires to return to the home town, desires to spread their wings in a new place, ability to secure a job and affordability. The “I want” balanced with the “I need” has always been a factor. Young people have always had to start small and think big. It would be foolish of us to expect that suddenly out of the blue, this generation was going to fall into high paying, lucrative jobs, live wherever they want and have every amenity they desire. Just foolish. </p>
<p>amtc, clearly I agree with you.</p>
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<p>I guess that you haven’t been following the Foxconn news.</p>
<p>"pwoods…where are you interning that you get $12/hour as a pre-freshman in college? "</p>
<p>I want to know what exactly you’re doing on that internship, and whether it’s with a family friend. Even most college students I know with considerable job experience aren’t getting internships paying that much.</p>
<p>Somewhat related is the unrealistic salary expectations that many young people have now. I recently got a note from someone – a stranger – who had been referred to me because her son is starting college as a freshman in my town this summer.</p>
<p>She was asking for information about job possibilities – “paying at least $8.50 an hour” for her son. I told her that where I live, people – including college graduates – take jobs paying minimum wage.</p>
<p>And when I heard about a part time job paying minimum wage, my own son, a rising college senior with considerable work experience, eagerly interviewed for it and now i working there. I didn’t bother pass the info on to the woman who’d contacted me for job info. I figured her son wouldn’t be interested in it because of the low pay.</p>
<p>I’ve actually read somewhere that it can hurt your entire salary trajectory to graduate in a bad economic climate…that it costs salary points all the way through retirement. I’ll try to find that article, though I read it a year ago, maybe, in fact, on CC. Can’t recall.</p>
<p>In my experience, it’s not hard to keep up with everyone else’s salaries as long as you’re willing to change jobs. I’ve changed companies six times (or so). Five times, I started at a salary I thought was fair or better, then fell behind over the next few years, then changed jobs and jumped back up to fair or better. Twice this involved relocating, but it was worth it, in my opinion.</p>
<p>The folks I know who are least satisfied with their compensation are the ones who stick with the same company in the same location. If they know they’ve got you, why would they pay you more? (I know this can’t be true for everyone, but this is usually the case amongst those I know personally.)</p>
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<p>This is true if you stay with the same company. My first job paid $12K. After a year I switched and was paid $18K. After another year, I switched and got $24K. And then $30K. This was 30 years ago. If you have the skills and a decent headhunter, you’ll get what you are worth.</p>
<p>Re internships and pay:
It will depend on the field. Our son had 3 engineering internships during his college summers. The pay ranged from $18/hr for the first one to $24/hr for his last internship. No parental connections were involved (or existed, for that matter). He needed to live out of state for the last 2 summers.</p>
<p>It’s understandable for college students in some high paying fields to get well paying internships.</p>
<p>I want to know, however, how a HIGH SCHOOL student could get an internship paying $12 an hour. What skills and experience does a high school student have to be able to do an internship (a real internship that requires work, not just sitting around watching others work) that pays that well? Why would a high school student get hired when presumably there’d be college students with more experience available?</p>
<p>Some highly skilled science prize winners are going to get offered a better internship than humanities college grads, it’s just the nature of the world. I know my D could work in any lab she wanted to work in and has had some really amazing offers, especially since she started college, but last summer she could have done so, as well.</p>
<p>Don’t have time to read all of this right now, but need to chime in … I am a professional with work experience. I have a degree from a good school. I have management experience. I make less than $40k per year, and my job requires a high degree of skill, intelligence, logic, etc.</p>
<p>Welcome to the real world, graduates.</p>
<p>Here’s the article I was talking about which posits that graduating into a recession can have a negative impact on lifetime income.</p>
<p>[It’s</a> Looking Grim for New Grads](<a href=“Businessweek - Bloomberg”>Businessweek - Bloomberg)</p>
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What is your degree in, and what is the nature of the work?
I start my junior year at an average state school in the fall, and my internship this summer pays more than that (if I did it year-round, obviously).</p>
<p>Friends graduating from Michigan with business or engineering degrees all got at least $55k, with about $5k signing bonus. Maybe a little less than years past, but not nearly as drastic as this article claims.</p>