> The question is why are people completing unmarketable (or not sufficiently marketable) degrees?
There's no reason to single this out as 'the question'. There are many interesting questions around student loans. The article singles out the question 'What caused the student loan debt load to get to the level of “crisis” in the United States?' There is no reason that an answer to this question needs to involve the actions of individual students. You could answer the question by talking about how states are reducing the % of tuition they they contribute to state universities, or the explosion of university administration, or how student loans are easier to get now than in the past.
The problem statement in the article is ‘student loan crisis an underemployment catastrophe’. If you accept the idea that some degrees are more marketable than others, then ‘the question’ absolutely is ‘why are people completing unmarketable degrees?’.
That’s not to say there aren’t also other problems. But the problem this article is discussing is that people are completing college degrees that do not improve their employment opportunities.
If you're talking about a single individual, doing a degree in something employable might be a good strategy for getting a job, but it doesn't follow that getting more people into professional degree programs will significantly change the underemployment situation. Our economy only needs so many teachers, engineers, doctors, etc. Underemployment of an entire generation isn't caused by the degrees they choose.
The article doesn’t put forward a case for underemployment of an entire generation. It puts forward a case for a certain level of increased underemployment for a generation of student loan holders.
It’s self-evident that if those college graduates who are underemployed had chosen different courses, then the problem would look quite different. The fact that developed nations have to import large amounts of skilled labour proves this (although you could make a solid argument that they import more than they strictly ‘have to’).
There’s likely a number of factors that contribute to this problem. Generally increasing enrolments seems like it would be having some level of impact. But this article does not even attempt to shed light onto what those factors might be, and how they might be weighted. I don’t know what I’m supposed to have learned from reading this that I couldn’t have picked up from just looking at the graphs it includes.
> It’s self-evident that if those college graduates who are underemployed had chosen different courses, then the problem would look quite different.
Not only is this not self-evident, it defies common sense and economics. If more people take professional degrees then the supply of those degrees increases and salaries decrease (and we're back where we started). That is, if there are enough professional jobs to go around which there aren't. You seem to think there are lots of professional jobs to go around, but I went to school with many engineers who struggled to find jobs after graduation. It seems like we're above the point of saturation in many professions.
Your anecdata doesn’t add much to the conversation, and you seem to be relying on a particularly extreme interpretation of what I said. It’s a fact that there are many skilled professions where we have labor shortages. If more people (I never said all people) had chosen to study in those fields, then they likely would not be facing underemployment. Unless you want to disputed the existence of skilled labor shortages, then this is a perfectly self evident conclusion. If you’d like to claim that there simply aren’t enough skilled employment opportunities in the entire economy to provide all of the skilled professionals with employment (which it seems you’re hinting at), then I’d suggest you produce some evidence to support that position.
There is no doubt some salary gains to be made by a small percentage of people choosing to go into professional programs (as I said above), but it's really besides the point. The main issue is that there will still be a large number of students who can't benefit from this strategy.
For that to be true, there has to be too few skilled employment opportunities available in the entire economy to provide employment for college graduates. A position neither you nor the author of the article have provided any evidence to support.
There's no reason to single this out as 'the question'. There are many interesting questions around student loans. The article singles out the question 'What caused the student loan debt load to get to the level of “crisis” in the United States?' There is no reason that an answer to this question needs to involve the actions of individual students. You could answer the question by talking about how states are reducing the % of tuition they they contribute to state universities, or the explosion of university administration, or how student loans are easier to get now than in the past.