How? Because parents, teachers and mass media said to 'do what you love and the money will follow' or some variant, so kids picked majors with no demand in the labor market.
Because affluent, well-connected kids got humanities degrees at Ivy league schools and then used their connections and the prestige of the school to secure high paying jobs, and kids from blue-collar backgrounds didn't realize they can't do the same thing with a humanities degree from the local college.
Because kids who should have gone to trade schools or entered the workforce after high school were convinced they had to go to some college, so they wasted a few years studying something they're not good at and don't care about, so they didn't learn anything to make themselves more employable than they were before they started.
In other words, the average lit major spent 50% more time unemployed than the average engineering major. That actually shows that field of study does make a major difference, even when times are hard for both.
My point may have been a bit subtle. The argument is not about absolute levels (no one would dispute that techies have better employment outcomes than fuzzies, both in getting a job and compensation).
People are claiming that recent youth unemployment is due to bad choice of major: the argument seems to go that, as technology is introducing serious economic disruption, people who get humanities degrees are disproportionately left at a significant market disadvantage, which is causing the recent uptick in college graduate unemployment. This, however, doesn't account for the actual historical data, as engineering and literature majors show similar relative employment rates as in 2001.
This is misleading because it doesn't factor in desire for work, pay, or even hours etc.
If I get a CS degree then make 100k a year for 2 years, then quit because I want to take a 6 month vacation and then go run my own startup that looks on average in bulk identical to someone with a "soft" degree working two separate part time jobs for $10 an hour hopping from job to job every year or so with 3 months of unemployment in between.
Plenty of students go into school not knowing what they want to do, with no direction for finding their talents. If you don't take the first steps to discover what you like to do and build on your talents, you simply have no direction at all, which is much worse than us overflowing with artists or musicians who made music and art with terrible income. At least then we have somewhere to go and funnel talent into.
What you major in isn't that important. This community needs to break out of the "choose a major for the job you want" shell. That same line of thinking is partly to blame for this whole mess anyway, since college departments can't possibly keep up with changing job markets. College students should learn skills, and their major is simply one way to do that.
Speaking as someone who puts his life in engineers', chemists', and clinical biologists' hands on a regular basis, I think there's at least some wisdom to the idea that folks should be specifically educated for the job they're going into.
Granted, there's also a whole range of people who major in subjects that aren't closely tied to much in the way of non-academic jobs, and end up in careers that aren't closely tied to much in the way of academic subjects. For that case, I have to wonder if it wouldn't be better to reconsider the basic structure of higher education from the ground up, rather than picking at the margins.
The standard bachelor's degree program is fabulous for certain purposes, but other cases make it look very similar to the "bundled channels" thing that is popular with cable and satellite TV providers: An archaic business model which primarily serves to disserve customers by forcing many of them to choose between paying for much more service than they actually want, need, or will use, and getting no service at all. In one corner, you have lots of people who don't really need a full bachelor's degree, but end up going into serious debt pursuing one anyway because no better option is available. In the other, you have lots of people who would love to take some individual classes, but find that the university won't let them if they are not enrolled in a 4-year program. Even if they already have a bachelor's degree. Even if it's in a related field.
Better yet, people should stop thinking that a 4-year arts&science college degree is a prerequisite for any sort of grown up job. More people would be better served by going to trade or technical schools, or learning on the job, and spending their free time indulging their educational passions or intellectual hobbies via self-study instead of digging themselves into 5 figures of debt learning nothing more than what they could with a mere library card.
Yeah, I dunno - people like us were also talking shit on the people who chose CS or MIS or whatever back in '99 based on the fact that there was strong demand in the labor market until the first crash. Now we're talking shit the other way.
If you're still in college (or about to go to college) and reading this, I have one bit of advice:
It's much easier to get a job as a college student with no experience than as a college graduate with no experience. If you don't do some work in your field (PT, internship, volunteering, summer program, whatever) you've wasted a one of the best opportunities you'll ever have.
I can't agree more. When I was a freshman, I was required to do a work study as part of the deal for my loans. I didn't want to do it -- my course load seemed hard enough -- but I found a job as an "undergraduate research programmer" at a small computer-vision oriented lab at my school. I worked around 10 hours a week during the school year, and 40 during the summers. Particularly during my freshman and sophomore years, I felt completely useless. But, even without noticing it, you pick up a LOT just by struggling with it (e.g. gdb, complex build systems, working with legacy code, version control systems, common patterns of software development, and how to get into a flow state even while hacking on bits of software that aren't all that interesting to you personally). By the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I was finally starting to feel a bit productive.
In any other environment, I would have never had the opportunity to be a completely worthless drain on resources for so long.
So certainly avail yourself of any opportunity to get a job while in school. I was lucky in that I was essentially forced to do it based on the terms of my loans. Any parents reading this: see if you can do your kids a favor and secure them a loan that requires your kids to get a work study, coop, or internship. And no, working as barista at the campus cafe doesn't count!
Similar articles have surfaced a lot recently with the publication of the BLS's new labor statistics, so I'll repeat what I've said before.
I recently turned 20 years old and I'm not in college nor do I plan to finish a degree (and if it wasn't for individuals Peter Thiel, I might still be making a $100,000 mistake). I'm a fairly normal guy, I've been out of high school for 3 years now and I'm making slightly less than Bureau of Labor Statistic's 2010 Median Income for 'Software Developers', which I believe is more than enough to not be considered underemployed.
I see a lot of psychic pain in my peers about how hard work is or the labor market is so difficult, but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure.
I'm afraid young people of today are losing the real virtues of life like living with passion and taking responsibility for who you are. The ability to make something out of yourself and feeling joy in life is more alive today than in any other point in human history.
I see a lot of active rejection of the ideals of hacker culture, perhaps epitomized by my generation's obsession with video games and fake work. This is really a shame, as one thing that comes out of hacker culture is not a feeling of defeatism, but rather a feeling of a real kind of exuberance about your work and life. Your work is yours to create. I've read the college labor statistics with some interest, even fear. But when I read them, I can't help but think that something essential about our generation and present technological zeitgeist is being left out. As if somehow our work is simply just a confluence of forces far beyond our control, framing college graduates as fragmented or marginalized which opens up a world of excuses.
From Chaitin to Stallman, when hackers talk about the meaning of work, they're not talking about abstract decisions, they're talking about you reading this post, doing something that has concrete consequences, making decisions and accepting the consequences. It may be true that there are seven billion people on the planet, never the less, your work matters in material terms, as well as to others.
In short, I'd encourage any young person my age to not write themselves off as a victim of societal forces. It's always our decision who we are and what we do with our lives.
It's very easy to transform "I work hard, and am successful" into "I work hard, therefore I am successful," but this is a dangerous fallacy, as it leads directly into "That person is unsuccessful, therefore they aren't working hard enough."
Statements such as the above are spoken from a position of privilege. There are many, many people out there who do work hard and yet do not enjoy success; the fact that you can adduce examples of the form "that person is unsuccessful and is not working hard enough" is not evidence for your claim either.
I have certainly been afforded no privilege in my youth, although I understand that you reason this is post-hoc sophistry -- it seems like you're setting up an impossible goalpost for my position.
But in the interest of fairness, I'll speak plainly and say I know a lot of people who work hard, virtually all of them are successful by their own standards. I know a lot of people who don't, only some of them are successful.
The privilege I'm referring to need not have anything to do with class (or race or gender for that matter), but just the privilege of having been successful. Many people work very hard and yet do not achieve that. The fact of your success, while correlated to your hard work and undoubtedly facilitated by your hard work, is nonetheless not the sure result of hard work; the ability to be able to even postulate a direct causal relationship is a luxury afforded you by the fact that you did, in fact, succeed.
(See also: confirmation bias, survivor bias.)
Not to detract from your success, of course! Good for you. But don't use it as a platform from which to claim that unsuccessful people would achieve more success if only they just worked at it a bit more.
It's not an impossible goalpost, you are just making a huge generalization and applying it to nearly everyone.
Understand that the market for software developers is HOT. If you are able to program a computer then there is no recession for you right now.
If you had instead focused really hard on becoming an expert in architecture or civil engineering rather than a computer programmer, you would be singing a different tune right now. I know many people in the construction related fields who do engineering work as difficult as computer science who keep finding themselves unemployed. They are unemployed not becuase they were laid off, they are unemployed because the company they worked for literally went bankrupt becuase nobody is building anymore.
Those people would be better off putting in a middling effort as a programmer than killing themselves to be experts in construction. So hard work in their case is not leading to success.
Now 5-10 years ago when they picked construction as their field, it made a whole lot of sense. Are we in the same place as programmers? 10-15 years from now will you look back and say, crap it looked like a good choice in 2012, but I really wish I had focused on X instead?
I'd encourage any young person my age to not write themselves off as a victim of societal forces
I think that's generally good advice, but potentially dismissive. A lot of the actual data around this has shown that the circumstances of your birth, as manifest in when you enter the workplace, have a huge lifetime impact. People who enter during downturns, on average, never catch up.
There's something that feels kind of distasteful about making it all about personal responsibility when the reality is far more complex than that.
I see where you're coming from. My background isn't that much different from yours, and yet a have a different perspective. Reasonable people can disagree, I guess.
While I could be persuaded to agree with some parts of what you said (I'm 23 and made that 100k mistake, but have already paid it off), I think you are missing a major point and probably wrong on the whole as a result.
You're assuming that everyone is like you, that everyone is able perceive the maze and to navigate themselves to the finish. I imagine most of the HN audience is in this boat. The reality is that most people can't do that. Most people are only able to accomplish something if you tell them what it is, show them how to do it, and help them along as they do it. This probably won't change anytime soon. It's not something that gets better with education, but the fact of the matter is that Society told our generation that if you go to college and work hard then you will do well, or if you save up and invest wisely you will have money for retirement. This simply isn't the case anymore.
Come, come. You know that all I'm saying is that you're more than just a gear in some deterministic machine. I'm not saying these statistics are invalid whatsoever. You simply should not use them to frame your chance of success.
I'll reiterate my central idea here -- your life is yours to create. I'm of the firm conviction that if you put limits on yourself, they will inevitably spread into other areas of your life.
However, if you'd prefer a more naturalistic explanation -- if you are unrelenting the Central Limit Theorem will work in your advantage. The most notable Scientists are not the smartest, they are the ones who have published the most.
Any observation/opinion is based on a collection of anecdotes. Studies are fine but I don't think they are needed to express an opinion on an internet board.
If I knew someone who was in a hard place, and they were stuck in a rut about how terrible their life was because of their parents/race/class background/asshole boss/whatever, I'd parrot your advice to them. When individuals believe they have the ability to effect change in their own life, they become more able to. This is borne out by statistics and experience.
I question, though, whether that spiel is appropriate here. Most people who haven't met success and are stuck in that blaming-external-factors rut don't post on Hacker News.
In an abstract sense, a sufficiently motivated person can accomplish nearly anything. But I use the phrase "sufficiently motivated" purposefully, because that kind of person bears a resemblance to the fabled compiler. It's true that there are a series of actions that can lead an unprivileged person to whatever level of success you imagine. More than that, such an unprivileged person exists, at least often enough to be relevant. But it passes over key structural issues by pushing all responsibility to the individuals who are stuck in some unhappy situation and ignores the reality that the average person can't be expected to have above-average judgment and motivation.
Taking the point to the extreme: Frederick Douglass was born a slave and worked himself up to the point where he was a world renowned intellectual. Diocletian was born a slave but eventually became Emperor of Rome.* Despite those facts, it's not controversial to say that we can't blame slaves for their misfortunes, even though through enough perseverance and skill it was theoretically possible for any slave to end up in a tolerable place.
For an individual seeking success, it's best to focus on yourself and self-improvement. But that fact doesn't change the reality that some people have to focus an exceptional (and unrealistic) amount on self-improvement in order to get what comes to other people with little effort.
* Interestingly enough, the ancient Romans practiced manumission for their best slaves with some regularity, holding up the freedman as an example of what a slave could achieve if he worked hard enough for his master.
> but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure.
When I was 20 I used to laugh at of my friends for being this way. Now 5 years later, they're in the same position complaining about the job market and its getting kind of sad. None of them put effort into learning any new skillset no matter how much I recommend them to. And these are kids all coming from good middle class upbringing.
This is of course purely anecdotal, but I'm hesitant to believe that this narrative is about a bunch of kids trying their hearts out to get work and a job market that doesn't want them.
Maybe a certain percentage but more often than not I see a lack of motivation to learn a skillset society actually needs.
To be fair, this is a direct result of the cultural zeitgeist of "get good grades, graduate college = worry free middle class livin!" that is deeply embedded in American thinking, from parents to educators and constantly instilled in young people. You can't really blame kids who are brought up through the meaninglessness doldrums of public education with the constant reassurance that all will be well if the Good Grades are achieved for not actualizing self-independence or even figuring out what that would entail. Besides "societal forces" are real. We're not living off our own land anymore. Policy decisions in e.g. China very much affect whether or not American college graduate A gets hired. So between the reality of economic dependency and the model of dependency as dominant doctrine in America, it's not completely fair to blame abysmal youth labor stats on kids being lazy video game addicts.
I am fortunate to have a skill that I am passonate about. I am fortunate to be technically inclined. I'm fortunate to have a skill that is experiencing a shortage and has a large amount of demand by very wealthy customers. I'm fortunate to be born in Canada, so by virtue of a birth lottery, I can easily teach myself this in demand skill and work in the country experiencing such a shortage. I'm fortunate that the country I work in has relatively restrictive immigration policies that increase my wage, except for Canadians. I'm fortunate to work in an industry where I can go start a company with a few friends and possibly become a multi-millionaire.
We could all be very passionate musicians, actors, and dancers and be in a very different box economically. Our superstars become billionaires, not millionaires. There were many lazy boomers, gen Xers back then too, it's nothing unique to our generation.
I see this attitude persistently reoccur in developers everywhere. Perhaps owing to their more academic interests, developers were punished for their perceived arrogance when younger and have now learned to adopt a mentality of weakness. As if somehow learning to code was some sort of cosmic mistake on your behalf? You're fortunate? Really? "Oh yeah, my professional success is luck, I was out drinking one night and woke up the next day writing compilers!".
No, I refuse to accept that notion. It may not be 'politically correct' to say this, but I believe you are to a very large extent responsible for your personal success and failures (At least growing up in the industrial world). The radical success of large population groups in countries with virtually no natural resources (Japan) and abject failure of countries more resource blessed than any other (Congo) is more than enough statistical evidence to support the notion that, yes, planning and hard work fixes hard luck.
But to address your Music jab, let me tell you a story.
A good friend of mine is named Max, he's only a few months older than me and it's certainly true that he is very passionate about music, he lives for it you could say. He is one of the hardest working people I know. He possesses no special skill, in fact, he just started learning to play guitar. However, he wanted to be involved very badly, so much so that he worked hard to learn to program and hustled by writing artistic music apps. That little bit of hustle and horizontal thinking got him far, really far. Now he plays with the eminent artist Bjork and regularly posts pictures of living the dream (At least of many 20 year old boys :). He was just playing on the Colbert Show on January 30th! Through hard work and intellectual pursuit, he has succeeded where so many others have failed, without connections and without privilege.
I also have two other friends, whose names you will not know and probably will never know who play many instruments quite well, both coming from decidedly upper middle class backgrounds, both of course claiming to have worked very hard, but all and all did nothing meaningful throughout my entire time knowing them. One of them is an English Major, the other a Nissan Lot Technician in Arizona.
Sure, you might be saying, "Oh, great, yet another anecdote", but I have a feeling that eventually you're going to see so many anecdotes that they stop being anecdotes.
People who consider themselves responsible for their situation are said to have an internal locus of control. People who do not consider themselves responsible for their situation are said to have an external locus of control. It is important to note that internality and externality represent two ends of a continuum, not an either/or typology. We notice, for example:
"In industrial and organizational psychology, it has been found that internals are more likely to take positive action to change their jobs (rather than merely talk about occupational change) than externals."
Herein lies the data everyone's crying out for, I think.
When I was an undergrad I wanted to go on and earn an MA in Library Science. I love information science and books, bookbinding, publishing, archives, &c. But after getting a great heart-to-heart talk with a university Librarian friend, I saw the writing on the wall and saved a lot of money.
I'd like to think that I've redirected at least some of that interest (except for the book binding and preservation component) into programming.
The iron grip that the publishing industry has upon anything library is absolutely stunning. There is so much potential for disruption, yet all the valuable IP (journals, indices, etc) is locked up by centuries-old monopolies. It makes Blackboard look like a puny little troll.
Hi Wyclif,
If you are interested in books/book binding and programing I would love to speak with you. Shoot me an email at patrick (at) dodocase (dot) com.
I've been working on my startup in this space for almost 5 years now (One Day One Job - http://www.onedayonejob.com/ ). One of the biggest buzzwords I hear from job seekers is "relevant."
I send daily e-mails about interesting companies with entry level jobs. When people unsubscribe, they sometimes leave comments like: "These jobs aren't relevant to my interests." or "Jobs are irrelevant to my location."
Very few students are able to realize that they are irrelevant to the job market. If you're not willing to develop new skills, adjust your attitude, and change locations, you're going to be one of the 53% (unless you got it right from the start and majored in Engineering).
As I said then, it's worth noting that according to this analysis, we're at an all time high of 53% jobless or underemployed, but the all time low was 41% (right before the dot com crash). 4/10 vs 5/10. Oh no.
With only two data points (and some probable error estimates), I don't think we're looking at enough of a trend to hang a narrative on.
Also, as this article notes, it's suspicious that a significantly higher percentage of college graduates under 25 are unemployed compared to all people under 25, considering that without an age limit the ratio is close to 2:1 the other way. Without actual data and without a plausible mechanism of action, I'll remain skeptical.
> Students are foolish to IGNORE the realities of the job
market for their majors as we assume more debt.
> College doesn't teach networking.
> College doesn't teach employable skills. Theory AND
Practice.
> Students don't have realistic expectations of their first
jobs after college.
> Even a little investment or initiative in learning
something practical - like SQL, Drupal, or Sharepoint -
can go a long way to opening doors to jobs students
actually want.
> Not everyone needs to be a business or engineering major,
but we, as a students, need think about life after
college more seriously than we have.
I'm a business major in a top 10 undergrad b-school now and they still don't teach networking unfortunately.
They just throw networking and recruiting info sessions DAILY, but they don't teach you how to network. They don't teach you how to explore your passions and interests, research companies working on those kinds of problems, and how to approach them for internships, jobs, etc.
Business schools succeed when they send a lot of students to corporations, so that these corporations come back and sponsor programs and stuff for the B-School. If you're interested in other jobs besides corporations, you have to find them yourself!
Sounds like they're teaching it "trial by fire." My undergrad and grad EE days: 12-hour workdays (nights?) in a dungeon-like room.
I often say to mentored students: engineering is 80% banging your head against a wall, 10% cursing, and 10% progress. It's a long, hard slog to become an expert. Daily networking events sounds like that to me (and frankly, even more unpleasant!)
High Schools and Colleges in the US should begin to treat every student as if when they graduate they will be a 1099 contractor in their chosen field. This will better prepare them for the realities of the markets they will enter and better fit the independence profile of the current generation.
I certainly wish my education had been down this path. I wouldn't have wasted 10 years working for other people only to learn that if I really wanted to achieve my goals I was going to have to work for myself.
The main reason that nobody's really hit on is that it's super easy to get a college degree now.
Sir Ken Robinson (check out his TED video on creativity) talks about how there's academic inflation. Now most jobs require a master's whereas 5 years ago a bachelor's was enough. With the rise of vocational schools and online ones like Phoenix University, the number of college degrees has gone up, but jobs have not gone up proportionally.
I'm going to point out that if significant numbers of these unemployed young people were as enlightened as some of the commentators here and had learned to program, the whole structure of the technical job market might look very different. There would be more people competing for jobs, and capital, and less time for smugness and/or condescension.
I am personally of the belief that the education system is overpriced and underperforming, but I don't want to see it become a trade-school system either. I'd prefer that college students have the opportunity to follow their interests and be exposed to a range of thought and ideas. After graduating , I'd prefer they have a chance to find their niche without being hammered by student loan payments. I do want people entering college to be clear eyed about the idea that they will have to find their niche.
Yes, get skills. But you don't necessarily need to get "hard skills" from a college major. Often, education that stresses the "hard skills" tends to undervalue the "soft skills" like reading and writing which, in my opinion, are more important.
"Hard skills" can often only be developed through experience, or, as the article notes, through alternate education paths, or, as this community stresses, through independent online learning. Since this is so, why major in a "hard skill?"
You have your entire life to learn hard skills. You can do it in the summer. You can do it in your spare time. You can do it while working at Starbucks. You can do it one class a semester at a time. But you don't have your whole life to sit around a table and discuss Vergil. I say, major in something "useless."
I'm not saying this in the sense of, "critical thinking should be taught in public schools". The issue is rarely does the average person look at an important decision with any real amount of thought. Yes, person. Not teenager.
When I was a teenager (tail-end of dot-com boom) there was this implicit assumption that I was going to go to the best school I could afford and get accepted into -- loans be damned -- and that was it. That's what friends would tell me, my parents, television, teachers and my guidance counselor. Everyone simply rolled with it.
I didn't. I got into stellar schools, but I didn't get any full scholarships. MIT and WPI would've ultimately required a loan large enough to buy the house I grew up in at its current market value. That alone was enough to scare me shitless. My sister was at Cornell racking up that kind of debt as it was, but didn't think anything of it. I sure as hell did. I looked at my job prospects where I lived. I looked at salaries. I thought the evaluation of tech stocks was absolutely ludicrous* and wasn't sustainable. I went to a state school, paid cash thanks to working nearly full-time, withdrew second semester and planned out my alternate approach. My parents kicked me out of the house and everyone thought I was an imbecile.
They don't now. However it wasn't fate that got me where I was. I sit down, think about my situation, and figure out not only what I want to change but how I'm going to go about accomplishing it. I do it every year. I do it every time I don't like something with my current situation. It's not that people are inept. I'll have friends over that are displeased with X, and I just pelt them with questions. I ask what they don't like, what they're going to do about it, and then have them prove that plan is feasible to see if it'll float or if it needs revision. They go home with a plan, and eventually they act on it one way or another and shit gets better.
Most people would be a lot better off if they just had someone blow holes in their plans, to ensure they have a decent plan in the first place.
-----
* And thought my parents' notion of the house doubling in value every seven years until the end of time was nuts since I was 12 (early 90s). "Dad, does your salary double every seven years?" "... go the hell to your room."
This guy pretty much sums up the failings of the system without saying it. Academia is out of touch with the market it is suppose to supply workers for.
procerus 3 hours ago
I think most people know very well why they may not have a job - perhaps
they're basically doing everything right but just haven't got lucky yet or
applied for enough jobs for one to catch. Or perhaps, like me, they're
basically unemployable and have no relevant skills or experience. I know that,
and I'm not surprised that I'm at a low level in work. My degree is broadly
useless, I got no industry experience/internships while in education, I have no
other tempting skills like math, languages or programming, and also I'm a
pretty weird, socially awkward person who doesn't know how to make people warm
to him.
I only realised all that fairly recently
and a bit too late to deal with while still in education, I should have caught it sooner when I went to the college careers presentations and there were a lot of accounting, tech, engineering, finance companies there. All through
school I was fed ideas about how clever I was and how going to college is
totally badass and I’ll walk into 50-60k jobs as soon as I graduate. Whether
the teachers or my parents honestly believed it or not, it was bs, and quite
damaging bs. I did what I was led to believe was necessary (by parents who had
never gone to college and teachers who were clueless) and that was not nearly
enough. Other people noticed what to do though, so good on them. My mind was
elsewhere, never really focussed on a career and
worried obsessively over my grades, this is my fault and I realize I shouldn't blame parents/teachers.
Now I am at point of really low self esteem
because the sudden realization of my errors over the past 4 years comes to
light and the fact is that I am not that clever if I can;t pick up economic/job trends and instead have my head in the clouds.
If you have a 17/18 yr old you need to sit them down and have long deep
conversations about what it takes to become
financially independent and you need to keep having
those conversations until they say "mom, dad, I want to gain
this skill and I can see from job adverts that I will be paid $xx.xxxx can we
discuss what further education or job training/experience I will need
to achieve this"
It is very important in my view that an 18 year old has at
least 1 job and career path laid out before they move on from high
school, they can change it as they grow older but at least they have
something to fall back on. It is really scary how many students have literally
no idea what they want to do once they finish school.
From the cleveland.com source article: "I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
How are so many unemployed? Creative writing degrees, that's how.
I see your point, but I suspect there's more to it. For example, here are some college majors along with their growth relative to the overall college population. So, for example, 107 means the field has seen 107% of the growth that the overall college population has seen. I'm comparing 1970 and 2008 because that's what I've got...
First, a few items that probably support your thesis:
Area, ethnic, cultural and gender studies: 265
Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities: 584
Mathematics and statistics: -41
Parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies: 2,044
On the other hand, take a look at these:
Computer and information sciences: 1,644
Business: 222
Engineering: 59
Engineering technologies: 222
Security and protective services: 2,143
Legal professions and studies: 663
Education: -47
English language and literature/letters: -15
Health professions and related clinical sciences: 416
Anyway, the point is that kids are clearly studying things that are supposed to be able to get them jobs. The stories you hear about unemployed kids with $100,000 in debt and degrees in Underwater Basket Weaving are outliers, not the norm.
In fact, many of these kids are being intensely pragmatic. Frankly, even some of the things that appear in the upper section are questionable. For example, "liberal arts and sciences" probably includes things like Physics and Chemistry, which this community likely views as quite valuable.
No, but a fair number (over 30%) have gotten degrees that I would consider to be hard to market. Even more if you include degrees that would be hard to market if they weren't followed up by a Master's and Doctorate (e.g., psychology).
Because affluent, well-connected kids got humanities degrees at Ivy league schools and then used their connections and the prestige of the school to secure high paying jobs, and kids from blue-collar backgrounds didn't realize they can't do the same thing with a humanities degree from the local college.
Because kids who should have gone to trade schools or entered the workforce after high school were convinced they had to go to some college, so they wasted a few years studying something they're not good at and don't care about, so they didn't learn anything to make themselves more employable than they were before they started.