From The Wall Street Journal:
In data compiled for a coming report, the Economic Policy Institute, a center-left think tank in Washington, found that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage for male college graduates aged 23 to 29 dropped 11% over the past decade to $21.68 in 2011. For female college graduates of the same age, the average wage is down 7.6% to $18.80.
“New college graduates have been losing ground for 10 years,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the institute, which derived the figures from regular government wage surveys. The drop in average wages for young adults is in contrast to U.S. government figures showing that average inflation-adjusted hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory workers of all ages and education levels are up 3% from a decade ago.
To put those income numbers in context, here are some facts from a recent Chronicle of Higher Education story by economist Alex Tabarrok:
– Only 35 percent of students starting a four-year degree program will graduate within four years, and less than 60 percent will graduate within six years.
– The U.S. college dropout rate is about 40 percent, the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world.
– Over the past 25 years, the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in STEM subjects has remained more or less constant.
– In 2009, the United States graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. That’s not bad, but we graduated more students with computer-science degrees 25 years ago!
– Few disciplines have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology—about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?
If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering, and math, what are they studying?
– In 2009, the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.
– Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees, and those graduates don’t get a big income boost from having gone to college.
And as Computerworld magazine notes, the science and engineering bit of the U.S. workforce has stalled:
Hey, I love liberal arts majors. I have a double history-poli sci major from Northwestern University. But do we want to subsidize the sort of higher education, as Tabarrok writes, “less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth?”
And rather than pushing students to attend a four-year, brick-and-mortar college in pursuit of the BA, how about business-backed training and apprenticeship programs leading to a high-skill technical degree just like in Germany and some other northern European nations? In Germany, 97% of students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college, Tabarrok notes. In the United States, we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college.
More education for all. But not college for all.
My son is a freshman majoring in chemical engineering. He has to study every second of the day just to keep up. Many of his classmates have already switched majors because they couldn’t handle the Calculus, Chemistry, and Physics. THe university is doing a good job mentoring the students – they tell them it will take 5 years (including co-op/internships). They offer tutors and dangle job offers in front of them. Yet, more than 25% quit the major in the first year. It is tough for an 18 year old to turn down the lure of an easy college major. They want to have fun, not study 12 hours a day.
Thankfully, my son’s biggest fear is Jane Austin.
Karen,
Your son is a dork and a closed bedwetter.
Yep. That’s one of the reasons STEM students decide to blow it off and take a non “dork” major. Thanks for being part of the problem.
I was a classics and philosophy major at a small liberal arts college . I was taught to think clearly , analyse rigorously and express those thoughts concisely and persuasively . I have not regretted that education one day of my life . The problem is not those particular liberal arts majors but the diminishment of undergraduate education as a whole . And the skillls I acquired in my undergraduate majors I applied with some little success at some fancy B-school in Philadelphia and took the wholle package to an oldtimey special bracket bond house , again with some little success . To repeat, it is not any particular major which serves well or ill a career , but the expectations and demands placed on the student by himself and his faculty which makes the man .
Jay -
I’m impressed that you were taught to “think clearly , analyse rigorously and express those thoughts concisely and persuasively”. Unfortunately, none of those things can engineer a machine, design a chip, or write the program to control chip and machine (although to be fair, computer science is more about language skills and logic than anything else). I went through the same grinder Karen’s son and his friends went through. We all knew what it was – a sieve to eliminate students from med school. The classes were typically poorly taught, by foreign teachers whose grasp of english is pitiful. And that’s at major universities.
STEM classes are a huge shock, because high school doesn’t usually prepare most students for the realization that you can’t rely on the professors. You have to self study, or you will fail.
I’m not sure what can be done about it, but part of the solution lies in giving more choice at the high school level. And it is difficult to keep the STEM students motivated when history classes are so easy, and its so much more fun in liberal arts. No engineer has fun doing Green’s function.
What to do about this situation? I submit that market forces, i.e., expected wages, will direct more people towards the sciences as time passes. That is, if parents do not agree to subsidize young people for long periods of time as they pursue careers in the liberal arts.
And here’s another thought. No doubt the political temptation will be to subsidize STEM majors in order to induce more of them. But in view of the country’s financial status, how about an excise tax on liberal arts majors? Or, better yet, a working capital fund that taxes liberal arts majors and uses the proceeds to subsidize STEM majors. Creative, no?
i am a humble (and purportedly “useless”) liberal arts major- full stop. But in spite of having an extremely tenuous grip on logic, this blog entry fails to make a case for anything causal, let alone anything coherent.
We have:
1) Average wages for college graduates over the past 25 years have seemingly stagnated- granted, most workers in the American population have experienced a similar effect. At the same time, I don’t know if this wage is ex health benefits (and other benefits) which may present another story .
2) To put those income numbers in “context”, we are presented with 8 facts- 3 or 4 of which do not seemingly relate to the graph above because they talk about college dropouts rather than college graduates. I guess tenuously they refer to high school graduates, but that doesn’t seem to be the point of this inquiry.
3) We are then told that the number of STEM, computer science, and microbiology majors are also stagnating- while the number of “liberal arts majors “are increasing. I am not sure what the point here is: Those who are majoring in the liberal arts probably aren’t going to major in STEM-related areas; perhaps they should just become part of the high school graduate cohort with even more stagnating wages than the college graduate cohort.
Hey, I love liberal arts majors. I have a double history-poli sci major from Northwestern University. But do we want to subsidize the sort of higher education, as Tabarrok writes, “less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth?”
And rather than pushing students to attend a four-year, brick-and-mortar college in pursuit of the BA, how about business-backed training and apprenticeship programs leading to a high-skill technical degree just like in Germany and some other northern European nations? In Germany, 97% of students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college, Tabarrok notes. In the United States, we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college.
Finally, even more perplexing, Tabarrok states that we may not want to subsidize “education” (read: worthless liberal arts majors) that are “less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth?” Except that: 1) Tabarrrok hasn’t produced analysis that more STEM majors produce greater innovation or growth on a macro level, and perhaps even more to the point, the German example is rather incoherent in this context. Many of the individuals who might major in STEM are the ones culled out to manufacturing- I don’t think you will find many people interested in the liberal arts bending tubes for ship production.
And rather than pushing students to attend a four-year, brick-and-mortar college in pursuit of the BA, how about business-backed training and apprenticeship programs leading to a high-skill technical degree just like in Germany and some other northern European nations? In Germany, 97% of students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college, Tabarrok notes. In the United States, we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college.
More education for all. But not college for all.
More education for all. But not college for all.
I recently heard a well regarded university president – who presided over a major expansion of research programs at his (large) institution – express real concern about the growing tendency of universities to compete with each other, eg for funding, by focusing resources on graduate programs and research, and on new campus facilities to support them. His concern, specifically, was that research and graduate programs were being subsidized, in significant measure, on the backs of undergraduate programs, through higher tuitions (paid for through student loans that are mushrooming out of control) and larger classes, with a result that the quality of undergraduate education is decreasing.
While I recognize the inherent value of a liberal arts education, and don’t believe that the value of a college education can be reduced to financial measures, his remarks, and the study below, lead me to wonder whether such business dynamics might lead universities to over-recruit for their undergraduate arts programs simply because its EASIER than increasing admissions in science, technology, engineering or math? By easier, I mean less real accountability to career outcomes: if only 5-10% of arts graduates end up with meaningful work in their field, oh well, but the same sort of outcome in STEM fields would leave graduates feeling cheated and or misled.
To be fair, I think it’s a failure on the math and science programs of the American school system. If kids were introduced and encouraged from an early age, I think we would see an increase in the amount of STEM majors.
As a dual electrical and computer engineer graduate from 2003 who never worked in either field, I have alot to say about your post. I appreciate your addressing the topic, but I have a different take.
If science and engineering majors are stagnating, it is largely because there is little demand for entry-level people in those fields. I went to a flagship state university that is well respected in the field. Only a handful of military contractors were recruiting the major, and each of them only had a handful of slots. Out university alone produced over 200 graduates, and each company was recruiting at other regional universities as well. For most companies, I never made it beyond the “behavioral” interview (personality test). Most other interview candidates didn’t either. Oddly enough, those who got hired typically didn’t have the highest grades; they were very shy and introverted and had few outside activities and no political involvement. Many were really being hired to do technician jobs.
A quick check of BLS data revealed the problem – the field had shed about 1/3 of its employees in the past several years, and total employment at that time only contained about 5 to 6 years worth of graduates. Foreign competition has played a role as had automation of design work. It doesn’t take that many people to design an iphone relative to the number of users. Far more people are employed in sales and marketing or accounting.
There will always be some unfilled positions, but not due to a lack of entry-level graduates. Almost all job postings seek candidates with several years experience in a narrow specialty. Few candidates may exist with 3 years experience doing something that barely existed back then. Non-competition agreements and intellectual property enforcement don’t help either, as virtually all STEM employers make people sign them.
“I believe I have already hinted at the quarter in which the cry for the greatest possible expansion of education is most loudly raised. This expansion belongs to the most beloved of the dogmas of modern political economy. As much knowledge and education as possible; therefore the greatest possible supply and demand—hence as much happiness as possible:—that is the formula. In this case utility is made the object and goal of education,—utility in the sense of gain—the greatest possible pecuniary gain. In the quarter now under consideration culture would be defined as that point of vantage which enables one to ‘keep in the van of one’s age,’ from which one can see all the easiest and best roads to wealth, and with which one controls all the means of communication between men and nations. The purpose of education, according to this scheme, would be to rear the most ‘current’ men possible,—’current’ being used here in the sense in which it is applied to the coins of the realm. The greater the number of such men, the happier a nation will be; and this precisely is the purpose of our modern educational institutions: to help every one, as far as his nature will allow, to become ‘current’; to develop him so that his particular degree of knowledge and [37]science may yield him the greatest possible amount of happiness and pecuniary gain. Every one must be able to form some sort of estimate of himself; he must know how much he may reasonably expect from life. The ‘bond between intelligence and property’ which this point of view postulates has almost the force of a moral principle. In this quarter all culture is loathed which isolates, which sets goals beyond gold and gain, and which requires time: it is customary to dispose of such eccentric tendencies in education as systems of ‘Higher Egotism,’ or of ‘Immoral Culture—Epicureanism.’ According to the morality reigning here, the demands are quite different; what is required above all is ‘rapid education,’ so that a money-earning creature may be produced with all speed; there is even a desire to make this education so thorough that a creature may be reared that will be able to earn a great deal of money. Men are allowed only the precise amount of culture which is compatible with the interests of gain; but that amount, at least, is expected from them.”
-Nietzche
When I was building AM radio kits in boy scouts, it was fun.
When I was building speakers in my grandfathers garage, it was fun and educational.
Most of the students made fun of me. My curiousity compelled me.
Math and Chemistry were hard, but it did not hurt me to think. It taught me about nature, physics, and how the universe works. I love the periodic table and the way the elements can form other materials.
I got to work as an intern on the Space Shuttle. Smartest people I have met.
I have not met many liberal arts majors that contribute a lot, but many who work in science field.
The US used to have 20% of the workforce working in manufacturing, Science, R&D – and when we did we had rizing incomes, lots of side jobs at smaller firms, we invented the transistor here, made cars cheap and good.
We got rid of manufacturing and science, and now the US is hurting all all levers. We reap what we sow. Sure we can get liberal arts and humanities degrees.
But how will the US pay down its debt if our entitled parents and kids want all the tech gadgets, but will no try to understand how to make them – a 180 degree turn from just 30 year ago?