The Value of a College Education

The major issue of low-wage workers in the United States was covered recently in articles from newspapers like The Star Tribune, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. The common theme found throughout all three articles is that due to the current state of the economy, anyone can fall into the poverty and other hardships that a low-wage worker must endure at the drop of a hat, and anyone really means anyone. Someone with a college degree? Certainly. Look at Emily Franklin who was featured in The Star Tribune's article - a woman who graduated with a college degree and teaching experience and who never got a teaching job to date. Someone with a white collar job? Sure. Look at Joseph Williams featured in The Atlantic's article - a man who fell from a white collar job as a journalist to a retail salesman. Additionally, the immense hardships that low wage workers must endure were highlighted in all three articles. In The Star Tribune's article, the difficulty of repeated rejection was seen in the story of Emily Franklin. For example, she said that after having over 100 applications rejected, she had to start going to job fairs where "You’d just hang your head when you walked in." In The Atlantic's article, the issue of wage theft was brought up along other incredible hardships that Joseph Williams faced. In The New York Times's article, the difficulties of raising children and trying to get by with bills piling up were discussed in the story of Erika McCurdy. The pictures included in these articles served to add to the effect. In The Star Tribune's article, the picture of Emily Franklin and her sister showed the great divide between low wage workers and higher paid ones. Emily, a low wage worker, sat with her hands covering her face, probably overwhelmed by her fear of what her not-so-bright and also unpredictable future has in store for her while her sister sat in a seemingly chipper mood with a smile on her face. The reason why Emily's sister's mood differed so much is because she has the reassurance of a steady, well-paying job that her sister had been deprived of for so long. In The Atlantic's article, the picture depicting a shopper in a sporting goods retail store had a significant effect as well, but in a different way. This picture allowed readers to contrast what they had always believed sporting goods retail shops to be like with the harsh reality in that the picture was showed what's on the surface while the story below contrasted the surface with the bitter truth. In The New York Times's article, the picture of Erika McCurdy also had a significant effect on the article. The sadness and weariness conveyed by McCurdy's facial expression alongside the bill she held in her hand serve to personify and put a face on the hardship that always accompanies low wage work. There were, in addition to pictures, graphs that added to the stories in a similar way to the images. For example, the bar graph found in The New York Times's article revealing that modern day low wage workers are older and more likely to have high school and college degrees and be of ethnic or racial minorities adds to the story in that it shows how this story does not only apply to the unfortunate woman featured in it but rather that this issue is widespread and covers all kinds of people. It also stresses that a college degree does not have the same guarantee of a job and nice life that it once did. In addition, in The Star Tribune's article, the video included in the article features a few charts that accentuates the fall of opportunity for young people looking for jobs and the decrease in pay over the years for middle-aged people enhance the effect of the story in that it - much like the graph in The New York Times's article - allows the audience to realize that this effects not just the people focused on in the stories but rather that this is more of an epidemic that wreaks havoc on a great many lives. Going off of the graphs in another article from The Atlantic that analyzed the job market for college graduates, wage rigidity is - as one could guess - as rigid as ever. The amount of college students with good non-college jobs have decreased significantly over the years, and this could be partly due to the tendency of businesses to cut workers rather than wages. That would explain why there was data indicating not a drop in the pay of college students with these jobs but rather a drop in the amount of college students with these jobs. In regard to job creation, these graphs do not bring good tidings, but quite the opposite. These graphs reveal that there have been fewer and fewer good-paying job opportunities to people with college degrees, and that this trend may continue in its descent. Concerning worker productivity for good non-college jobs. these graphs indicate that this may decrease because even though college students are working in non-college jobs for which they are overqualified which may indicate that productivity would increase, the graphs also show that less college students are getting these jobs which means that less experienced workers who may be less productive will fill these jobs. On the other hand, worker productivity for low-wage jobs may increase since the amount of overqualified college students with these jobs is increasing. Regarding skill attainment, these graphs once again bring bad news: college students that spend a great deal of time and money mastering the subject of their choice are not ending up in the jobs they tried to attain the skills for, but they are rather ending up in low-wage jobs for which a college education is not needed. Lastly, in regards to retooling, there is actually a bit of good news - even though the good news is not for college students but the companies that they work for in their low-paying jobs. Their businesses will definitely be enhanced by the increasing amount of people with college degrees looking for jobs in their businesses in that their skills that are not necessary for employment in that area will enhance the company once filled with unskilled laborers without college educations. Just like almost any other controversy in the United States, this issue can be analyzed from a political standpoint. For example, liberals tend to try and fight for these low-wage workers and college students just barely making minimum wage, and they in some cases even call for a higher minimum wage. The article on U.S. News that covered the issue of the ever-increasing amount of college graduates with low-wage jobs attended to the biases of liberals in that it focused on the need for a higher minimum wage to accommodate these low-wage workers that, in the eyes of liberals, deserve to make money and support themselves and their families just as much as the next guy. The article pointed out that the improvement of the job market - perhaps by the increase of minimum wage mentioned in the beginning of the article - would lead these suffering college graduates back to the higher-paying jobs they trained for. This appeals to liberals in that it suggests that the solution to this low-wage working college graduates issue is by carrying out one of the things they believe in: higher minimum wage. A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on employment participation by college graduates 25 years of age and older seems to agree in some ways and also to disagree in other ways with the statistics found in articles previously mentioned. For example, one common theme among all the statistics is that there is a significant amount of people with varying amounts of college education who are working low wage jobs. One thing different about these statistics, however, is that the article in U.S. News said that there were 284,000 college graduates employed in jobs paying at or below the minimum wage while the study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics had not indicated that number. The only way to get an accurate picture of this problem would be to see the effects of this issue for oneself. Finding someone in one's own community suffering in this manner can do much more than any set of numbers, data, and graphs can because of the emotions that humans cannot control coming largely into play in a situation like that. A May 2013 study from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce yielded many shocking results from my point of view, as a high school student constantly looking at what the future has in store for me. One noteworthy trend I noticed among the unemployment rates for the various jobs noted in the study is that there was no major theme among all the different career fields studied for unemployment rates. The study revealed to me that it truly does not matter what a person's interests are; there is always a chance that one is not going to end up with a job. Even though I recognize there are definitely jobs that are in much higher demand than others, aside from that, there really is no specific warning sign that pops out at me, telling me to avoid this or that kind of job. Rather, one must put oneself out there in order to find out whether they will get a job in a certain area or not. The job market is obviously quite fickle, and the only way to deal with that is by having strong back up plans that are perhaps just as strong or even stronger than one's primary and preferable plan. There is a similar article found in The Wall Street Journal that looks at the choice college students face in regards to choosing a major based on different factors. This article, while it has a similar goal to the Huffington Post article in that both articles give tips to college students in regards to choosing a major for their careers, the two differ in that the Huffington Post article focused on the comparison of unemployment rates particular to different majors in choosing a major while The Wall Street Journal article looked at the comparison of salaries in choosing a major. I am more swayed by the arguments made in The Wall Street Journal article, mainly because the experts quoted in the article seem to back up their arguments more sufficiently while the Huffington Post article lacked the back up or discussion of a topic by experts. Going off of a chart on comparative unemployment rates of college graduates versus non-college graduates over several decades, it seems as though one could predict that the premium of a college education, though it is falling, will not become irrelevant. Information on average indebtedness, however, could add to this analysis because it may decrease the value of a college education. College was once the institution that set apart the elite from the average in the United States. Things have certainly changed.