Confusion

College Grads May Be Stuck in Low-Skill Jobs (from the Wall Street Journal)

It is little wonder that you may be confused about getting your degree.  Headlines like those above, combined with the continuous din about student loan debt, add confusion rather than clarity.   It doesn’t help that this particular piece appeared in the highly respected Wall Street Journal.   Buzz TodaySource:  The Wall Street Journal:  Better-educated workers still face far better job prospects than their less-educated counterparts. The unemployment rate for Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree was 3.8% in February (2013), compared with 7.9% for those with just a high school diploma. College-educated employees also tend to earn more and advance more quickly even when they are in fields that don’t require a degree. 

Don’t be confused. Student debt is a real issue. The federal government is the lender of the guaranteed student loans.  Interest rates on such loans are relatively high and those interest rates are potentially going to double this summer if Congress does not take action to hold the current rate.  In addition, federal student loans are virtually forever since they cannot be discharged under bankruptcy laws.

But we will examine student loans in detail on another day.  For now we need to look at the headline of the article and the data in that article as reported in the BUZZ Today here.

Under any scenario, what the data shows is that earning a degree gives you a far better shot at having a job, advancing more quickly and earning more over a lifetime career than not having a degree.

These results are critical to your decision about whether to get a degree or not get a degree.  From this basic decision, your challenge is to make wise choices about what to study, how your studies relate to specific careers, where to go to school, how to get the most favorable tuition, how to finance your education.  For the data on these important decisions you need an easy to understand road map about where to get that important data and how to use it.  For that, I recommend that you go directly to “Your Future is Calling”.

Disconnect

Why are there so many unfilled jobs when there are so many looking for work? In brief, it is because so many learners are not studying what is required in our global economy.

Buzz Today Source: CNN Money 72% of educators believe they’re doing a good job of preparing students for the workforce, while only 45% of graduates and 42% of employers think so, a McKinsey & Co. survey found.

Clearly graduates and employers have different opinions about how well higher education prepares graduates to meet employer needs. While all of this is going on, jobs are going unfilled. Only two-third of recent graduates were employed six months after graduation, yet there are 3.6 million jobs sitting empty nationwide. Ironically, this is especially true for coveted manufacturing jobs.

So what are you supposed to do in the face of these facts? The answer is that you have to rely less on what your professors are saying and more on yourself and labor market data when it comes to what you study in college.

The bottom line is that while professors are smart and well educated, they do not necessarily connect to job opportunities employers are creating. You need a third party source that can help you link what you study to where the jobs are. The choice of the university and the degree should come last, not first. Knowing who you are match job opportunities need to come first.

I write about exactly these issues in my forth coming book:  Your Future is Calling.