At 23:03 23/04/2012, Ed wrote:
It does seem that universities have increasingly
assumed the role of 'holding tanks' for the
young because there really aren't many jobs out there.
Yes, but also, shockingly, the one line of jobs
that employers in all the advanced countries say
they are constantly short of -- software
engineering -- is not what it seems to be.
Keith
Software Engineers Will Work One Day for English Majors
By Norman Matloff Apr 22, 2012
Which of the following describes careers in
<http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/Software-developers.htm>software
engineering?
A. Intellectually stimulating and gratifying.
B. Excellent pay for new bachelors degree grads.
C. A career dead-end.
The correct answer (with a your mileage may
vary disclaimer) is: D. All of the above.
Although the very term coding evokes an image
of tedium, it is an intellectually challenging
activity, creative and even artistic. If you like
puzzles and are good analytically, software
development may be your cup of tea. You not only
get to solve puzzles for a living, but in essence you compose them.
Wages for new computer-science graduates working
as software engineers are at, or near, the top of
most surveys, certainly compared with new
humanities grads. We hear about the gap a lot
this time of year, as students compare job offers.
You had better be good to get that first job in
computer engineering, because you will probably
be asked to
<http://www.ohio.edu/eecs/undergraduate/documents/upload/whatCpEsDo-better%20version.pdf>code
on command during job interviews; employers have
been burned too often by those with high grades
yet low ability. But those who are chosen are
generally paid well and love the work.
The downside? Well, say you interview as a
graduating college senior at
<http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/FB:US>Facebook
Inc. (FB) You may find, to your initial delight,
that the place looks just like a fun-loving dorm
-- and the adults seem to be missing. But that is
a sign of how the profession has devolved in
recent years to one lacking in longevity. Many
programmers find that their employability starts to decline at about age 35.
Gone by 40
Employers dismiss them as either lacking in
up-to-date technical skills -- such as the latest
programming-language fad -- or not suitable for
entry level. In other words, either
underqualified or overqualified. That doesnt
leave much, does it? Statistics show that most
software developers are out of the field by age 40.
Employers have admitted this in unguarded
moments.
<http://topics.bloomberg.com/craig-barrett/>Craig
Barrett, a former chief executive officer of
<http://topics.bloomberg.com/intel-corp/>Intel
Corp., famously remarked that the half-life of
an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few
years, while
<http://topics.bloomberg.com/mark-zuckerberg/>Mark
Zuckerberg of Facebook has blurted out that young programmers are superior.
<http://wadhwa.com/bio/>Vivek Wadhwa, a former
technology executive and now a business writer
and Duke University researcher,
<http://wadhwa.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-dark-secret-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-age/>wrote
that in 2008 David Vaskevitch, then the chief
technology officer at
<http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/MSFT:US>Microsoft
Corp. (MSFT), acknowledged that the vast
majority of new Microsoft employees are young,
but said that this is so because older workers
tend to go into more senior jobs and there are
fewer of those positions to begin with.
More than a decade ago, Congress commissioned a
<http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9830&page=133>National
Research Council study of the age issue in the
profession. The council found that it took 23.4
percent longer for the over-40 workers to find
work after losing their jobs, and that they had
to take an average pay cut of 13.7 percent on the new job.
Why do the employers prefer to hire the new or
recent grads? Is it really because only they have
the latest skill sets? That argument doesnt jibe
with the fact that young ones learned those
modern skills from old guys like me. Instead, the
problem is that the 35-year-old programmer has
simply priced herself out of the market. As
Wadhwa notes, even if the 45-year-old programmer
making $120,000 has the right skills, companies
would rather hire the younger workers.
Whether the employers policy is proper or not,
this is the problem facing workers in the
software profession. And its worsened by the
<http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=4b7cdd1d5fd37210VgnVCM100000082ca60aRCRD&vgnextchannel=73566811264a3210VgnVCM100000b92ca60aRCRD>H-1B
work-visa program. Government data show that H-1B
software engineers tend to be much younger than
their American counterparts. Basically, when the
employers run out of young Americans to hire,
they turn to the young H-1Bs, bypassing the older Americans.
Fewer Managerial Jobs
With talent, street smarts and keen networking
skills, you might still get good work in your
50s. Moving up to management is also a
possibility, but as Microsofts Vaskevitch
pointed out, these jobs are limited in number.
Qualifications include being verbally
aggressive, as one manager put it to me, and
often a willingness to make late- night calls to
those programmers in
<http://topics.bloomberg.com/india/>India you have offshored the work to.
Finally, those high programmer salaries are
actually low, because the same talents
(analytical and problem-solving ability,
attention to detail) command much more money in
other fields, such as law and finance. A large
technology company might typically pay
<http://www.cov.com/careers/siliconvalley/attorneys/faq/>new
law-school graduates and
<http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/mba/career_opportunities/positions_compensation.html>MBAs
salaries and compensation approaching double what
they give new masters degree
<http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads>grads
in computer science.
If you choose a software-engineering career, just
keep in mind that you could end up working for
one of those lowly humanities majors someday.
(Norman Matloff is a professor of computer
science at the
<http://topics.bloomberg.com/university-of-california/>University
of California, Davis. The opinions expressed are his own.)
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[email protected]>Arthur Cordell
To:
<mailto:[email protected]>'RE-DESIGNING
WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION'
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 10:10 AM
Subject: [Futurework] Half of new grads are jobless or underemployed
Half of new grads are jobless or underemployed
HOPE YEN April 23, 2012
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47141463/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/#.T5Victnvhad>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47141463/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/#.T5Victnvhad
WASHINGTON The college class of 2012 is in for
a rude welcome to the world of work.
A weak labor market already has left half of
young college graduates either jobless or
underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are
increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs
waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or
receptionist, for example and that's
confounding their hopes a degree would pay off
despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
An analysis of government data conducted for The
Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven
prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.
Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.
While there's strong demand in science,
education and health fields, arts and humanities
flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's
degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological
changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such
as bank tellers. Most future job openings are
projected to be in lower-skilled positions such
as home health aides, who can provide
personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.
Taking underemployment into consideration, the
job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell
last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
"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.
Initially hopeful that his college education
would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished
for three months before finally taking a job as
a barista, a position he has held for the last
two years. In the beginning he sent three or
four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers
questioned his lack of experience or the
practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.
Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum
wage, says he got financial help from his
parents to help pay off student loans. He is now
mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing
few other options to advance his career. "There
is not much out there, it seems," he said.
His situation highlights a widening but
little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more
than ever, the choices that young adults make
earlier in life level of schooling, academic
field and training, where to attend college, how
to pay for it are having long-lasting financial impact.
The double whammy
"You can make more money on average if you go to
college, but it's not true for everybody," says
Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the
growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S.
student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If
you're not sure what you're going to be doing,
it probably bodes well to take some job, if you
can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."
<http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/10/11120440-its-hard-to-find-good-workers-even-in-this-economy?lite>It's
hard to find good workers, HR execs say
Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor
Market Studies at Northeastern University who
analyzed the numbers, said many people with a
bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising
tuition and poor job outcomes. "Simply put,
we're failing kids coming out of college," he
said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a
college major can make all the difference.
"We're going to need a lot better job growth and
connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow."
By region, the Mountain West was most likely to
have young college graduates jobless or
underemployed roughly 3 in 5. It was followed
by the more rural southeastern U.S., including
Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee.
The Pacific region, including Alaska,
California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.
On the other end of the scale, the southern
U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have
young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.
The figures are based on an analysis of 2011
Current Population Survey data by Northeastern
University researchers and supplemented with
material from Paul Harrington, an economist at
Drexel University, and the Economic Policy
Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on
Labor Department assessments of the level of
education required to do the job in 900-plus
U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate
the shares of young adults with bachelor's degrees who were "underemployed."
About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of
bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25
last year were jobless or underemployed, the
highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the
share was at a low of 41 percent, before the
dot-com bust erased job gains for college
graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.
Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job
market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.
Broken down by occupation, young college
graduates were heavily represented in jobs that
require a high school diploma or less.
In the last year, they were more likely to be
employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and
food-service helpers than as engineers,
physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined
(100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working
in office-related jobs such as receptionist or
payroll clerk than in all computer professional
jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were
employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer
representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).
According to government projections released
last month, only three of the 30 occupations
with the largest projected number of job
openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's
degree or higher to fill the position
teachers, college professors and accountants.
Most job openings are in professions such as
retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs
which aren't easily replaced by computers.
College graduates who majored in zoology,
anthropology, philosophy, art history and
humanities were among the least likely to find
jobs appropriate to their education level; those
with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer
science degrees were among the most likely.
Anxiety and fear
In Nevada, where unemployment is the highest in
the nation, Class of 2012 college seniors
recently expressed feelings ranging from anxiety
and fear to cautious optimism about what lies ahead.
With the state's economy languishing in an
extended housing bust, a lot of young graduates
have shown up at job placement centers in tears.
Many have been squeezed out of jobs by more
experienced workers, job counselors said, and
are now having to explain to prospective
employers the time gaps in their resumes.
"It's kind of scary," said Cameron Bawden, 22,
who is graduating from the University of
Nevada-Las Vegas in December with a business
degree. His family has warned him for years
about the job market, so he has been building
his resume by working part time on the Las Vegas
Strip as a food runner and doing a marketing internship with a local airline.
Bawden said his friends who have graduated are
either unemployed or working along the Vegas
Strip in service jobs that don't require
degrees. "There are so few jobs and it's a small
city," he said. "It's all about who you know."
Any job gains are going mostly to workers at the
top and bottom of the wage scale, at the expense
of middle-income jobs commonly held by
bachelor's degree holders. By some studies, up
to 95 percent of positions lost during the
economic recovery occurred in middle-income
occupations such as bank tellers, the type of
job not expected to return in a more high-tech age.
David Neumark, an economist at the University of
California-Irvine, said a bachelor's degree can
have benefits that aren't fully reflected in the
government's labor data. He said even for
lower-skilled jobs such as waitress or cashier,
employers tend to value bachelor's
degree-holders more highly than high-school
graduates, paying them more for the same work and offering promotions.
In addition, U.S. workers increasingly may need
to consider their position in a global economy,
where they must compete with educated
foreign-born residents for jobs. Longer-term
government projections also may fail to consider
"degree inflation," a growing ubiquity of
bachelor's degrees that could make them more
commonplace in lower-wage jobs but inadequate for higher-wage ones.
That future may be now for Kelman Edwards Jr.,
24, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., who is waiting to
see the returns on his college education.
After earning a biology degree last May, the
only job he could find was as a construction
worker for five months before he quit to focus
on finding a job in his academic field. He
applied for positions in laboratories but was
told they were looking for people with specialized certifications.
"I thought that me having a biology degree was a
gold ticket for me getting into places, but
every other job wants you to have previous
history in the field," he said. Edwards, who has
about $5,500 in student debt, recently met with
a career counselor at Middle Tennessee State
University. The counselor's main advice: Pursue further education.
"Everyone is always telling you, 'Go to
college,'" Edwards said. "But when you graduate, it's kind of an empty cliff."
----------
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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