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[Trekkin]

It's culinary arts, silly people, if it's not more specialized. There's actually cooking degrees and schools. A graduate of one of those flipping frozen burgers in a fast food chain would be a more or less perfect example of underemployment

That depends on how you define underemployment. From their perspective, we may safely assume they'd rather be a chef or something. For society at large, though, it's difficult to imagine a more efficient way to discourage young people from getting an arts degree, so in that sense they're exactly where they should be.

[JoshuaFH]

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[Reelya]

It's culinary arts, silly people, if it's not more specialized. There's actually cooking degrees and schools. A graduate of one of those flipping frozen burgers in a fast food chain would be a more or less perfect example of underemployment

That depends on how you define underemployment. From their perspective, we may safely assume they'd rather be a chef or something. For society at large, though, it's difficult to imagine a more efficient way to discourage young people from getting an arts degree, so in that sense they're exactly where they should be.

That's exactly right. It's not "underemployment" it's "overtraining".

We don't need 100 top chefs per 1 burger-flipper, the graduates fill up needed positions. this idea that high-paying positions should just magically appear because someone trained to fill them is completely silly. You get paid because you create something other people want, not because you deserve it because of "your potential".

The wasted resources issue isn't that the graduate from fancy cooking school can't find a swanky job, it's that we were sending too many people to fancy cooking school, when there are only a limited number of "fancy meals" that anyone wants. Like I said before, blame the predatory education system for loading you with that debt when there weren't jobs on the other side, don't blame society in general for not laying out the red carpet for what you "expected" after you graduated.

[Doomblade187]

Orrrrrr we could make it so people can earn a decent living regardless of their career path, and then we would have a more healthy culture surrounding work and career education.

[McTraveller]

Orrrrrr we could make it so people can earn a decent living regardless of their career path, and then we would have a more healthy culture surrounding work and career education.

You can't have both of these things: if you tie earning to career path, you are stuck with the reality that there are careers that aren't in demand so are low earning.  If you want "decent living" for everyone, it cannot be based on career-based (well, more precisely, individual) earning.

This is of course the dilemma of US politics: our culture is steeped in individualism which is at odds with this type of idea.  The growing movement to do things more community focused, instead of helping those ingrained with the old individualistic culture the new movement, just says "get over it" and espouses division.

[scriver]

Orrrrrr we could make it so people can earn a decent living regardless of their career path, and then we would have a more healthy culture surrounding work and career education.

I 100% agree that the person with the useless degree should be able to earn a decent living from flipping burgers. But they should not expect to be reimbursed for choosing to get an education in a field with no prospects. I say this as someone who believes relentlessly in the idea of learning for the sake of learning in Itself. The simple fact of the matter is that the burger flipping job may be the lowest of low statused jobs, but in actuality it is a more important job than whatever this theoretical person got a degree for.

[sluissa]

Orrrrrr we could make it so people can earn a decent living regardless of their career path, and then we would have a more healthy culture surrounding work and career education.

You can't have both of these things: if you tie earning to career path, you are stuck with the reality that there are careers that aren't in demand so are low earning.  If you want "decent living" for everyone, it cannot be based on career-based (well, more precisely, individual) earning.

This is of course the dilemma of US politics: our culture is steeped in individualism which is at odds with this type of idea.  The growing movement to do things more community focused, instead of helping those ingrained with the old individualistic culture the new movement, just says "get over it" and espouses division.

"Decent living" can have a lot of different meanings. But I've heard arguments for people that certain jobs (and the prime example more than once was fast food burger flipping) are simply not meant to support a person. That those sorts of jobs should be left to kids, or other people who just need some extra money, not necessarily for someone to live off of. That's an actual argument I hear from people, more than once.

Now, I'm not sure where the cutoff is, and I do think some amount of wage inequality is inevitable, and possibly even encouraged to push people toward more necessary jobs. But I am of the opinion that no matter what your job, if you're working 40 hours a week, a job should support you to some minimum level, no matter what job that is.

Personally, I'd rather that minimum level be an amount that lets people still, with careful budgeting, build up a savings buffer and be able to handle unexpected circumstances, rather than just be a week to week subsistence thing. But even just a week to week subsistence would be a step up for some areas. I live in one of the lowest cost of living areas of my state and minimum wage still only barely covers food, shelter and transportation costs. I have no clue how anyone lives places where rent is higher and food costs more on the same wage. I expect it's often impossible without depending on others.

[Frumple]

Orrrrrr we could make it so people can earn a decent living regardless of their career path, and then we would have a more healthy culture surrounding work and career education.

I 100% agree that the person with the useless degree should be able to earn a decent living from flipping burgers. But they should not expect to be reimbursed for choosing to get an education in a field with no prospects.

Plenty of people stuck like that do not, in fact, choose to go into a field with no prospects. They go into one that has prospects, often strong ones, and by the time the education finishes, the economy's fucked something sideways and what was a strong prospect suddenly isn't, or it still is but it's super hostile to low experience workers or something. Unfortunately, we also don't reimburse people for when market fluctuations fuck the value of their degree sideways during the last few months of acquiring it or whatever lol

[scriver]

In my mind, "decent living" both includes a living standard not detrimental to your health (and I do realise this would rule out the entirety of say NYC but you know exceptions can be made if you desperately want to live in a place that drives you mad), as well as enough time or pay to be able to seek to increase your prospects if you so wish -- for example, a burger flipping masters degree holder studying to become a nurse or something else that is in high demand.

[McTraveller]

Plenty of people stuck like that do not, in fact, choose to go into a field with no prospects. They go into one that has prospects, often strong ones, and by the time the education finishes, the economy's fucked something sideways and what was a strong prospect suddenly isn't, or it still is but it's super hostile to low experience workers or something. Unfortunately, we also don't reimburse people for when market fluctuations fuck the value of their degree sideways during the last few months of acquiring it or whatever lol

Sounds like an opportunity - let's create a "degree insurance" company!  Pay this premium, and if your degree turns out to be useless you get a payout...premiums are based on the risk of your degree "defaulting."

That is only half tongue-in-cheek: that's essentially what you'd have to put in place (either in a private or public sense) if you want to be able to hedge against such changes in employment environment.

[JoshuaFH]

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[scriver]

Oh yes. That's a thing I took for granted in my way of thinking, a bit of me-centric mistake I guess. All arguments of mine on the matter should be preemptied by "and yes of course I don't think the American college system is currently in a good place in general".

I generally think education should be free or subsidized to increase class movement and increase it's availability to the poor. I generally think it should be free, but recent decade's developments in Sweden has leaned me more in the direction of subsidized based on societal need. I don't like the idea of middle and upper class heirs getting luxury educations that the lower class pay for while also doing all of the necessary-but-low-status jobs that are direly in need of population (such as nurses of every kind).

[MrRoboto75]

Meanwhile trades are endangered due to poor marketing.

[SalmonGod]

But the problem with that perspective is that it's always double. If the official rate was 10% in 2010, then it was actually probably more like 20% then, and if the official rate is 4% now, it's actually probably 8%. So you can still use the figures going up or down to say "things seem to be getting a little better" or "things seem to be getting a little worse".

...

I get what you're saying, but it doesn't necessarily progress this way.  If employment numbers only go so far as counting who has a job and who doesn't, and only among those who are actively looking, then those numbers don't meaningfully capture some pretty important things.  Like if the number of people not actively looking spikes drastically, but unemployment rates among those who are looking doesn't change, then that's something really important that's not reflected.  And if unemployment goes down, but a massive portion of those jobs have re-organized around trends like gigification or other means of weaseling out of providing the wages and benefits that are supposed to be associated with employment, then this also means the value of employment metrics is drastically reduced as a means of gauging the trends in how well the working class is doing in the economy.

The solution here is that people shouldn't study shit that nobody needs then expect to get paid a lot of money for it. Basically, to put that "masters degree nobody wants" guy in a cushy well-paying job we'd have to relegate 10 other people to burger-flipping in his stead. Saying it's a "waste" that we're not putting this guy's masters degree to use is actually the sunk-cost fallacy. Saying that since we invested money and time in that guy's education, the only sensible thing to do is waste more money coming up with things for him to do. The real problem here is the student loan system. Student loans give out erroneous economic signals about what skills are actually in demand, so you get very high wages in some disciplines where they can't get enough graduates and you get other disciplines with high levels of unemployment/under-employment and low wages, poor conditions, because the student loans / university system doesn't allow for actual economic feedback from industry. They only care about filling up their allotted class sizes every year.

Reelya straight shooting Boomer memes at us now...

I'm pretty sure you're smarter than to believe what you're saying here.  Not really sure what's going on...



Not to mention that master's degree "nobody wants" is usually about stuff that's actually really important but difficult to monetize.

[Rolan7]

Orrrrrr we could make it so people can earn a decent living regardless of their career path, and then we would have a more healthy culture surrounding work and career education.

I 100% agree that the person with the useless degree should be able to earn a decent living from flipping burgers. But they should not expect to be reimbursed for choosing to get an education in a field with no prospects. I say this as someone who believes relentlessly in the idea of learning for the sake of learning in Itself. The simple fact of the matter is that the burger flipping job may be the lowest of low statused jobs, but in actuality it is a more important job than whatever this theoretical person got a degree for.

But planet-and-worker-killing coal mining and obsolete manufacturing jobs should be artificially protected, because *those* jobs are good even if they aren't economically viable. (would say most Republicans).