Despite being neither a real professor nor an advisor, I have been solicited by many undergraduates over the years for advice about postgraduate education or non-academic career options. I generally recommend that they get advice from someone who isn't making minimum wage but this is rarely an effective deterrent. Comments on yesterday's IBM thread emphasize why this is an unenviable position from my perspective. To be blunt, what the fuck am I supposed to tell these kids?
For decades we've told generations of young Americans that blue collar work is going the way of the Victrola and the covered wagon. Unlike Mom and Pop, we've warned, kids cannot come out of high school today and get a job in the mill/factory which will offer long-term security and $45,000 per year with benefits. No, those jobs must go where they can be done more cheaply. The only thing to do, kids, is to get a college education and subsequently a job that depends on brainpower, not muscle. Prepare yourself to succeed in the post-industrial "knowledge and services" economy in which a Bachelor's will be mandatory and postgraduate degrees all but required for those who hope to succeed.
Well, it didn't take long for large employers to figure out that "knowledge and service" work can be done as well as assembly line work in China, India, or Singapore. Boy, all these advances in IT and communications sure do make it easy to replace John with Jagdish.
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Hence many of the hot fields of the 80s and 90s are already obsolete – business administration, computer science, electrical engineering, and so on. And if we can't find a way to ship the job to the underdeveloped world there's a good chance that we can import Chinese or South Asian workers who'll undercut your wages.
So tell me. What field is a good field to get into these days? MBA programs are already bloated with exactly the kind of nonspecific, poorly-educated "business" and "management" people – full of Chicken Soup for the Middle Manager's Soul bullshit but devoid of knowledge about economics or finance – we don't need.
Law schools already churn out three times as many lawyers as our economy can absorb. Medical school is an option only for the academic elite. Nurses are in demand but those programs are highly selective too. Journalism offers no barriers to entry but makes it very difficult to earn an actual living in the field. Accountants face intense competition from non-domestic workers and that pressure will only increase in the future. The engineering fields are all hemorraging jobs to Asia.
Part of the rite of passage of being an undergraduate is that "Holy crap, what the hell am I going to do when I graduate?
" feeling. That has always existed and always will. Today it has essentially become a rhetorical question. I don't have an answer. Nobody has an answer. Education and healthcare are the only fields that seem to offer any long-term potential in my view, and the former is quickly being stuffed with more bodies than there will be available jobs in the next decade or two.
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Undergraduates are at a complete loss and the people who are supposed to be advising them – parents, professors, and professional academic advisors – are either ignorant or speechless. My default advice is to work for the government. The pay blows, the bureaucracy is stifling, but the odds of avoiding the Efficiency Guillotine are better. I hope the Cato Institute crowd is happy; now that we have successfully globalized the workforce the only jobs worth having are on the government's tab.
The idea that borders should disappear and every job goes to the lowest bid started as a pebble rolling down a hill in the early 1970s. No one noticed at first because it only picked up a few scraps – some fruit pickers here, an old factory there. Then it took out most of American heavy industry. Blue collar people noticed, but white collars were safe in festung suburbia. Now the pebble is a boulder the size of Soldier Field. It's crushing everything in its path and no one can stop it. The nature of the economy has fundamentally changed and not for the better. Few and far between are jobs that can't be exported or done by imported workers, and that situation will only get worse as communication networks become better/cheaper and levels of education in other nations increase. American kids who've done the "right thing" and gone to college are confused, angry, and afraid. Maybe not all of them. But the smart ones are.
Kulkuri says:
There are still blue collar jobs out there, all the ones the illegals are doing. Lately I've been thinking that the last couple of generations of telling kids (and grown-ups too) to go to college so you can get a good job has left us with nobody wanting a job where you get your hands dirty!! For several decades I have been hearing there is a shortage of workers in various jobs like aircraft mechanic and truck driver to name two that I have personal knowledge having worked at both. There never was a shortage of people, there has always been a shortage of wages, why work your ass off if you can't make a decent living??
Rob says:
man, every so often i have to thank jeebus i chose the ol' education field. it sucks to watch my other friends with "big boy" jobs shit bricks every day about security while i post up in may with a big sign that just says: see ya in three months!
it's nice when the only things that can get you canned are punching or poking a student. neither of which i have any desire or intention of doing.
FMguru says:
The best answer I can come up with is "learn a trade". Plumbing, electrician, welding, auto repair, HVAC, whatever. They are subject to booms and busts in the business cycle (wouldn't want to be in the building trades right now or for the next few years), you might have to relocate every few years chasing booms, and you'll likely be an independent contractor having to manage your own benefits, build your own customer base, and chase down unpaid bills (not the M-F 8-5 paid every two weeks office job you were expecting). It's also tough if you're handicapped, in bad shape, or have health problems. But it's damn hard to outsource.
Granted, it's probably not what someone who's carrying $120,000 in student loan debt wants to hear…
Government work is also good advice: state, county, city, school district – unions, civil service protections, and the rest. Hard to beat.
Matthew says:
Repo man! It can't be outsourced, and as the credit crunch continues to worsen, you can be sure that their services will be in high demand.
Heqit says:
The ambivalent attractions of plumbing & mechanical work aside, I third the recommendation for government work. The government can't hire all of us (…yet), but…it's what I did, when I graduated with a degree in Religion and absolutely no desire to enter the fucking ministry. The pay is shit, the benefits are pretty damn good, actually, and the stability is unbeLIEVable. At least until we have a coup and/or descend into national insolvency.
Actually, I suppose you could recommend ministerial/religious work to mediocre students who want to "help people" and keep their hands clean. Send 'em to Rick Warren…but maybe not Ted Haggard.
john says:
In my area (CS), you need to be good at more than just programming. Working in the development labs is a much less secure job than working in the field with a customer. Having people/relational/etc skills is essential.
The thing all the "unable to outsource" jobs mentioned above have in common is that they require physical presence. There are white-collar jobs that fit that bill as well. They can be found in any industry and typically require you be good at whatever your specialty is AND be good at working with people.
Kati says:
Well shit.
Mark says:
You can always join the Army!
grendelkhan says:
Plus, the life of a repo man is always intense.
Of course, the field is also saturated with neckbearded aspies who wouldn't know people skills even if they were downloadable. Good luck putting them into direct contact with the customers. Lots of people went into CS precisely so they wouldn't have to interact with people.
john says:
Yes, that's exactly why it's a good field if you have CS skills AND people skills
Nan says:
Government work, especially federal. It's gotten harder to get permanent status, but even being a term employee includes decent fringe benefits (health insurance) and contributions to a pension plan. Depending on the agency, there are student loan forgiveness programs, too. Quite a few agencies got gutted under Bush, the remaining federal workforce is old (large percentages coming up on retirement in the near future), so hiring will happen no matter what goes on with the national economy.
BK says:
Non-profit health care… even if we get a national health insurance plan put in place, folks who can't afford to further grease the wheels of medical care will still need to receive care at community based clinics. If Obama gets this done there may even be growth in this sector!!!
Plus, it's challenging, rewarding and you get to hone a lot of great skills in one position – I currently lobby, maintain community and press relations and do a lot of writing…
Chris says:
There's a line from Palahniuk's Fight Club that sums up the future of young Americans: "I see the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived, and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables".
America has become the mother cat that eats its young. If this is how America treats its best and brightest, how do you think it treats the Average Joe (which is 90%+ of America)? I, personally, believe it has officially reached the point where throwing in your lot with the capitalist economy isn't worth it. You can't win. This is what happens when you base a society on greed. America needs to try something else, probably a form of socialism. At least you get health care and are treated like a human being. If the economic elite want capitalism to continue, they can pay for all of the shit it creates.
I think it is pretty obvious which job is the best job to have: come from a rich family.
Shane says:
Two words: Marry well.
My says:
Mebbe I have a little something for everyone:
Come from the (short-lived) union of a lower-middle class blue collar dad and middle-class 1st-gen country gentry mom. Thanks to me, she didn't go to college. He wasted/avoided the opportunity to do so. He gets out of the military and dumps her, begins decades-long cycling through decent blue-collar job/layoff/decent b-c job/layoff/decent b-c job. She goes to school in the healt care field and makes something like a career of it before marrying back into what she grew up in…
I grow up upper-lower to lower-middle middle (Yay! I'm a white euromutt Protestant male castoff! Instant not-bottom-of-the-barrel status in latter-twentieth century America!). I waste a year at a major university. I join the military for 4 years and graduate with a degree in Disinterest in Being Well-Trained to Kill Strangers. I get a job very much like dear old dad: 55 hrs. a week 3rd shift for decent money. It blows so hard I can't see how anyone with a brain and not doing it to support a family doesn't blow their brains out. I go back to school and get a few non-grad degrees in nothing especially useful. I run in terror from the job market in Philosophy. I refuse to try to get a job in a State Dept. that (now) shows the wounds of trying to operate under 8 years of BusCheney, LLC.
I have had jobs doing everything from literally digging ditches to editing to delivering pizzas to office bitch to setting up tents to management to freelancing to sales. Most of them sucked and all of them had their drawbacks.
Move back home, have a baby, look for six long-ass fucking (heh heh, long assfucking) months for a decent job…any job. I find something ringing a cash register for minimum wage in the interim (it does not improve my already-low opinion of most of humanity). There's no pride left: I can sling some serious Wittgenstein, I know the rebuttals to the fallacies and sophistry to the quasi-fascist propagandists, I'm blah blah blah, goddammit!!!
So. Fucking. What.
You know what I am now? Damned fucking lucky that after spending hundreds of hours sifting through thousands and applying for hundreds and hundreds of jobs I finally snagged a legitimate job. I got one. Boom, motherfucker. I work for Uncle Sugar again, permanent hire, gravy bennies. I'm glad. Certainly better than average benefits, the pay doesn't suck (particularly if you take a look around), and if you aren't one of those that takes it for granted like all the schmucks who get their foot in the door and stand there enjoying the breeze created by the rest of us quickly flying past, there's ample opportunity to eventually make as much as six figures and retire while there's still gas in the tank. Make no mistake, there is indeed dead weight amongst the bureaucracy, but isn't there deadweight most everywheres?
Besides, as the man said, don't ever let anybody tell you anyone here is doing anything other than screwing around.
Then again, who knows what tomorrow may bring, no less than what yesterday held. Regardless, if you work hard, focus on what matters (to YOU. And by that, I mean what REALLY fucking matters to you. Not fucking Buffy, Not fucking NASCAR. Not fucking Harry Potter. UNLESS…that shit REALLY fucking matters to you. In that case, tear that shit out the frame and be happy already, bitches. But seriously, if that crap does, you ought to consider expanding your horizons a bit. Please.), and aren't a complete little bitch you will generally find your way, eventually. Happiness generally comes to those who don't effing wait around for shit to come to them; shit is always on the way, yo.
In that vein, I'm often mindful of my great-grandparents and their experiences in the 1930s, and lemmetellya, we ain't got shit on them. There are times when I suspect–for all that I'm a reasonably sized fan of Palahniuk, what with the smart-strong reference above, and I feel he'd agree with me–that our generation doesn't also have some of the whiniest, pussiest so-called men (and women, for that matter) who've ever lived. And the saddest part may be that every one of us comes from survivors. To whit: Great-Grandpa Campbell started working in the coal mines at 13 because he FUCKING HAD TO. He retired from there at my age (with black lung, no less) and then delivered soda pop until he retired from that, too. He also raised five strong, happy children through the Depression, WWII, Korea, Eisenhowerism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Coup of 1963. There was a man who could truly enjoy sitting down with a smoke and a whiskey…and deserved to do so.
I rest my case.
Cal C says:
I was talking to someone yesterday who was saying pharmicists make 120k after graduation