Half of College Grads Lack Degree-Worthy Jobs

 

 Newsmax

VERBATIM

Enrollment at American community colleges and four-year universities appears to be declining, and one economist attributes the drop largely to a lower “rate of return on college investments.”

That is, college graduates are increasingly finding it difficult to land jobs that actually require the college degree they spent so much time and money to obtain.

Richard Vedder, who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and teaches economics at Ohio University, discloses that higher education enrollment is predicted to be lower this year than a year ago. In Ohio, for example, the University System is showing a 5.9 percent decline, and some community colleges around the country are showing a double-digit drop.

Several reasons have been suggested for the drop-off, Vedder says. Some cite the fact that the population of 18-year-olds is in decline, but the drop “isn’t large enough to explain the big enrollment decreases,” he observes.

The tightening of federal financial assistance to students has been cited as well, and Vedder acknowledges that this “might be of some importance at schools with large economically disadvantaged populations.”

Also, colleges could be pricing themselves out of the market. College costs have soared faster than the rate of inflation over the past four decades and student-loan debt has reached the $1 trillion mark.

“Last and possibly most important, concern appears to be rising about the rate of return on college investments,” Vedder, who is also an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in an article that appeared on Bloomberg.com.

“One estimate is that as many as 53 percent of recent college graduates are either unemployed or have relatively low-paying, low-skilled jobs.”

He points out that 40 percent of adult Americans have at least an associate degree, yet a smaller percentage of jobs have historically been filled by new college graduates.

Also, the number of graduates has been growing faster than the number of high-paying jobs. Most of the jobs predicted to see the most growth in the next decade require less than formal higher education.

President Obama has made expanding access to higher education one of his main re-election themes.

But Vedder concludes: “If the proponents of near-universal higher education get their way, in another couple of decades more than half of adults will be college graduates — and by definition some of them will be in jobs that pay below average.

“The higher education establishment will then claim that in our complex world, post-graduate degrees are vital: a master’s in janitorial science, for example. Isn’t this over-credentialization leading to a huge waste of scarce human resources?”