Why a BA is Now a Ticket to A Job in a Coffee Shop

I've been around long enough to have seen how a period of years where there is a demand for a skill or degree, ike engineering, results in more people going into that field, resulting in a period of years where many qualified cannot get a job in that field. It shouldn't surprise anybody.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/27/why-a-ba-is-now-a-ticket-to-a-job-in-a-coffee-shop.html

by Megan McArdle, thedailybeast.com
March 27th 2013

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Skilled workers with higher degrees are increasingly ending up in lower-skilled jobs that don't really require a degree--and in the process, they're pushing unskilled workers out of the labor force altogether.

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The authors think they have an explanation: during the great IT boom, the returns to cognitive skill rose. Since then, the process has gone into reverse: demand for cognitive tasks is falling. Perhaps this is because installing robots consumes more resources than maintaining them, or perhaps it's simply that the robots are doing an increasing number of those cognitive tasks. But whatever the reason, we no longer want or need so many skilled workers doing non-routine tasks with a big analytical component. The workers who can't get those jobs are taking less skilled ones. The lowest-skilled workers are dropping out entirely, many of them probably ending up on disability.

This is, of course, highly speculative: it's one paper. But it would explain a lot. Six months ago, I made quite a splash with a Newsweek story arguing that we may be overinvesting in college. There were basically three parts to this argument: first, that a lot of college attendance is signalling activity rather than skill acquisition; second, that more students with BAs are ending up in jobs that don't require them; and third, that a substantial number of kids don't finish, washing out with a lot of debt and no commensurate earning power to pay it.


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