Why Get Bachelor’s When Jobs Go Begging?

It is a sign of an awakening economy when jobs go begging. It is also an indication of the futility of higher education today.

“In all, some 30 million jobs in the United States that pay an average of $55,000 per year don’t require bachelor’s degrees, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce,” Jon Marcus write in the Washington Monthly.

“Yet the march to bachelor’s degrees continues. The number of bachelor’s degrees conferred has more than doubled in the last five decades, from 839,730 in 1970 to nearly 1.9 million in 2014-15, the last period for which the figures are available, the U.S. Department of Education reports. And while people who get them still are more likely to be employed and make more money than those who don’t, that premium appears to be softening; their median earnings were lower in 2015, when adjusted for inflation, than in 2010, the department says. Meanwhile, the number of students who borrow to pay for college has increased from half in 1989 to nearly 70 percent now, and their average debt has grown from $15,200 to $26,300.”

Marcus covers higher education for The Hechinger Report. The Hechinger Report is actually based at Teacher’s College at Columbia University.

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