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| HIGHER ED ARTICLES FOR LEADERS | |
| |  | | | Underemployment Hits Recent Graduates the Hardest – Data Points - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education | Stories of college graduates working as baristas and taxi drivers have played into a narrative about how college-degree recipients are struggling to find work that uses their education.
At the same time, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the jobless rate for workers with at least a bachelor’s degree fell to 2.9 percent for the month of September. How can both be true? Many of those with jobs are considered “underemployed,” since they are in jobs that don’t require a college degree.
Unlike unemployment, underemployment does not have a universal measurement, nor does it receive as much attention. The lack of an underemployment figure—in particular, a measurement based on educational attainment—leaves the picture of how graduates are doing fuzzy.
A survey released in August by PayScale, a compensation-research company, attempts to fill some of the void, finding that graduates over a broad range of college majors have significant levels of underemployment. The findings highlight nine majors, including criminal justice, business management, and sociology, that have underemployment rates of over 50 percent. [More] | |  |
| |  | | | College Diplomas, With a Side of Specialized Study - WSJ | Instead of heading to graduate school and taking on thousands of more dollars in debt, Mr. Hudson has chosen an increasingly common path for recent graduates facing a tough job market: He enrolled at Harper College, a local community college, to earn a four-month, $800 certificate in computer-aided drawing and now works there in a paid internship.
“I think the bachelor’s degree is actually less than what is believed to be,” said the 25-year-old from Arlington Heights, Ill. “I see the certificate I got as more career-based and has actually provided me more leverage toward my goals.”
Already saddled with debt, students in a variety of majors, but especially within liberal-arts subjects, political science and arts programs, are finding that a bachelor’s degree often provides skills that are too general to land a job. So they are increasingly signing up for coding boot camps, online classes or going to community college. Together the options represent a developing rung in the hierarchy of higher education, modern-day finishing school.
Studies show the long-term value of a college degree in terms of lifetime employment opportunities, but in the short-run many college grads are feeling the frustration of an economy that increasingly demands specialized skills.
“In the end you have to put some kind of applied point on your pencil in order to get through the door,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “These are the handholds and footholds that allow you to move around and start climbing new angles” in the job market. [More] | | |
| |  | | | ‘Worcester working to become a thriving college town’ | A recent Boston Globe article features the city of Worcester as an emerging college town. Worcester, which is home to the College of the Holy Cross among eight other colleges and more than 35,000 students, has been tied to its industrial past for too long. Worcester city official and university leaders are looking to change this stigma and transform the city into a thriving higher education hub like its neighbors Boston, Amherst, and Cambridge.r>
A major contribution to uniting the students of Worcester began last summer with the creation of the Worcester Student Government Association.
“What we’re hoping to do is find that niche that brings them all together,” said Patrick Rielly ’17, a sophomore at the College of the Holy Cross and vice president of the Worcester Student Government Association. “There is so much potential in Worcester, but it’s matter of a bringing everyone together.” [More] | | |
| |  | | | Graduate to a Great Job | | Graduate to a Great Job shows college students and graduates how to overcome obstacles and challenges to launch a successful career. | | |
| |  | | | College of Tomorrow: The Changing Demographics of the Student Body - US News | In August, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that, for the first time, the total percentage of minority students – Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans combined – is larger than the percentage of whites in public grade-school classrooms this year.
Meanwhile, in California, the state's flagship, nine-school University of California system announced an eye-opening milestone: that it has admitted more Latino students (29 percent) than whites (27 percent) for the 2014 academic year. Thirty-nine percent of the Golden State’s population is non-white Hispanic [More] | | |
| |  | | | Where Will the Jobs Go? | When it comes to the future of manufacturing jobs, the key question isn’t, “How much will be automated?” It’s how we’ll conceive of whatever can’t be automated at a given time. Even if there are new demands for people to perform new tasks in support of what we perceive as automation, we might apply antihuman values that define the new roles as not being “genuine work.” Maybe people will be expected to “share” instead. So the right question is, “How many jobs might be lost to automation if we think about automation the wrong way?”
The particular way in which we are digitizing economic and cultural activity will ultimately shrink the economy while concentrating wealth and power in new ways that are not sustainable. And that mistake is setting us up for avoidable traumas, as machines get much better in this century. [More] | | |
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David DeLong
Inside Higher Ed 2015 Survey of College & University Presidents
