Dan Erwin

Recent College Grads: The Revolving Door and Parent Support

A survey of Generation-I, four year college grads between 22 and 26 years old, finds that they have little professional or geographic staying power. The study, fielded by Braun Research and funded by Adecco Group, was a telephone survey of 507 recent college grads. 

There’s plenty of research surrounding the validity of self-reporting, indicating that it is only moderately trustworthy. Still, a nationwide survey like this, can serve as a “pointer.” 

Intriguing findings:

Only 3% of recent grads said they’d expect to stay at any given job for more than five years. A job offer with higher pay, from a dream company or in a dream city would result in a move for more than 50% of grads. (I’ve always recommended that staying in the same job more than 3 years is nonsense and usually unwise. So I’d want to know what the survey meant when grads were quizzed about staying at any “given job.”) 

A striking 91% of recent would only continue working at a job they didn’t like for up to a year. In fact, 1 in 5 would only stay for three months before leaving a job they didn’t like. Salary, benefit and perk cuts, along with work that doesn’t fit their interests are killer reasons for these stats. 

Recent grads expect to stay connected to personal life—even at work. Certain activities will prevent grads from taking a job that they might be otherwise interested in. The list of important connections is highly reflective of the technology bent of the generation.

• 23% wouldn’t stay if personal phone calls are prohibited.
• 20% wouldn’t stay if they were not permitted to check personal emails.
• 15% wouldn’t stay if they were not permitted texting.
• 12% wouldn’t stay if they were not permitted to visit social media websites.

Nearly 30% of recent grads report that their parents are in some way involved in their job search process—and in some cases, very involved.

• 13% use parents’ personal network.
• 11% parents locate job listings for grads
• 9% parents rehearse job interview.
• 8% parents forward resume or cover letters for grads. 

More than half of recent grads report that parents help pay living expenses. The assistance is significant.

• 32% of parents help with cell phone expense.
• 21% of parents help with food.
• 20% of parents help with health insurance.
• 17% of parents help with rent.
• 17% of parents help with utilities.
• 13% of parents help with student loans.
• 12% of parents help with transportation. 

Students who graduate from college and are in that 22 to 26 year-old group are a very select group. It suggests that parents are very supportive of a huge proportion of college grads. I’m curious to know what you think about these statistics?

Flickr photo: U Chicago graduation

"Monkey Kabuki"

If you’re a history buff, happened to see “Inherit the Wind (1960) on a rerun, or are from Tennessee, you probably understand the reference to monkeys. The anti-evolution folks are at it again.

This is The Economist’s way of reminding its readers of the so-called “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 1925, where two of America’s greatest mouthpieces, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan argued over evolution. In previous blogs, The market has spoken—conclusively—on climate change and, Is there something peculiarly American about the rejection of science, I opined on questions of science.

You’d think time would dim those issues, but instead, it gets worse. My wife, who happened to be a graduate of the bastion of evangelicalism, W-----n College in the 1950s, used to roll her eyes at the subject. On a few occasions, she informed me that evolution was a given in her science classes at the school. When I asked how they dealt with their theology, she smiled wryly and said something to the point of god instituting evolution as the means of creation.

Obviously, it was never a question of significance to her. But how time has changed elsewhere. It’s worse now than it was in the ‘50s.

As The Economist writes, the Tennessee legislature has passed another of those bills about science. Rather, about questioning the entire discipline. The bill in question required the state’s education system to encourage students to “explore scientific questions” and “respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about scientific subjects.” It passed by big majorities in both Tennessee chambers, and the governor declined to veto it. 

Though intelligent design and creationism are not mentioned, many are certain this is a back door, allowing teachers to introduce the subjects. I should say “reintroduce” those subjects. What is a bit surprising are the statistics about such bills. Since 2004, similar measures have been offered in 13 state legislatures. Only in one other state has the bill become law. Thankfully, Louisiana’s measure, which is law in the state, seems to have had no discernible effects. I say thankfully, because students who come to those conclusions will be limiting their future in science. That's especially true today, where the best vocational opportunities are in STEM careers (science, technology, engineering,and math). An engineering degree often requires an extensive science background in subjects of medical background, such as biology.

Flickr: photo by Doug888

Quotation of the Week: Reg Henry, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

On a rare occasion I stumble for two or three minutes across talk radio or talk tube. It's an enlightening and horrible experience. So I was delighted to see that Reg Henry of the Post-Gazette thought that perhaps talk radio provided the best rationale for attending college. Indeed, this is one of life's important lessons.

Everybody should go to college. Young people should stay up to all hours of the night in dorm rooms and argue absurd philosophical points with fellow students, the better to get absurdity out of their systems. A failure to do this can lead to talk radio in later years.  --Reg Henry

A confession: Yes, I did stay up all nite and argue absurd philosophical and theological points with fellow students. But thankfully, Jesus saved me from talk radio. Ha!

Enjoy--

Passing the Books, But Holding the Oil

I spent a morning hour trying to organize my thinking about Fareed Zakaria’s ground-breaking work, The Post-American World and its direct relation to Sunday’s Tom Friedman’s column, Pass the books. Hold the oil. 

Friedman’s column was eye-catching, well-crafted and exceedingly relevant.  But a quote near the end of the column, by K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company, Bloom Energy, stopped me in my tracks:

When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.

Zakaria makes the point that countries with significant oil resources tend not to diversify and not to create jobs outside the oil industry. The long-term result, of course, is that unemployment in those countries is a terrific problem inevitably resulting in huge inequalities and social unrest. The pragmatic monarchies, like Saudi Arabia, buy off the population with their wealth. That, of course, will eventually come to an end. So rather than oil resources becoming an advantage, they will become an eventual disadvantage.  

Friedman follows Zakaria’s thesis, making it immensely relevant by focusing on two nations that have no significant resources, but became very resourceful: Taiwan and Israel. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams test math, science and reading skills of 15 year-olds in 65 countries every two years. And, uniquely, it compares the kids’ results with total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of GDP.  In short, “how well do your high school kids do on math compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig?” Obviously, these are correlations not causations. But they are damned significant correlations.

The results indicate a significant negative relationship between money extracted from natural resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population. Israel and Taiwan, along with several other nations lacking natural resources, but high in educational resources, enjoy a standard living most of the oil-rich countries of Arabia are unable to offer.  That’s why, says Friedman, that the foreign countries with the most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Singapore—none of which can live off natural resources. So the CEO of Bloom Energy has got it right. When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.

The summary is telling:

Among the 34 OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 23rd in mathematics.

The U.S. fell particularly short in the share of students achieving the highest level of math performance. Only 2 percent of U.S. students reached the top rung. By comparison, more than 4 percent of students in Canada, Finland, Korea and eight other OECD countries attained that level—as did 11 percent of the Hong Kong students and 27 percent of the Shanghai pupils. (Conversation with Lori Taylor, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) 

Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams says that knowledge and skills have become the global currency of the 21^st century, not natural resources. But, he goes on, there is no central bank that prints this currency. So, Israel and Taiwan are printing a lot of their own currency. It’s great to have oil and gas, because they can buy jobs. But over the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning, they’ll weaken your society. Exactly the point that Zakaria makes. Looks like the good old US has got some work to do.   

Flickr photo: Audubon Images

Milestone on College Degrees is Passed

More than 30% of American adults hold bachelor's degrees. That's a monstrous change, considering that only 11% of my generation of septuagenarians holds a bachelor's. 

The report, tucked away on page 16 of the Times, is far more significant than its newspaper location suggests. Drill down into the statistics and there's a lot of fascinating information. Information which suggests that careers are changing significantly. Some for the good and some not so good.

After a relatively stagnant period between 1970 and 1990, the stats reflect an increase that began in the 1990s. Significant gains are represented by all groups, but blacks and Latinos still lag behind whites. What's not so good is that the gap between whites and the rest has even widened in the last decade.

The census figures are initially heartening.

As of last March, 30.4 percent of people over age 25 in the United States held at least a bachelor’s degree, and 10.9 percent held a graduate degree, up from 26.2 percent and 8.7 percent 10 years earlier.

The statistics bear out the growing lead of women in college degrees, especially since colleges have enrolled and graduated more women than mean. The historic male advantage in graduation rates is about to be a thing of the past, although salary differences between men and women certainly don't reflect that collegiate advantage.

 In 2001, men held a 3.9 percentage-point lead in bachelor’s degrees and 2.6 percentage points in graduate degrees; by last year, both gaps were down to 0.7 percent.

It's no surprise that Asian-American are the best educated racial group: Asian-Americans remain the nation’s best-educated racial group, with 50.3 percent having bachelor’s degrees, and 19.5 percent holding graduate degrees.

Though this study didn't report on salaries, Asian-Americans have replaced Jews as the best paid in today's world. And, by the way, Asian-American Muslims are a significant factor in that high-wage world. As an aside, I've noticed that Asian-Americans are exceedingly aware of the best schools while most Midwestern college grads seem to have little interest. If, for example, I note that one of my daughters holds a Columbia University degree and another a U Chicago degree, there's a gasp from the Asian-American, and then a lot of questions. They want to know how, as a parent, I prepared them, what experiences did I provide for them, what high schools my kids went to, was it an International Baccalaureate school? Etc., etc. 

In addition to the census statistics, the article alluded to results from the American Community Survey.

One of those, examining major fields of study, shows that taken together, engineering and science are the most common areas for bachelor’s degrees, representing 34.9 percent of the total.

The persistence of men in those fields is waning, a significant trend given that engineers and people with science backgrounds tend to be in high demand, and have above-average incomes. Among college graduates 65 or older, only 23 percent of those with degrees in science or engineering majors are women; among people 40 to 64, the proportion of women rises to 36 percent; among those 25 to 39, 45.9 percent are women.

The same report also found that engineers and science majors are most heavily concentrated on the East and West Coasts, with the highest percentages in the District of Columbia, California, Washington and Maryland, and the lowest in Southern and Plains states.

Two issues are of importance from the last set of statistics. First, Richard Florida's research on the hot areas for technology and other STEM vocations merits study by parents and recent grads in search of jobs. Having spent much of my life in the Midwest, I'm aware that leaving home for a job in another state is difficult for many. Still, if recent grads want job opportunities of significance, they'd best kiss mom and dad goodbye and head for where the jobs are.

Second, the extensive jobs study at Georgetown University's Center for Education and the Workforce (downloadable free here), argues that US competitive advantage will turn on science, technology, engineering and math expertise. The report is highly nuanced, recognizing, for example, that two-year grads will have opportunities in the tomorrow's world. The conclusion for parents with kids looking to college are broadened significantly beyond the typical conversation. To wit: major in a stem discipline, or, choosing not to major in a stem discipline, get a job in a company with core stem needs. The third approach is to attend a top school (you know the list of the top 25) and major in whatever you wish.  

Want to Make a Lot of Money? Don't Major in Business.

Warning: This blog may be bad for your health.

According to some recent statistics, one of five college students today is majoring in business. Who recommended that dumb major? The pay statistics sure don’t support it. In fact, majors in American studies, political science, philosophy and literature (that’s right, the humanities--literature) make more money by mid-career than business majors.

This is not a blog that business majors and their parents will want to read. In fact, the Penelope Trunks of the world are probably already pissed by the first paragraph. Tough!

In the latest Pay Scale salary survey data for full-time employees who possess a Bachelor’s degree and no higher degrees, there’s a lotta bad news for business majors. You really, really need a liberal arts degree to make big money.

Recent employer surveys conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers find that workplaces most value three skills that you’re far more likely to find with a liberal arts education: communication competency, analytic excellence and collaborative teamwork. Don’t be too quick to think those skills are easy to come by or that you’re a natural. The level of skill sophistication demanded by most firms today would come as a shock to 99% of the twentieth-century workforce. On top of those recruitment demands, six-figure salaries are requiring three big squishy traits: adaptability, exploration competency and entrepreneurialism. In short, the driving contribution of liberal arts is a well-developed ability to learn and think, both fast and successfully.

What are the “liberal” arts?

I realize that many already hate this blog because it has the word “liberal” in it. The masses think that liberal arts types are artsy people who speak French, study Plato, ponder cloud formations and dress like counter-culture bohemians.  There’s a terrible misunderstanding about the liberal arts, and it’s not just college students who don’t get it. So here’s a bit of history.

The liberal arts began in the middle ages with the Trivium (“the three”): grammar, rhetoric and logic. Then they expanded with the Quadrivium (“the four”): arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Ever wonder why music majors do well in software development and application? It’s the pattern thinking they learn in their artsy, music major. In most of the better colleges today, the liberal arts have expanded to what are labeled the humanities (English, languages, philosophy, the arts), the physical and biological sciences, and the social sciences (linguistics, history, sociology, political science). College and university leadership will tell you that the real purpose of the liberal arts is to enable students to make informed decisions of the most significance.

So some techie is going to tell me he or she knows how to make informed decisions? Sorry, research won’t support that widespread notion. Research findings consistently reveal that what students and graduates know is related to what they study and how they have studied it. Vo-tech schools, many so-called engine, tech and business schools, focus solely on the what. As a consequence they are limited in the how—including how to think and make informed decisions. If you think this is liberal arts elitism, you’re quite correct. And them’s the facts.

What that means, of course, is that engineering majors in the best schools are liberal arts majors. They take a lot of liberal arts courses, including humanities, physical sciences, biology, chemistry, math and the arts. Both the top public research universities and private engineering schools, including Cal Tech and MIT, require the liberal arts in both their engineering and computer science programs. And some of the top liberal arts colleges that don’t offer engineering have what is known as a 3/2 engineering degree. These colleges, like Bates, Carleton, Macalester, Williams and Colorado College, provide three years of classic liberal arts, and then their students march off to the engineering programs at Columbia, Wash U, Dartmouth and Princeton. I’ve worked with several of them. They’re really, really smart—and they make a lotta dough.

Furthermore, many of the top schools don’t even offer an undergrad major in business. Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Yale and Dartmouth don’t have undergrad business schools, nor do they offer an undergrad business major. They want the future business leaders to focus on a broad range of topics in the liberal arts and sciences. Just as you can’t major in medicine or law as an undergraduate, you can’t major in business as an undergrad at many of the top schools. They believe you need a liberal arts background to support the graduate MBA. Plenty of undergrads with a business major have tried to get into top business schools and found, to their shock, that those schools usually aren’t interested in undergrad business majors. Glenn Hubbard, Dean of Columbia’s business school, put it this way: “Go to the best liberal arts college you can get into and learn how to think.”

Why do so many colleges offer business majors? As a former university faculty member, I can tell you the answer in one word: MONEY. The populace believes business majors are the key to vocational success, so. . . .  In case you haven’t noticed, many of the large public research universities in the first and second tier charge more for business majors than any other undergrad major. That’s telling.

What did I tell my daughters? Get in one of the top liberal arts colleges and major in whatever you want—not business, even if they offer it. Do they do well financially? You can bet your sweet bippy on that one.

So what, over the long term, are the best liberal arts majors for big money? The top thirty salaries at mid-career all emphasize science and math—the liberal arts. Business doesn’t get near the top thirty careers. It’s number 59 in the listing. So knock it out of your thinking.

Photo: Flickr, Images_of_money

Quotation of the Week: President Theodore Roosevelt

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

               --Teddy Roosevelt, Labor Day, September 7, 1903

As the latest Economist points out, the billions who seek that prize are finding both feast and famine.

Why is that true in the US? The consensus is that there are two causes: globalization and technology. But Michael Spencer, the Nobel winner, argues, rightly, that globalization is the more potent cause.

Tyler Cowen, the economist and compulsive blogger, also agrees, but adds a different twist in his book, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will Eventually Feel Better. (The title is classic Cowen.) Cowen argues that for much of our history, we enjoyed the benefits of free land, immigrant labor and powerful new technologies. Those advantages have faded, and now we need to start over again. In the meantime, there are winners and plenty of losers. And some of the problem is not fixable.

What do we do in the meantime?

The Economist answers that question with the obvious.  Lowering this new natural rate of unemployment will require structural reforms, such as changing education to ensure that people enter work equipped with the sort of skills firms are willing to fight over, adjusting the tax system and modernising the welfare safety net, and more broadly creating a climate conducive to entrepreneurship and innovation. None of these reforms is easy, and all will take time to produce results, but governments around the world should press ahead with them.

[I’ll add a not-too-welcome caveat. When voting time comes this means that you’d better make certain that jobs and education (a sub-topic of jobs) are a higher priority than fixing the deficit today. The deficit needs to be fixed, but it doesn’t have to be fixed today. On that, ninety-percent of those in the know are agreed. Too often fixing the deficit is more an ideological issue of downsizing government than taking care of our own backyard.]

What do we need to do for our careers?

Education and learning are an inevitable prerequisite for success and security. Or, as Laura Pappano has argued in a summary: The Master's as the new Bachelor's. Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s degree. That’s about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s in 1960. That’s not just the MBA, but includes such degrees as the M.S. in supply chain management, the M.S. in technology and etc. 

In her research she finds that the degree of the moment is the professional science master’s, or P.S.M., combining job-specific training with business skills. Where only a handful of programs existed a few years ago, there are now 239, with scores in development. Florida’s university system, for example, plans 28 by 2013, clustered in areas integral to the state’s economy, including simulation (yes, like Disney, but applied to fields like medicine and defense). And there could be many more, says Patricia J. Bishop, vice provost and dean of graduate studies at the University of Central Florida. “Who knows when we’ll be done?”

All of this means that your kids should do at least one of two things: go to an elite college where the major doesn’t matter (liberal arts, including the humanities are just as marketable from those schools), or major in one of the STEM areas (science, technology, engineering and math).

Although I’ve always thought that Teddy Roosevelt was the first master of spin, I started this blog with his statement because it is just as relevant today. For fun, Mark Twain once grumbled that Teddy Roosevelt, “would go to Halifax (that century’s Timbuktu) for half a chance to show off” and “to hell for a whole one.” Still, Roosevelt’s comment couldn’t be more prescient.

College for Me, But Not for Thee

David Leonhardt, the well-known business columnist of the NYTimes, challenges the skeptics who say college is overrated. And he does it with well-supported statistics and argument. I had argued that Newsweek's pontification about "useless college degrees" was just more career nonsense, ready for the circular file. But Leonhardt does me one better--far better.

Leonhardt points out that nearly a century ago the US made high school near universal at the same time that Europe's elitists decided that universal high school was a waste. Clearly the US made the right decision. As Leonhardt writes, the educated American masses helped create the American century. . . . The new ranks of high school graduates made factories more efficient and new industries possible. 

Today we're getting the same negative arguments from the skeptics, emphasizing that teenagers aren't ready for college work and that college costs saddle students with debt. Leonhardt dissects the anti-college arguments piece by piece. And as he says, the most discouraging part of the case is that it encourages parents and students to aim low. There are no statistics, but I'm appalled by the number of parents that aim so low that they refuse to provide kids with either emotional or financial support for college. But I also note that immigrant parents will starve so that their kids can have a college education. Intriguing distinctions. 

"Sending more young Americans to college is not a panacea," says David Autor, an M.I.T. economist who studies the labor market. "Not sending them to college would be a disaster."

The statistics are especially unique and illuminating. A new study has found that the value of college is that it gives grads entry to high-paying occupations. Skeptics continue to say college is overrated, but degreed workers make more even when their jobs don't require a degree. These are eye-stopping median stats: dishwashers without college degree, $19,000. Dishwashers with college degree, $34,000. Dental hygienist without college degree, $30,000. Dental hygienist with college degree, $53,000. Hairdresser without degree, $19,000. Hairdresser with degree, $32,000.

Furthermore, the costs are not nearly what we've been led to believe. Sure the Ivies cost more than $50,000 a year, but less than 1% of college students attend the Ivy League schools. All the journalistic alarms about college costs and college debt need to be taken with a grain of salt. Many colleges are just not very expensive. Once financial aid is taken into account, average net tuition and fees at public four-year colleges this past year was about $2,000. Take that to the bank.

Another issue of significance. The much-quoted study casting doubt on college education based on statistically significant progress, or lack of, misses a highly significant point. The general skills that colleges teach, skills such as discipline and persistence, may be far more important than academics. 

Leonhardt's last two comments should be pasted across some foreheads. 

Then there are the skeptics themselves, the professors, journalists and others who say college is overrated. They, of course, have degrees and often spend tens of thousands of dollars sending their children to expensive colleges.

I don’t doubt that the skeptics are well meaning. But, in the end, their case against college is an elitist one — for me and not for thee. And that’s rarely good advice.    

So U.S. History Doesn't Flip Your Kid's Switch. So What?

Diane Ravitch, who recently changed her mind and decided to support public schools, took a look at the test, the scores . . . and blew her cork. "The answer was right in front of them. This is alarming."

The test was the National Assessment of Educational Progress given to 20% of our fourth graders, 17% of of eighth graders and 12% of high school seniors. It showed that our students are less proficient in their nation's history than in any other subject. The other subjects? Math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, economics. No surprise. Students scored highest in economics. That won't, by itself, resolve 21st century corporate--or political--needs.

So why does it matter that kids don't know U.S. history? (Before I go any further, I need to 'fess up. I was an undergrad history major, who also took a bit of political science and econ. Smart advisor guided me. And that was the 1950s.) Sure, the data of historical events, dates, people, cultures, politics, wars and movements helps us understand what's going on in our world today. But there's also a second, far more important reason for understanding history. And it gets practically no press.

My answer to the question tells you why I nearly went bonkers when I read Penelope Trunk's blog telling her readers to avoid the humanities, of which history is one of the major disciplines. She couldn't have been more wrong. I was so pissed that I almost wrote a blog on why a business major is the absolute worst undergrad major to major in. If my daughters had even let business as an undergrad major cross their minds, I'd have indicated that they'd get no money from me for college. What a dumb major for smart kids. Might as well take cheer-leading or basketball. Ninety-five percent of the stuff you'll get at work anyway. The only thing it possibly offers is a faster track to your first job out of college. By your fifth year of work, practically everything you got in it is obsolete. Zip. Nada. Useless.

What history offers, instead, is a phenomenally important, permanent set of critical tools. History forces you to investigate an endless set of highly complex issues [religion, culture, politics, scientific thought (Ben Franklin, Benjamin Rush, David Rittenhouse), media, wealth, taxes (for the unenlightened, "taxation without representation"), natural resources or lack of (Jefferson, Lewis and Clark)] to enable you to figure why something happened, and what else might have happened, if. . . .

In short, there is not a single undergrad major more effective for teaching critical reasoning for a highly complex world. No critical reasoning tools is exactly why 95% or more of business people can't do strategic thinking and legislators have so damn much difficulty with policy-making. Simply no tools in the toolkit.

History is an inquiry-based study and a problem-solving activity. So it teaches you how to ask the really significant questions and deal with the complex problems that business and government people struggle over. (Here's a successful humanities grad who really gets it.)

History requires students to deal with social problems that are poorly structured, very controversial and with all kinds of reasoning and built-in illogic. It requires different kinds of thinking than a student would learn in the well-structured problems of philosophy and basic logic. Furthermore, it forces students to look at conflicting accounts of the same problem (the residents of Boston versus the British military perspective on the Boston Massascre). It also presents students with moral and ethical challenges (were the colonists justified in using violence against British authority?) Finally, students who study these challenges learn to recognize the different biases asssociated with perspectives. (Here's one ninth grader who gets it.) Significantly, they learn to compare their moral suasion against the different persuasions within a historical context.

There's endless stuff about all kinds of wars. Lack of historical tools is a major reason why Iraq, which the Bushies thought would be delighted with their intervention, blew up in their face. Lack of historical tools is why so few understand that you can't take a country like Afghanistan, that's living in the ninth century, into the twenty-first century in just ten short years. Lack of historical tools is why so few understand that the Medicare and Social Security systems impact all kinds of people, businesses, state governments, classes and generations of people in half-a-million different ways. Lack of historical tools is also why so many don't understand the conflicting perspectives and conflicting ethics of the different political parties involved. Lack of historical tools is why the resolution of the problems those programs have given us is evidently impossible to manage.

I think it was Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the first Senator of Missouri early in the 19th century, who commented about a certain decision and a certain legislator, that the decision was not nearly as simple as some simple-minded people would like to think. In today's highly complex world, "don't do nuance" and no critical historical tools can lead a person, a company and a nation into tragedy.

You can't possibly imagine how good it feels to vent my spleen and stick my middle finger into the air on this issue..#!%@!!

Newsweek: "The Most Useless College Degrees."

The latest career nonsense comes from a Newsweek "Perspective," summarizing a "survey" from the Daily Beast.  The "top ten majors that don't pay" included journalism, horticulture, agriculture, advertising, music, child and family studies, fashion design, mechanical engineering technology, chemistry and nutrition.

The first problem with this kind of stuff is that parents, students, and even academics take it seriously. The obvious assumption is that your degree equals your earning power. That's pure, unadulterated bullshit. It's a classic example of wrongheaded, early-20th century thinking applied to a 21st century world. I'd ignore it, except that there is widespread acceptance of the perspective. 

FYI: Your degree does not equal your earning power.

To an unfathomable degree, most thinking about careers is profoundly linear. It assumes a direct path between a person's major and that person's career. That assumption is powerful and deeply embedded in our thinking. From the time you played with fire trucks and told people you wanted to be a firefighter, the linear path has been assumed to be the natural state of things. As a consequence,nearly everybody thinks that you pursue a major that would become your ultimate career. Engineering majors become engineers. Law school grads become lawyers. Business majors become business people. History majors become . . . ? Hmmm . . .

As Katherine Brooks points out in her brilliant work, You Majored in What? (See "good books" on my blog sidebar), the linear path between your major and your career came out of the trait-and-factor approach of 1909, designed to determine the best career choices for people. As America evolved from an agricultural society to an industrial society, early psychologists sought ways to determine the best fit between individuals and their jobs. Career tests, like the famous Strong Interest Inventory or the Meyers-Briggs, were designed to match persons' interests with potential vocations. 

Brooks has an enlightening analysis of college majors and jobs. She draws from alumni surveys from three institutions:

        MAJOR                JOB

• art                   cartoonist
• dramatic arts    MTV program director
• economics         bond trader, Wall Street
• government       Republican national committee
• religion             minister
• psychology        psychotherapist

There's only one problem with the above list: it's all wrong. Here are the actual careers of those grads:

        MAJOR                JOB

• art                    special prosecutor, DA's office
• dramatic arts     Republican national committee
• economics         veterinarian
• religion             MTV program developer
• psychology        cartoonist      

Reality just doesn't match up to the traditional career path. It isn't that the linear path has disappeared. Some psychology majors do become psychologists, etc. But linear thinking keeps people from thinking broadly about options and being open-minded to new opportunities. 

I begin at a slightly different place than Brooks, but end up at the same place. I absolutely refuse to look at college degrees from the perspective of a specific vocation. I believe that the purpose of a college degree is to learn how to learn and how to think so that a person can make an informed decision. Choose a major that interests you so you can dig into that subject. But remember, the purpose of that major is to provide you with subject matter in which you can explore how the subject works, how it's put together, how to think about it, and how to learn it.

I'm a firm believer with that anonymous college career counselor who said that "it's ridiculous to ask liberal arts students (or any other college student) what they plan to do in five years. They don't even know what they plan to have for dinner."

After four to six years of college, you're ready to take on your first job. If you were smart, you spent your summers exploring jobs, or even served an internship, so you've got a bit of a network. Most aren't going to make much money right out of college anyway, so grab an interesting job and go from there. The market is chaos, and your thinking and your career are going to evolve. Keep your options always open and don't burn bridges. Keep learning and adding new expertise as you see opportunities.

My own career has followed the pattern I've just described. I used to say that I had vocational menopause every eleven years. At those breaks in time, I made major career shifts. Those shifts, however, were the result of evolutionary career processes that had been going on throughout the weeks and months of my work. Adapting, changing and growing. Unsatisfied with life and very curious, I was always writing a new life for myself--and continue to do so into my seventies.

That's not to say that some don't follow a direct path. My son-in-law decided when he was eight years old that he was going to be a scientist and a doctor and teach at Harvard Medical School. I'll be damned--he did it, in spite of the fact that he grew up poor as a church-mouse. However, like many professionals in their mid-forties, he left the Harvard position and has taken advantage of several options. He has what I think of as a multi-career: research, teaching (another university), consulting and contracting. Like me, he'd be bored on a one-way street. You're going to see more of that as global demands begin to be felt in all the professions. 

Brooks takes today's cultural and economic chaos, and spells out a thorough-going process for career development. She argues, rightly, that careers follow chaos theory, the complex theory and practice that grows out of the mathematical formulas that were originally designed to develop a better weather prediction model. So think about it: how successful are we at predicting the weather? Sometimes we're pretty good. When the conditions are foreseen, when nothing changes, and when we know certain physical laws are being followed, we can predict the weather. If we see a front moving across the map, we know a storm is coming. But what happens when something interrupts the pattern? What if the front coming from the west suddenly encounters another storm coming up the East Coast? When and where will they meet? How well can we predict a tornado's path? Not too well generally. . . . Chaos theory helps us understand that too many variables in a complex system make it hard to predict the outcome. 

We also know from chaos theory that the greater the distance between now and the future, the weaker our prediction will be. For instance, we're pretty good at predicting the weather today. Maybe even tomorrow or within the next week. But after that our prediction gets shaky. We may notice trends, or make logical inferences. . . but chaos theory helps us understand we can't predict the future in greater detail.

So, as Brooks rightly points out, career paths can be highly complex with all sorts of intervening variables, including family of origin, level of education, individual skills and talents, the job market, and so on. And like weather forecasting, career planning is a form of prediction, right?

Brooks doesn't say so, but I happen to know that meteorologists are the most accurate predictors in the world. Business people, lawyers, physicians, economists, etc, all pale when compared to the predictive ability of meteorologists. That'll drive you nuts, but it happens to be quite true.

So what's a person to do about his/her career? Chaos theory holds that systems ultimately reveal patterns and an order. What looks like chaos isn't always chaotic. Once again, I’ll use Brooks to make my point:

• use your knowledge of chaos theory to create a resilient career strategy that will serve you throughout your life,
• adapt to change and not be defeated by it,
• be open to possibilities, without simply going any way the wind blows,
• know you are in charge and can create each and every day of your life,
• have a direction, even though you're not arrogant or mindless enough to think that life will be served up in one neat linear package,
• embrace the chaos of your life and take it as a source or of pride.