About a year ago, I published a post titled, “There Are Officially Too Many MBA’s.” Hyperbolic, perhaps, but it’s undeniable that salaries for new MBAs have decreased since the recession, which suggests the market is glutted with business-school grads.
By the standards of other rich nations, the US minimum wage, at $7.25 an hour, can look pretty measly. Australia’s minimum for full-time adult employees works out to almost $15, these days. France’s is around $12. For almost a year now, American fast food workers have been going on strike to demand that kind of pay.
When the American psychologist Wayne Oates died in 1999, The New York Times began his obituary by noting two facts. First, the man had authored an astonishing 57 books. Second—and presumably not coincidentally—he had invented the word workaholic. Oates coined the now-ubiquitous term in a 1968 essay, in which he confessed that his own addiction to industriousness had been a disorder akin to substance abuse. Of course, he acknowledged, workaholism is much more socially respectable than drinking a fifth a day—more the sort of personality trait that might help someone, say, earn an obit in the paper of record.
Ever since the Great Recession sucked the air out of the legal industry, an extremely vocal group of writers—myself included—has been trying to warn pretty much any 20-something with an Internet connection to think twice about going to law school. The job market for recent grads has been murder. And there’s an abiding sense that the business model that sustained many big corporate firms, the ones that offer those plum $160,000-a-year jobs of lore, is in danger of becoming obsolete, if it hasn’t already.
The barren job market for law school grads has become a familiar reality by now. But here’s something that tends to get lost in the story: The problem isn’t just about no-name law schools churning out JD’s nobody wants to hire. Even graduates at some of the country’s top programs are struggling.
The U.S. fossil fuel renaissance has sparked job booms in the oil fields of North Dakota and Texas, shrunk the national import tab, and led to a whole lot of talk about energy independence. But, as Bloomberg Businessweek noted recently, one thing it hasn’t done is lower the price of gasoline for American motorists, who are still paying $3.71 a gallon.
You hear it from journalists. You hear it from academics. And, most painfully, you hear it from the twenty-somethings who are shouldering a ruck sack of student debt through this frightening job market: A college degree just isn’t worth what it used to be.
Amazon is the king of online booksellers and, by most accounts, the most feared player in publishing. Yet last week it shelled out a reported $150 million to buy up Goodreads, a social network for book nerds with a devoted but far from enormous 16 million members. So why is most of the media convinced this is a brilliant deal?
It’s been a glum couple weeks in the world of higher education. We officially learned that states kept slashing their funding for colleges and universities in 2012, and tuition in turn kept on rising. Student loan debt expanded over the year, and more borrowers are falling behind on their debt.
“Corporate profits are eating the economy,” Derek Thompson wrote yesterday. And indeed, it seems they are. Company earnings are reaching new highs as a share of GDP. Wages are falling to new lows. And the stock market is surging.
Politicians and businessmen are fond of talking about America’s scientist shortage — the dearth of engineering and lab talent that will inevitably leave us sputtering in the global economy.
Last week, it was reported that law school applications were on pace to hit a 30-year low, a dramatic turn of events that could leave campuses with about 24 percent fewer students than in 2010. Young adults, it seems, have fully absorbed the wretched state of the legal job market.
We’ve all gotten used to talking about the problems with law schools and the thousands of underemployed, debt-addled JDs that they graduate. But perhaps its time to start taking a similarly critical look at business programs. As the Wall Street Journal illustrates in a piece today, it looks like the U.S. now has a glut of MBAs.
Lloyd Blankfein, the 57-year-old CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was paid more than $16 million dollars last year, appeared on CBS last night to talk about the fiscal cliff and lay some truth on the American people: You all need to work longer.
When it comes to the problems facing American higher education, more people should really listen to Bill Gates.
Philosophy lovers, prepare to be outraged.
The US is the venture-capital capital of the world, but startups and young small businesses play a lesser role in America’s economy than in many other rich nations.
Our patent system is a mess. It’s a fount of expensive litigation that allows aging companies to linger around by bullying their more innovative competitors in court.
