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It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

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Re: It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

#41

Post by Alupis »

tensafefrogs wrote: post #27
Alupis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should do away with it and replace it with basic income So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue. We, as a society, are very good at band-aid solutions (like minimum wage from the get-go). We're not good at solving the real hard problems. The real hard problem here is folks are ge…

> So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue. No, you give them money to pay rent and eat while they go to school if they want to, or learn whatever new skills they might be interested in instead of having to wait tables. Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on…

> No, you give them money to pay rent and eat

If every person gets X dollars per month, then over time, everything will cost at least X dollars. We have 78 years of a "grand experiment" to prove this (minimum wage).

Proponents of BI often forget that our economy will not remain how it is today.

Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living).

> Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job.

We do have programs in place that solve this. Yes, you have to pay it back, and it can certainly add up to a large sum if you decide to not work at all and use your loan to pay for food and rent. Perhaps our universities should change the paradigm, and require students to work at minimum part time, as this yields a tremendous amount more than just money... but I digress.

Re: It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

#42

Post by Swizec »

bpchaps wrote: post #31

In interviews, the second most common question I get asked is, "Why don't you have a degree?" followed by "Are you planning on going back?". More than often, the questions have a strong No True Scotsman feeling to them. My experience is solid and my personal projects are fun and reflect passion. Yet, not having a degree is a detriment to me somehow still. Why? I can't think of a single good reason why so many employe…

Strangely, even after publishing books in my field, people still ask me if I'm ever going back to finish my degree.

Stranger still, the US government gave me a genius visa (O-1) despite my not having graduated.

I think it's one of those "If I had to do it, you have to do it" type situations. Or people are just curious and wonder if I'm ever going back to school. It's hard to tell sometimes.

Re: It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

#43

Post by punk-coder »

0max wrote: post #29

What America needs are institutions similar to that of the apprenticeship programs of Western Europe. I came out of a one year job training program operating out of a non-profit with corporate partners (similar to the way it works in parts of the EU) that consists of college credit classes and industry experience. This lowers the barrier to entry for most young adults (like myself) to get into the job market and jump…

I went to University back in 89-90 in Munich Germany while my dad was in the military. When the first Iraq war broke out he went and I ended up heading home. I did some night schools, but never got a degree. In 96 there was a program in Columbus, Ga, called ICAPP. It was sponsored by Synovus, Aflac and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Thousands tried out for it, and after much testing, interviewing, etc it came down to about 60 of us making it in. We got paid to go through a program that taught us Assembler, COBOL, IMS, DB2, and other mainframe development skills for 6 months. After that we were guaranteed a job at one of those companies. If you worked in Georgia for 4 years your loan was forgiven. I took a job in Atlanta at Total Systems, a company owned by Synovus. 20 years later I'm an application architect making $155k at a different company in Atlanta. I have no degree. When I finished the program it counted as college credit and I was 11 credits shy of a Bachelors, but I don't see what that will do these days. I have 20 years real world experience, and in case you're wondering, the latest project I'm leading is a NERD stack app (Node, Express, React, Database). I quit the mainframe job back in 99. I wish there were more programs like that.

Re: It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

#44

Post by mgkimsal »

jdminhbg wrote: post #30
dugditches wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you could walk off the street(with no Highschool diploma) into a Manufacturing job with good pay, benefits, etc. And if they mistreated you, you could leave and go to another Factory in-town that did treat you well. So they tried to retain employees by treating them well. Versus today, where if you can manage to find a Manufacturing job you're under the thumb of the bosses. Because they know you have a mortgage,…

> When you could walk off the street(with no Highschool diploma) into a Manufacturing job with good pay, benefits, etc. This sounds more like a good-ole-days fantasy than reality. Can you quantify when and what good pay and benefits were for someone without a high school degree who walked off the street?

I can't speak specifically to walking in off the street with no diploma/education at all, but I'll share this.

25-30 years ago some of my friends could fairly easily get line jobs at Ford/GM/etc with just a HS diploma. Of course, from what we were told, it wasn't as easy as way back in the 50s, but it was still a possibility in the 80s, and some of my friends did. In addition to direct work, there was a moderately large ecosystem of auto suppliers to work for, and many of them would still hire with a HS diploma.

Friends of mine were starting in 1990/91 at $17/hr with some benefits and usually some overtime available. Min wage, at that time, was... IIRC, $3.35/hr. So.. 5x min wage with just a HS diploma was possible. That's not to say it's not possible now, but I don't think there's many employment situations like that (certainly much fewer than 50 years ago). You'd probably need to be self-employed to pull in $35-$50/hr with just a HS diploma these days, and you're then having to cover your own insurance and perks and whatnot.

Hope that helps.

Re: It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

#45

Post by Alupis »

Retric wrote: post #32
Alupis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Effective minimum wage(that is, min. wage adjusted for inflation) has been slowly declining for decades. Minimum wage isn't getting higher, it's getting slowly lower. This is simply not true. Minimum wage was introduced in 1938, and was for a whopping $0.25 per hour. This is about $4.22 per hour in 2016 dollars. Federal minimum wage is currently at $7.25. Some states have even higher minimum wages, with California…

In 1969 the minimum wage was 1.4$/hour which works out to $10.34 in 2012 dollars. You can go back to 1956 and see eq $8.29 or forward to 1972 @ eq $9.10 vs now at less than 7.25$ in 2012 dollars. More recently it peaked in 2009 and has fallen every year after that currently it's down 15%. PS: In fact you need to go back to 1949 to find a worse year than 2006.

What you are tracking (and cherry picking) is the inflation rate, which naturally goes up and down over time. My point was, and remains, people are paid more today on a minimum, than they ever were intended to be when this program was created in 1938.

Minimum wage was intended as a baseline for unskilled entry-level jobs. Our issue today is we have a tremendous amount of folks, more than ever imagined, attempting to survive on minimum wage.

The solution is staunchly not to just give folks more money; we've been trying that for 78 years and we still have the same problem.

The solution is to enable people to support themselves off and above a minimum wage. We do this by empowering folks to get higher education and/or highly skilled job training.

We should not have 50+ year olds working the cash register at Walmart. That's a failure of society... and we're not working on solving that problem. Instead, we just want an easy out; toss cash at them so we don't have to think about this for another couple of years, never-mind that same 50 year old is still working the cash register at Walmart! That's a flat cop-out.

Re: It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

#46

Post by slackstation »

Alupis wrote: post #10
deciplex wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. Minimum wage is a hack from a previous era. We should do away with it and replace it with basic income.

> We should do away with it and replace it with basic income So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue. We, as a society, are very good at band-aid solutions (like minimum wage from the get-go). We're not good at solving the real hard problems. The real hard problem here is folks are ge…

The real meta problem is that if you don't work, you don't eat. Who cares if they have a job or they just sit at home and play videogames.

Basic Income would allow people the freedom to pursue the things that truly interest them. It will be a golden era of video games and movies and art. A huge percentage of the population will be only concerned with pleasure.

Overall, we produce more with less labor and robotic automation only accelerates that. It's not just factory workers and cashiers either. Many white collar tasks, bookkeeping, simple accounting, simple contracts, simple law are being swallowed by automation too.

I see a future where everyone is in a play or a movie, making a game, working on a novel, reading a metric ton of fan-fiction.

What's probably true is alot more porn, video games and arguing on Reddit about porn and video games.

Either way, it's better than millions doing jobs they hate, badly as they watch automation swallow them up like an ocean does an exhausted overboard sailor.

Re: It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

#47

Post by deciplex »

Alupis wrote: post #41
tensafefrogs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue. No, you give them money to pay rent and eat while they go to school if they want to, or learn whatever new skills they might be interested in instead of having to wait tables. Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on…

> No, you give them money to pay rent and eat If every person gets X dollars per month, then over time, everything will cost at least X dollars. We have 78 years of a "grand experiment" to prove this (minimum wage). Proponents of BI often forget that our economy will not remain how it is today. Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would…

> Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living).

If implemented by idiots, I agree basic income would tend to result in the consequences you describe [1]. It is very important that any implementation of basic income also do away with minimum wage at the same time. If a person is currently working a job which pays them $1500 / month, then ideally basic income would result in (assuming that we agree on $1000 / month as the minimum subsistence-level income) that same person making $500 / month at the same job, and receiving $1000 / month in basic income.

So to be clear, anyone currently getting a wage exceeding the agreed-upon basic income level, should not see much difference in how much they take home each month.

Properly done, the only price inflation you should see are from people who are seeing more money each month than they were before, because they were previously working at below-subsistence wages. But even then, they were probably receiving other government assistance anyway, and with basic income we'd start phasing that stuff out as well.

[1] Which, I admit, means it stands a good chance of happening that way. Difficulty of proper implementation is an argument against basic income, but it is also reflective of our broken, irresponsible government.

Re: It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

#48

Post by Retric »

Alupis wrote: post #45
Retric wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1969 the minimum wage was 1.4$/hour which works out to $10.34 in 2012 dollars. You can go back to 1956 and see eq $8.29 or forward to 1972 @ eq $9.10 vs now at less than 7.25$ in 2012 dollars. More recently it peaked in 2009 and has fallen every year after that currently it's down 15%. PS: In fact you need to go back to 1949 to find a worse year than 2006.

What you are tracking (and cherry picking) is the inflation rate, which naturally goes up and down over time. My point was, and remains, people are paid more today on a minimum, than they ever were intended to be when this program was created in 1938. Minimum wage was intended as a baseline for unskilled entry-level jobs. Our issue today is we have a tremendous amount of folks, more than ever imagined, attempting to…

Inflation rate is just that a rate, not adjusting for it after 7 years because fuck people with limited mental capacity is sick.

As to trying things for 78 years we have very different problems now vs 78 years ago. To pretend otherwise is to simply act the fool.

There are many popular ideas that simply don't work. Pretending everyone is a healthy, intelligent, well educated, and they can just make everything better by working harder is one of them. People have been working harder, productivity keeps growing but for a huge chunk of the population things have been getting worse over time. And that my friend is a very dangerous trend.

Re: It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

#49

Post by jayess »

ahoy wrote: post #7
jayess wrote: post #2

The higher the minimum wage gets, the harder it'll be for those with little or no skills to get a job.

What a goofy thing to think. Effective minimum wage(that is, min. wage adjusted for inflation) has been slowly declining for decades. Minimum wage isn't getting higher, it's getting slowly lower.

Goofy way to think? It's simple math. Supply and demand. Econ 101. It's like saying 2+2=4 is a goofy way to think.

Re: It’s a Tough Job Market for the Young Without College Degrees

#50

Post by bpchaps »

Swizec wrote: post #42
bpchaps wrote: post #31

In interviews, the second most common question I get asked is, "Why don't you have a degree?" followed by "Are you planning on going back?". More than often, the questions have a strong No True Scotsman feeling to them. My experience is solid and my personal projects are fun and reflect passion. Yet, not having a degree is a detriment to me somehow still. Why? I can't think of a single good reason why so many employe…

Strangely, even after publishing books in my field, people still ask me if I'm ever going back to finish my degree. Stranger still, the US government gave me a genius visa (O-1) despite my not having graduated. I think it's one of those "If I had to do it, you have to do it" type situations. Or people are just curious and wonder if I'm ever going back to school. It's hard to tell sometimes.

Yeah, both definitely happen. A majority of it feels like it's the former, though. Usually it's the same crowd that has huge knowledge gaps and gets offended at being corrected.

(Btw, do you have any links to your books?)

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