Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

finance.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–68 of 68 posts

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#61

Post by Cadsby »

ZephyrP wrote: post #48
magicalist wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see a lot of psychic pain in my peers about how hard work is or the labor market is so difficult, but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure. You probably live in a bubble then. Yes, we all know these people, but they are the minority of those affected by the current economy. Unemployment is vastly higher in groups without col…

This is overly personal and about to be a little Horatio Alger, but it's a relevant anecdote to the bubble comment so I'll throw it out there -- I personally don't come from a household making more than 25,000 a year, I lived in the esteemed estate of 'Mountain View Trailer Park' just a few years ago and have always attended public school, My stepfather was a construction worker and my mother taught ESL. My insistenc…

> Plenty of people told me that escaping my class was impossible

Then those people are idiots. However, the statistics don't lie. It is very, very difficult. It's called a cycle of poverty for a reason. Having said that, I commend your passion and attitude as someone who came from a family of four well below the poverty line. It really is key to getting anywhere.

> I'll accept that our medical system imposes undue stress upon those within it, but equally so, it's tough to not concede that many medical problems are ultimately self-induced through poor diet and exercise habits spanning over many years.

This is true, but it's only in the US where medical crises lead to financial ruin, increasingly so with the revised (personal) Bankruptcy laws of the last few years. Personal responsibility is something I think everyone can get behind, but the system is plain broken, and that is the far bigger problem.

> I'll reiterate -- your life is yours to create.

I fundamentally agree with this, but it dangerously ignores certain realities and systemic problems in our society. Be very careful of adopting the attitude "well I made it, so therefore everyone should be able to." Everyone's individual circumstances are different and there's more random luck involved then anyone cares to admit.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#62

Post by drivebyacct2 »

ZephyrP wrote: post #60
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird and incredibly false dichotomy. I smoke a bunch of pot, play a bunch of Halo, have had internships with 3 major corporations, worked as an independent contractor last summer and have a 6-figure job lined up when I graduate. On top of working 12 hours a week with 15-18 credit hours during my Junior and Senior year, I also have 5 side projects that will either make nice additions to my open source portfoli…

You're right, it's somewhat unfair of me to demonize video games. I most certainly did not mean to demonize drugs, our society places an unfair stigma on them that is entirely a result of some rather ancient belief systems. To be direct, I take this pot shot at video games because I see so many peers, filled with unbelievable intelligence, ambition and ideas waste everything they can give the world and themselves by…

I think I agree with you about human behavior and things being drains on peoples' productivity, but frankly I'm sure not if it's anywhere near "big enough" to be relevant in this particular conversation.

I have some friends that are extremely intelligent that fall into "addictive ruts" that I think cater to their ADD. In my opinion, it's embarrassing for them (the ones I have in mind) because they run their mouths about these big ideas and then play "Tiny Tower" on their iPad (which I suppose qualifies as a video game) and don't really excel as much as they could. I mean, they're doing fine for themselves but I'm floored at how I can write 500 lines of code for something and they've not moved from their chair/iPad.

At the end of it all though, I still don't see anything to make me believe that this is unique to our generation. Anything can and often is a distraction, whether it's video games, drinking, being out doors. I know people that fail classes they were more interested in their rec football game than studying. I don't think these things account for this enormous gap in employment.

I'm just imagining the line-graph of "overall unemployment in the US", on top of the linge-graph of "job availability in the US". I'm sure if you placed the graph of "college grads with jobs exiting college" you would find a very large correlation between these three graphs.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#63

Post by majelix »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #31
rsanchez1 wrote: post #28

I wonder if this has anything to do with how it seems that every time someone talks about colleges better preparing young people for a career, there is always someone here that responds saying that college is not all about getting a job, but about a "cultural experience". I guess you need something to justify the expense now.

Absolutely. This phrase is a distortion of the "liberal education" (that included calculus, biology, chemistry, and physics) provided by universities of the past. From what I can tell, universities used to have a much smaller student/professor ratio, and had a bit more "disciple" in the study of a particular discipline. Presumably that ended with the G.I. bill, but no one particularly minded because factory jobs were…

> If they majored in Communications, probably not. Do their jobs require collegiate-level knowledge or skills?

How many dev jobs do you think require, say, integrals or compiler design?

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#64

Post by apsurd »

thrownaway779 wrote: post #33
ZephyrP wrote: post #13

This is interesting to me. I'm 20 years old and I'm not in college nor do I plan to finish a degree (and if it wasn't for technology greats like Peter Thiel and PG advice, I might still be making a $100,000 mistake). I'm a fairly normal guy, I've been out of high school for 3 years now and I'm making slightly less than Bureau of Labor Statistic's 2010 Median Income for 'Software Developers', which I believe is more t…

oh come on with this bs, while you feel so smug about achieving success through hard work, super obvious you got lucky with an early start. your profile shows you learned assembly before you could vote and started writing a nosql database when you were 19. you're a "normal guy" and im the second coming. if you're an autistic supergenius there will always be code work, but some of us have to live in the real world you…

The funny thing about an excuse, no matter the correctness, is its inverse relation to success. all interpretations of success notwithstanding.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#65

Post by patio11 »

kabuks wrote: post #58
patio11 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should. They'll also find it helpful to learn what a command line is and how to operate it. Oh, and HTML -- got to know HTML. And Javascript seems to be pretty popular these days... at least enough to operate jQuery. Then there's SQL, because even Rails developers will get their hands dirty at some point. Of course, we wouldn't want to start them with data programming because they've got imperative programming,…

I just taught 20 people ror. It took 8 weeks. They worked their butts off, and now two thirds of them have entry level dev jobs. The talent gap is big enough now that it doesn't take much for someone who is talented and motivated to get to a point where they are getting paid to continue to learn.

Thumbs up for you personally and for innovation in the space.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#66

Post by Quizzy »

I'd like to throw in the practicalities of survival income that many college applicants fail to appreciate because they are so used to living off their parents' dole. The following are steps that young people ignore until it's too late:

1. Before living your dream or doing "something you love", you have to make your survival income: the first $1500 for food, shelter, transportation. So where does this steady $1500 come from, and is working the necessary hours to make $1500 going to leave you with enough time to invest in that "dream"?

2. So before graduation, have you established your fall back $1500 contingency plan? Do you have a skill (vocational or otherwise) that you KNOW will bring you that monthly $1500? Step TWO is where I believe high school counseling has failed America's youth. Everybody should leave high school with a $1500 skill, whether that be bookeeping, welding, sales, waiting tables, cashier, etc. It is imperative that upon graduating high school, you are able to count on having survival wage skills.

3. Does your college major allow you to skip step two because it is in such demand that the employment rate for your industry is healthy? Back in the early 90's, CS graduates were not having an easy time and were considered the bottom of the totem pole among engineering majors (in my school they weren't even considered engineers, but rather a soft science more akin to biology, insultingly enough). Again, this is the fault of high school counselors who fail to make foresight an essential part of the planning process - this whole "major in what you love" crap just leaves graduates with a sense of disappointment when they are unemployable. Always temper "major in what you love" with the caveat "as long as you already have a skill to pay for food/shelter/travel".

4. What's your exit strategy from your survival job? Plan this every day as you're waiting tables (bartending, welding, dancing,...).

4. Knowing that high schools (both public and private) are too highbrow to ever consider vocational training for their top students, it's up to parents to fully prepare their children. When my son is old enough, his summers will be spent honing a vocational skill so that he will have an employable skill that any society will find useful such that if he wishes to travel the world, he can always pick up a local job should the circumstances demand it. Two come to mind: welding (easier and ubiquitously needed) or electrician (harder, but more lucrative).

This long rant is a part of my disatisfaction with the high school paradigm as currently constituted. The current paradigm is a crapshoot that ill prepares students for the rigors and realities of survival in a world that could care less if they were once a valedictorian or All-State track star. I have known many former high school heroes turned zeroes after college, and it's a fall from grace that their parents have never ever prepared them for because in their world, their kids will always be special.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#67

Post by astrodust »

guynamedloren wrote: post #24
astrodust wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While programmers in general are in short supply, Rails people are extremely scarce. This is surprising considering the learning curve for this platform is basically a few weeks of intensive training, perhaps even less for those familiar with some other MVC development model. Mobile applications are putting a tremendous strain on the labor pool by demanding not just native developers, but people who can build out bac…

Is this true? Do you have anything to back this up? Not doubting you, I'm genuinely curious. Perhaps I undervalue my skillset...

Maybe it varies from market to market, but here (Toronto), there's almost zero in the way of surplus labor. Rails is fairly well established here in the web arena because of the efforts of companies like Unspace that have been active promoters.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#68

Post by ashayh »

astrodust wrote: post #8
YuriNiyazov wrote: post #3

They should learn Ruby on Rails. * Yea, this sounds like I am being an asshole, but really - the gap between how many developers are needed and how many are available is probably hundreds of thousands.

While programmers in general are in short supply, Rails people are extremely scarce. This is surprising considering the learning curve for this platform is basically a few weeks of intensive training, perhaps even less for those familiar with some other MVC development model. Mobile applications are putting a tremendous strain on the labor pool by demanding not just native developers, but people who can build out bac…

It is a few weeks for people with novice-to-moderate knowledge of programming, web-dev, javascript and a sprinkling of Unix.

Most people without this background are starting from scratch, and if they have no determination, are soon lost.

Post reply on HN