These days, the only jobs not requiring a college degree, or some kind of post-high school training or certificate course are in manual labor, or the very lowest rung of service positions. These include fast food, waitressing, and retail sales and stocking. The lucky few who are both hard workers and happen to get noticed, can still work their way up into management from the inside, but the percentage of people able to do this is fairly low, compared to the number of workers.
Yet, a college education is no guarantee of a job, and becoming even less so as more people become college educated. Furthermore, 73 percent of college graduates in the United States now end up working in a different field from what they studied.
Many of the jobs now requiring college degrees used to require only high school degrees in the 1950s. Why, then, are college degrees required now for jobs such as insurance adjuster, salesperson of insurance or office equipment, higher-levels of office assistants, and most office jobs, even though many of these jobs pay relatively low white-collar salaries? Why are employers requiring college degrees, without caring too much what subject the future employee has a degree in? The reason is that they feel it is indicative of the person’s quality. It’s proof to an employer that they will hire someone with sufficient reading, writing, and critical thinking ability. It weeds out the people who can’t make it through college because of weak reading/writing abilities. Good reading/writing abilities are a good indication of good thinking abilities and adequate arithmetic skills for use in everyday life business situations.
In the 1950s, a high school degree was indicative of the good skills which a college degree indicates today. Now that most people graduate from high school, many people seem to have that piece of paper, but still haven’t mastered basic arithmetic in order to be able to do business math, and cannot read, write, think, or speak, at the level employers require in a white-collar office setting. Before I had a college degree, I worked as an executive secretary (and had taken courses in a secretarial school to be able to do so). Later, when I was in a management position in a bank, and was hiring an executive assistant, I asked for a typing speed of 70 words per minute as one of the hiring qualifications. Why? It was not because we had a lot of things to type; it was because excellent typing skills are the best indicator that a potential assistant really has good skills in all areas. Similarly, a college degree is the best current indicator to an employer that they are hiring someone who has the general reading, writing, critical thinking, intelligence, and public presentation abilities that they want. Now a graduate degree is usually required to get a higher-paying job in a specialized field. The one exception to this might be in any type of engineering.
What we are really fighting today is the process of technology advancing to take over higher-and-higher level jobs. First we saw low-wage manual labor taken over by robots. Next we saw most former middle-class jobs outsourced to third-world countries as their workers became educated–for example, our lower-level legal research formerly performed by new lawyers, now being outsourced to India. Accounting work, such as tax returns, are now being outsourced over the internet to trained accountants in India. In both cases, their foreign salaries are far less than would have been paid in America. Now there is talk of replacing fast-food service workers and restaurant service workers with robotic solutions. Some of these are already being tried out in Asia.
A computer-scientist friend of mine from Silicon Valley claims very convincingly that it is only a matter of time before all jobs are taken over by computers. He claims that it is only a matter of time before computers will be able to repair themselves and no longer require humans to do so. He further claims that even scientific research no longer need humans, as the way to solve a problem is to throw a lot of research at one area, trying many things until a solution is found. He points out that computers are far more efficient at doing this than humans. I always imagined that Hal, the computer, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, could never be a reality, but my friend insists this is not nearly as far off as people think. If my friend is right, then we can look forward to a world without work, where all work is done by machines.
Unfortunately,in a capitalist world, this might be an unattractive future for many people, as how will they live, or get money to live? The European socialist model might work better in a world without work, as machines produce, and the benefits from that are divided among all. Different countries, capitalist or socialist, might take different paths toward dealing with the future problem of a world without work. This is a frightening prospect, indeed. Will some countries of the world divide ever further, in a world without work, between haves and have-nots, while others create socialist utopias? Or will the countries of the world divide between those who can afford computers and robots to do work, while those without robots employ humans as the lowest-wage slave labor?
–Lynne Diligent
Dilemmas of an Expat Tutor 