Less and Less Masters and Doctors???
We used to think that education, college and university degrees would be a way to a better job, a better life and a better future.
We even created a whole industry that marketed this need.
Higher education schools became money making machines by literally selling this above idea and towing in youngsters as students with their carrot of future promises.
It worked. For many years parents aimed to save money to send kids to college, then when the financial situations changed and the education industry became more demanding, parents did not save for their kids' college but their own pension! Kids had to take student loans to pay their tuition and later when they had the good, better, excellent job this tuition was meant to guarantee them with, they could pay back their student loans and still enjoy the better life and better future that were promised in the first place...
But not for long. Money making is a very delicate thing. You have to make the money while someone is losing their money! Money is not made out of thin air. It simply changes hands, changes value, changes lives.
While someone somewhere is making more and more of it, someone, somewhere is losing more and more of it, through loans, through devaluation, through increased costs of life, etc. Money making is not a fair deal. It seems fair to the one who is making the money, but the coin has yet another side. The one who loses the money does not feel it is fair at all.
This is now happening with the education industry. The promise, the carrot still holds, many if not most of us believe that education is the path, if not the only but surely the best path to a better job, a better life and a better future. Here I need to explain that as better life and future we commonly understand more income, better financial position and of course better social position. The more the letter behind ones name the more social respect the can enjoy! The title "Doctor" whether of medicine with the MD after the Dr, or of anything else is a well respected and well sought after title. It also shows a certain financial position.
To begin with behind the Dr. title there is a huge amount of money that went towards attaining that title. Tuition fees, and books and material costs that reach sky high, living expenses of the student, transportation, all in all we are looking at amounts that reach $30.000,00 and more depending of course of the school one attended. If it was one of the ivory league schools like Yale (my brother did his MA there and my mother knows how sky high his tuition fees were, cause she worked very hard to pay most of his costs...) we are looking at double or triple that amount, if not more...
The education industry to sustain itself, need to reel more and more willing students to pay the fee, lose their money so that the industry can make theirs! One gives (loses) the other takes (makes). Simple formula.
For many years as I said, this formula worked. The students made some money, too. They received a degree that opened many doors for them to a better life and a better future. These doors are now closing, and soon they will be shut and bolted from within! The ones who managed to have a better life and a better future do not want to share this better life and better future with the bigger and bigger masses of college students who have gone deep into dept to also have a better life and better future.
These doors are closing as society is making sure less and less from these masses reach the top of the ladder, whether that is the financial ladder of the social status one. Privileges come with a cost. One has to be become inhuman to be able to hold on to, protect and prevent that others lower the standards of the privileges one holds. privileges is very much like money.
It can change hands and it can become devalued. Those who have the privileges can also change, they can become selfish and self-centered as they refuse to share their position at the top of the ladder with the growing amount of college and university students that wants to be part of the promised better life and better future!
What happens then is a well fabricated financial crisis. All at the bottom of the ladder and the ones climbing the ladder, lose, so that the ones already at the top of the ladder can either hold on to that top and privileges, or make these privileges worth even more. They lengthen the distance between them and the masses.
This works, too. All of these are social tricks that have been used for ages and ages in every society so that the oligarchy, the few with the privileges could keep the masses out and away far from any reach of these privileges. If anyone thinks we are living in democratic societies is gravely unrealistic. There is NO DEMOCRACY, what we are told that is democracy is a game that the oligarchy has us play, we hold elections, we go vote, we think we have the power of decisions, and all that crap.
Nope. This game works, too. Like all games we are made to play as the immature idiots we are and do not get top grow up and stop from playing their games with their rules made for them to win and us to lose!
Then comes Autism! See, you were wondering how the heck all this is going to link to Autism...
Autism is the ability of the human being to see these games and refuse to play them. They call that a disorder, since all the rest of the normal human being do play the game and do not cause trouble and resistance in obeying this simple rule. Autistics do not like obeying rules, as simple as they may be, which do not sound fair. And the game we are all forced to play is NOTHING like fair. As I said before it is fair only for the ones on the winning end, and they never lose.
So, we have two choices. To accept the fact that the game is unfair, and stop using the idiotic cliche "life is unfair" because LIFE is NOT UNFAIR! We make life and living unfair because we have established a "money making-privileges holding-top of the ladder" maintaining game!
This happens of course when the ladder is vertical and there is a top and a bottom! Once this ladder is turned by 90 degrees and becomes horizontal, by magic the top and bottom disappear and we all become equal and the game becomes fair as it should be. This is what we Autistic know. That the wheel of fortune turns, and when it is not fair fair today, it can be fair the next.
This is a simple rule of gravity and a law of nature: All turns, all flows, παν ρέει!
This simple rule of Nature, we humans with our societies and laws and privilege holding have influenced and altered. We have made the game of life unfair for all, except the privileged few who make the rules as they please. The rest just live day by day unnoticing how bit by bit we lose any and every chance to ever reaching the promised better life and better future, the proverbial carrot in front of out noses...
The Job Market: Is a College Degree Worth Less?
Tuesday, Dec. 08, 2009
Employers and career experts see a growing problem in American society — an abundance of college graduates, many burdened with tuition-loan debt, heading into the work world with a degree that doesn't mean much anymore.
The problem isn't just a soft job market — it's an oversupply of graduates. In 1973, a bachelor's degree was more of a rarity, since just 47% of high school graduates went on to college. By October 2008, that number had risen to nearly 70%. For many Americans today, a trip through college is considered as much of a birthright as a driver's license.
Marty Nemko, a career and education expert who has taught at U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, contends that the overflow in degree holders is the result of many weaker students attending colleges when other options may have served them better. "There is tremendous pressure to push kids through," he says, adding that as a result, too many students who aren't skilled become degree holders, promoting a perception among employers that higher education doesn't work. "That piece of paper no longer means very much, and employers know that," says Nemko. "Everybody's got it, so it's watered down."
What's not watered down is the tab. The cost of average tuition rose 6.5% this fall, and a report released on Dec. 1 by the Project on Student Debt showed that the IOU is getting bigger. Two-thirds of all students now leave college with outstanding loans; the average amount of debt rose to $23,200 in 2008. In the last academic year, the total amount loaned to students increased about 18% from the previous year, to $81 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for recent grads rose as well. It is now 10.6%, a record high. The devaluation of a college degree is no secret on campus. An annual survey by the Higher Education Research Institute has long asked freshmen what they think their highest academic degree will be.
In 1972, 38% of respondents said a bachelor's degree, but in 2008 only 22% answered the same. The number of freshmen planning to get a master's degree rose from 31% in 1972 to 42% in 2008. Says John Pryor, the institute's director: "Years ago, the bachelor's degree was the key to getting better jobs. Now you really need more than that."
Employers stress that a basic degree remains essential, carefully tiptoeing around the idea that its value has plummeted. But they admit that the degree alone is not the ace it once was; now they emphasize work experience as a way to make yourself stand out. Dan Black, director of campus recruiting in the Americas for Ernst & Young, and his team will hire more than 4,000 people this year out of 20,000 applicants. There are a lot of things besides a degree "that will help differentiate how much attention you get," says the veteran hirer, who has been screening graduates for 15 years.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car hiring guru Marie Artim, who says her company will hire 8,000 of 200,000 applicants worldwide, has found that her applicant pool is changing. "While 10 years ago we may have had the same numbers, today we have higher-quality and better-qualified applicants," she says.
So what does it take to impress recruiters today? Daniel Pink, an author on motivation in the workplace, agrees that the bachelor's degree "is necessary, but it's just not sufficient," at times doing little more than verifying "that you can more or less show up on time and stick with it." The author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future says companies want more. They're looking for people who can do jobs that can't be outsourced, he says, and graduates who "don't require a lot of hand-holding."
Left-brain abilities that used to guarantee jobs have become easy to automate, while right-brain abilities are harder to find — "design, seeing the big picture, connecting the dots," Pink says. He cites cognitive skills and self-direction as the types of things companies look for in job candidates. "People have to be able to do stuff that's hard to outsource," he says. "It used to be for blue collar; it's now for white collar too."
For now, graduates can steer their careers where job growth is strong — education, health care and nonprofit programs like Teach for America, says Trudy Steinfeld, a career counselor at New York University. "Every college degree is not cookie cutter. It's what you have done during that degree to distinguish yourself.
