AP published a rather disturbing forecast for the college class of 2012, presenting its job prospects in a pretty bleak light.
Here's an excerpt from yesterday's article:
Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating mid level jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.
I would imagine that a large percentage of high school and college students don't have a clear plan of what they want to be doing for a living once their diplomas are given to them.
"You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it's not true for everybody," says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. "If you're not sure what you're going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college."
This is where the WSO community has an advantage; many of our recent college graduates know what they want to do for a living.
But maybe this one advantage is not enough...
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One of the points that I was trying to make is that when I was going to college, many of us were adrift, not knowing what we were going to major in, much less what our next job was going to be. The placement office in my school was of little help. My suggestion for remedying this shortcoming in my education is to have a mandatory course, just as English 101 is a mandatory course in most universities, that would explore how the transition from school to work can be made more smoothly. So, for example, if a student wants to be a writer or an artist or an equity research analyst, s/he will learn about the effort that needs to be made outside the classroom to land that first job and beyond.
My assumption is that most of you in the WSO community know what type of job you want when you graduate and have sought out summer internships and taken all sorts of other steps to prepare for life after college. This gives you a definite advantage over the general college age population. I was just wondering whether any of you feel that your schools could have done more, or done something different, to make your path a little easier to travel...
Nihil aut repudiandae itaque vitae magnam totam. Non eos voluptate atque eum sed. Iste et numquam laboriosam inventore.
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