The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young.
We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young).
We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth".
Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.
The biggest problem that increasing housing supply can solve is the gap between minimum and median apartment price. In places with very constrained housing markets the cheapest slumlord apartments are very expensive (~70-80%) compared to the price of well maintained apartments. Increasing housing supply doesn't do much to the median housing price (since new houses are expensive), but it lets the price of shitty apartments drop a ton.
This is the problem - not that a brand new McMansion is going for 3,000 square and $900k - it's that the 750 crackshack is going for $500k.
> increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity
Why not?
(I guess I'm a "dunce", but I'm one that's ready for that conversation)
Being charitable here (though... when called a "dunce" it's hard sometimes to want to be charitable), the statement would be perfectly correct if slightly reworded to:
"increasing supply isn't going to solve many of our problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity"
It would just help with some of them.
But that's a statement that's obvious on the face of it - cheaper housing costs buy time if you lose your job, and makes it easier to have a bigger emergency fund, but it isn't an infinite reprieve. So. The charitable interpretation still hits a wall because that would be acknowledging that supply would help with some of them, and the "dunces" nonsense suggest that they wouldn't agree even with that.
(In some states in particular, though, home ownership is uniquely protected in ways that would help fight homelessness, so increasing supply and incentivizing selling-to-an-owner vs being a landlord could be very helpful too.)
I guess I'll be the one to point out that the richest American demographic is the 50-95%. And the ~75-85% are the actual backbone of the economy, with their relentless spending.
If there is a reckoning, the most pain will be the demographic here on HN, living in the suburbs. Not the billionaires living in the Hamptons or Napa.
The fuel of this fire is white collar high earners. Its also why not much is probably going to change, because these people also vote a lot. It's not billionaires and Black Rock driving up home prices, that's for sure...
Isn't basically every decile getting richer (i.e. able to afford more things) thanks to economic growth?
What if I don’t care about affording more things? And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?
No. It's a k-type curve where the high deciles are getting higher and the lows are getting lower, so to speak.
There is increasingly becoming more of a divide between haves and have nots, and it has a temporal component because of how equity has appreciated over the last decade or so. Both housing and stocks.
People from a decade ago have seen absolutely unsustainable appreciation in their assets while doing nothing. That is putting them at structural advantages against younger generations that will not see those same appreciations. It's like the bus has left without them. No matter how hard and fast they run, someone asleep on the bus will always be ahead of them.
I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.
It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy.
Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.
> I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.
What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US?
Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?
A bit more specifics, to follow up:
GDP growth rate, for instance, in the US doesn't have a significant inflection point around Reaganomics and its increases in deficit spending + "pro-growth" lowering of tax rates on the wealthy. We've never really gone away from that philosophy despite not seeing increases in growth + seeing a LOT of increases in inequality and the elites thriving while everyone else gets squeezed.
Perhaps "growth" is driven primarily by cultural and technological factors (especially the latter!) and inequality is driven primarily by whether or not a population has the balls to say "even if economies of scale suggest that wealth will concentrate in big mega-players, we want to fight that"? And the US had the will to do that 90 years ago, but was successfully brainwashed into giving up on it *despite the 50s in particular being still seen even by those on the right as a "golden age" of both growth and "everyman" quality of life?
If the PC revolution had started seven years earlier and the Iranian revolution had occurred seven years later how would our views of Carter vs Reagan (or some other Republican in 1984 instead) change? But which of those things did they actually cause personally?
Growth only lessens their power if it benefits those without, which, even by the most optimistic takes, hasn't really happened since at least the 80s.
I don't see aversion to growth. I see aversion to filling to pockets of the top 0.1% at the expense of the bottom 90%.
A rising tide raising all ships sounds great and all, until you notice the tide seems to only be rising on one side.
>I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.
People say that right up until someone wants to do something and then it's all "not in my back yard" and "won't somebody think of Alex Jones and his gay frogs" or whatever their line is.
I'd say nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is but it's not money. They'd made more money with growth. It's speculative bullshit "what ifs" that could be mopped up easily if they happened. The problem is people's beliefs, ideology, religion, whatever you want to call it.
Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc.
EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc.
I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.
There's a huge disconnect between perceived amount of building and actual need for housing, in my experience. People are used to seeing nothing, so when even a single building goes up they think it seems like a lot.
In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much.
It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.
This is also the cause of the gentrification anger and resulting NIMBYism.
If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both:
- expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford
- localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability
- overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need
And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.
"We" in GP was the previous generation, not a nefarious evil cadre. The prior generations followed jobs to highly desireable areas, affordable only because they had the expertise and education to get the high paying job in the first place. Every person that moves there lifts the ladder a little higher behind them just due to market factors.
I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.
The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed.
Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else.
It's far easier to remove the law on the books banning housing than it is to build an ecosystem of any economy from scratch in a new area.
We don't need any new cities, we need to allow existing areas to grow. If every city blocks housing, then even that new area is going to be blocked from growing as it grows.
We must stop everybody in their tracks that thinks it says "I don't want new housing or neighbors near me" because that is the literally robbing of our young people and of society of opportunity.
> The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed.
I'd add more nuance here, SF and many of the surrounding areas said we don't want population growth but they didn't say they didn't want economic growth. And that's a nasty combination for cost-of-living because if you have new higher-grossing, higher-paying businesses displace older ones, you're going to see a crapload of residential displacement and housing inflation.
SF didn't want to be Manhattan residentially, but they didn't do much to try to avoid being Manhattan industrially.
People who rented in SF got screwed because of that.
People who owned property didn't. They made out wonderfully. They kept their property, with the existing characteristics in many places so that they still had a nice big SFH instead of living in a condo like in Manhattan. And the fact that it's worth ten times as much is hardly a downside to them!
Sure, that plot of land would be worth even more if you could build a giant tower on it, but that increase in value is much less marginally useful or desirable to them than their home and neighborhood staying more or less the same shape.
If you want to change that, you have to be really specific about the incentives and the motivations of the current players. "Economic growth" as a sales-pitch alone doesn't resonate against entrenched non-financial NIMBY interests. Or necessarily promise anything to change the property-owner-vs-renter power imbalance.
The problem (edit: "a problem") is that this down zoning is basically state and federally enforced.
Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.
And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.
So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.
And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.
> Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.
> And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.
> So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.
> And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.
I don't think you can run this example in any state.
Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.
But the Metroplex "proper" - which now includes the popular new surrounding cities - has gotten a lot more expensive over the same time frame.
There's a demand aspect that means some places can build into the growth, and others can't. What's the old saw? Location, location, location. There's all the land in the world to grow outwardly in the area, but it doesn't happen uniformly in every direction, and it hasn't prevented rising costs in the popular areas. It's less acute than SF because the raging single-family-zoning NIMBYism isn't accompanied by being landlocked, but the combo of NIMBYism + popularity/demand constraining where new construction happens mean that supply hasn't kept up with demand. And the money you'd save by living somewhere else, for many, doesn't justify giving up the location they want, so those other areas don't have a strong economic case for growth (why invest in a project there instead of a project on the north side?).
(THAT part is universal, and part of why I wonder just how much Temecula would actually want to grow: would growth just look like Riverside or San Bernadino? Folks with means aren't choosing the inland locations first... and unlike in TX, the weather is enormously different.)
> Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.
I still think the solution involves rapid transit (which could be cars maybe) - you need the outlying towns where there is space and room to be directly connected to the economic centers in a way that makes them practical.
Then the area that is low density can grow - connected to the city center but not contributing significantly to vehicle traffic.
So there’s tons of empty housing? Why are people building new housing then, is it just that much better quality that the empty housing is the old crap?
All the empty housing is not near where jobs are, you could make the houses dirt cheap and if there are few jobs then they're actually relatively expensive to the population.
Also, yes lots of housing has unbelievably expensive deferred maintenance and many sellers are trying to act like their homes aren't huge money pits.
Yeah.. In Texas, there is loads of housing, and loads of affordable housing.
In Canada - not so much
We've spend the last fifty years shipping every job and industry overseas. What did we expect to happen?
We build new housing, but it just isn’t keeping up with demand in those few hot cities where young people want to live. Yes, Toledo and Buffalo (in the USA) have cheap housing to get, but those aren’t where people want to live.
This is a big part of the problem; in the past when you had these situations the "kids" would move to new cities where new activities were happening and build them up (hell, Silicon Valley is basically an example of this).
That seems to have dried up, nobody is building massive employment centers far from the existing major cities.
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Couldn't agree more. Completely aligned. Quote I refer to for this:
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
Perhaps they should vote, unfortunately they don't. They are unreliable as a base so politicians ignore them and their needs.
College graduates have been saddled with debt for a few decades now. Universities know that most of the student base gets a federal loan and once the money changes hands, don't care if it can ever get paid back.
This has led to administration bloat and majors that are completely useless when you graduate. Federal loans should be eliminated and universities should back the loans themselves.
That would unfairly couple the success of their students with their own success /sarc.
The government has a history of inflating anything they offer cheap money for. Housing, healthcare, education.
In our area parents can get several thousand for opting out of public school. That can be used to offset private school tuition. What happened? Private school tuition rose by about the amount the government was giving. It’s no more affordable, the government is on the hook for money, and the private schools have less incentive to compete since they got a 50% bump for doing nothing.
Any time the government offers handouts fraud, waste, and inflation will follow.
I keep going back to the debate with myself. Do I give my now-young kids 500K in an ETF in 14 years or do I send them to college? And the debate is not about how they will spend it (I can hold on to it too), it’s about whether to spend the money or just pass on the wealth to them. People have given me tons of reasons why college is good for them - independence, etc etc. I can find a way to give them independence without spending 500k. I haven’t settled the debate but articles like this are not helping the college path.
This is the easiest niche to pick on but I am mid career for cybersecurity. I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable. Really I'm not sure how new people to tech could even enter the industry, it seems like at the lower levels the entire industry is essentially closed.
However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
> I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable.
My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.
Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. The apocalyptic narrative warning of a dire skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:
It's led to an expensive, unforgivable mess for a lot of young people and their families.
Anytime you see a lot of media claiming there is a shortage of some career it's a negative signal. The field will shortly be flooded
Same for the retiring cobol programmer myth. All those jobs were offshored years ago.
> Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault.
It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.
Edit: If you need a sure thing, go into healthcare. The world is going to keep getting older, and the demand for care will not end in our lifetime.
(day job is cybersecurity and risk)
I personally as a general rule don’t hire people who work in cybersecurity if they were not traditional developers first. The chances of you understanding “cybersecurity” without also understanding how general software works is extremely low.
This is true for most sub-fields. The average person in them is either a failed dev or more of a pencil pushing box checker. The quality employees are devs with extra specialized expsrtise
Security, qa, devops, data emgonerkng, the list goes on and on.
Infosec also adds the angle that you want someone with actual grey or black hat hands on experience
I'm actually pretty good at data emgonering, one time I accidentally wiped our production db.
This is broadly true for all concentrations in cyber. There is no entry level. Your first job should be learning how what you want to focus on works… be it networking, sysadmin, devops, vendor risk management, etc.
Unfortunately, cybersecurity was a hot topic in the education market and people got sold on the idea that they could get a six figure job with nothing but some theory and an entry level certification.
> Your first job should be learning how what you want to focus on works.
Then what was the purpose of sitting for a degree?
Kind of funny, my cousin studied software development, then she pivoted to cyber security last minute because she was uncomfortable about finding work, she's been through a few different companies so far, so I guess it worked out for her.
100%. I started out in cybersecurity and was complete shit. I gave up and went into software engineering and devops instead. Now returning to cybersecurity again and things finally make sense
> A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
I graduated with an AS in programming in the mid-late 1990s. I continually sent resumes for 18mos and got back 2 replies.
I had 2 major strikes against me. I was a new coder. I worked in a region that was reluctant to consider new hires (even for no-skill jobs) w/o an introduction.
My scholarship came with job placement but the entire program was axed by the Contract With America prior to me graduating. Apparently the animosity toward helping folks off the bottom rung outweighed any platitudes about jobs.
I eventually eked out a living doing local IT work but I never did reach a living wage.
The Contract On America as many of us called it. And Newt's legacy has metastasized into even more virulent forms.
> However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market.
The problem isn't necessarily with job _experience_. It's the acronym. Most employers seem to believe that YOE stands for years of _employment_, which has effectively cut off anyone who wasn't previously employed at a relevant position. You can gain experience in almost anything by working hard at home (and 90% of that would absolutely carry over to a FT position), but you can't do the same for employment (unless you accept fabricating your job history). Cybersecurity is actually a field where hacking away at home, messing around with codebases, doing ctfs can actually give you TONS of experience, but barring you coming up with major zerodays, no one cares.
Have a friend just graduated in cybersecurity. He’s going into the military with it.
The absolute wild opposite (for cybersecurity) to this is that higher level individuals are in such insane demand that if you are underpaid even during the current wage suppression, going to over market should be almost completely trivial.
Of course, people actually good at security are rare and in high demand. This is totally aligned with OP’s statement. IMO you shouldn’t even be thinking of going into cybersecurity straight out of college. There’s just too much you have to learn about how software works for it to be a reasonable first job out of university. There will always be exceptional people, of course, but as a general rule I’m not hiring new grad cyber folks. Seems dumb
Cybersecurity seems to be either working to fill out forms to satisfy some requirement of some company/government office, or being akin to an exhacker actually trying to improve security.
Colleges seem to be producing tons of the first, hardly any of the second.
Are the companies hiring fewer people than they need? If not then perhaps the fault is not with their standards but with an oversupply of applicants.
> Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site
It certainly can, companies just don't want to pay for that training. That's really where the "maniacal obsession" with job experience comes from. Companies just want to save money on training.
I’m just a swe, but I kinda thought cyber is a good place to be, since the proliferation of insecure vibecoded apps.
Companies have never cared about security, because there are almost no consequences to data breaches. A hospital network could get ransomwared for 48 hours, and no one cares. Critical data gets leaked? So what, pay a fine. You either pay a fine to the hackers, or you pay a fine to the government, or you pay a fine to customers, but no matter what its substantially less than a fully staffed security team, not just because security professionals are expensive, but because security professionals slow everything else down, they'll spend all day telling everyone what they can't do, which == lost revenue growth.
The only thing keeping security companies in the business is compliance/certification. If you've been around these compliance programs for long enough you know: they're box-checkers. But, sometimes you need to check that box, begrudgingly, annoyingly, so most companies will prefer to just outsource that security work to some managed security services provider, then think about it once a year when audit time comes around.
What is a cybersecurity professional going to do about a bunch of vulnerabilities in an app that someone else decided to deploy on a network they are responsible for?
99% of cybersecurity in the commercial sector is a box checking compliance exercise.
Most companies sadly don't care about security whatsoever.
Yep, I think my megacorp's cybersecurity department is just a bunch of checklist punchers that now just copy and paste any of our technical writeups into ChatGPT, and I am not even joking. Fucking infuriating.
They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
I know _for a fact_ that most companies don't care. There might be a select few out there that genuinely do, but most don't. I've literally reported numerous GLARING vulnerabilities to companies in various different industries, only for the vulnerabilities to remain unpatched for MONTHS. Few of the most comical examples, one major game studio was compiling their Linux binaries with FULL DEBUG SYMBOLS AND INFO plus they were shipping a 600M .sym file with practically full paths and all source info. Literally all the paths and function signatures to every single one of their functions was in there. I had to submit FOUR bug reports before they patched it (didn't even receive a bug bounty). The second one was with a major multinational telecom that was distributing routers that _had an open telnet port to the wide internet_ ... with a default password. And there were countless more. The telecom one I had to BEG them to ship me a new router, or to at least do an over the air update, because "they didn't understand what the problem was".
Shipping debug symbols isn't a security vulnerability. It might be sloppy, but we all know that security through obscurity doesn't work. Especially not with modern analysis tools and access to the executable code.
That's what it means to be a cost center. Anything over the minimum translates to wasted effort and inefficiency.
There would not be such a proliferation if cybersecurity were a well-respected field.
I think the article is correct to point out remote work as a big culprit, but for the wrong reasons. The article says "Employers, the Fed argues, are wary of hiring inexperienced people into remote roles, where the on-the-job mentorship that turns a new grad into a productive worker is hard to deliver." And I agree that's a factor, but I really think that what changed in the late teens is that remote software and networks finally got good enough so that the hit you got to productivity from employing people in low cost of living areas really went away.
I lived through lots of "offshoring frenzies" that never went very far in the past, but things are different this time. Like in the fallout from the .com bust in the early 00s, there was all this talk about how we'd ship all software development to India, and a lot of companies did try to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. And top companies were still paying crazy high salaries for entry level top talent in the Bay Area because they knew it was worth it.
Now, though, I feel like companies are smarter. They know time zone overlap is key, so I've seen a lot more offshoring to Latin America, Canada and Europe where there is sufficient overlap with US time zones. Since even US folks spend so much of their time on Zoom etc. anyway, it doesn't really matter if your Zoom colleague is in your same city or thousands of miles away. I've worked with excellent colleagues from Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland etc. before, and the network speed was good enough so that videoconferencing quality was great. And this is a far cry from the early 00s when I was on choppy voice-only conference calls with a team in India.
So new grads are not only competing with other new grads, they're competing with highly competent, experienced grads from all over the world, most of whom have salary expectations much lower than US new grads.
So what are remaining high-paying white collar jobs which aren't exposed to this type of foreign competition?
I'm thinking lawyer, since legal skills aren't as portable across international borders?
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Forget white collar. Figure out a career that makes use of your hands.
Or make enough money to retire in the next couple years.
AI’s coming for them. It’s impossible to predict what lawyering will look like in four years.
I wonder what the impact of the rising base rate of employees with college degrees is. In 1992, a fresh college graduate had better educational attainment than 42% of the labor force. In 2016 (latest date I found numbers for), that was down to 32%. https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/educational-attainment-of...
That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average member of the labor force.
Compare under 27s with a degree vs without and you see the problem is youth unemployment. If you are 25 you’re better off with a degree than without though.
In the U.K. youth unemployment is about 2005-6 levels. It was far higher by 2010.
Isn't getting a college degree actually making you more selective, too, leading graduates to pass on jobs they would otherwise have taken?
I've known a few college graduates who have come up in this market. From what I see, the common pattern is to try and get a position in your field for 3-10 months. Somewhere in that time range, they burn out. Then they apply for something field related for a few months. Then anything. Once they've exhausted all options they usually give up.
We will likely have a similar concept in our country as China's "lying flat" movement unless we make a big shift.
This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.
"College grads are fully employed" certainly wasn't true in 2013 but the chart ain't that hard to read.
The news here is how much it's changed.
2011 and 2013 were the years most tilted in the other direction since 1991 (unemployment rate 2 percentage points lower among new grads than all others). Only since 2019 have new grad overall had a higher unemployment rate, and it's climbing.
One of the interesting aspects here is that bad economies generally favored new grads because the unemployment baseline was higher and employers were picky and favored "any degree" over "no degree". I wonder how much of the change is from less of a preference for "any degree but not much experience" to "experience regardless of degree" in work that doesn't exactly need a degree. And how much is from job availability shifts eating away at entry level roles combined with the ever-present "get a degree to get a good job" pro-college marketing for most of recent US history.
Yeah, I also wanted to question the "now" in the headline. But if you can believe the article's data, this is new - new since 2019.
>as China's "lying flat" movement
No, you miss that "lying flat" is only possible when cost of food/living is low and housing is abundant.
I believe the closest US equivalent is to get on disability to subsidize those costs. (Especially effective in cheaper areas.)
Getting on disability is insanely difficult and pays jack shit. That is not a US equivalent by any measure.
Even then, it's only possible when someone is willing to subsidize it, unless both food and housing are free.
Our lying flat is opiods. Generating dark money and killing off the useless, isn't late-stage capitalist empire great?
American parents on average may be less willing and financially able to support deadbeat adult children than their Chinese peers.
Bonkers to call college graduates deadbeats. These aren’t addicts or slackers. They had to have some level of achievement their whole lives and managed to finish a degree.
Deadbeat adult children? That’s definitely American thinking.
That’s why I tell people family isn’t #1 in America it’s like #3 or 4
Nonsense. Supporting adult children after they've finished education equates to putting family last, not first. Some youths need a forcing function to reach their full potential.
Hah, I speed ran that process when I graduated with a useless degree back in the dotcom days. I graduated and gave up any hope within 3 months. I was working at the shopping mall selling suits after that. I've since told anyone who will listen that college degrees are worthless and school loan debts are the kiss of death. Not many will listen, but I try.
BA/BS in many fields and also depending on the university and social connections are worthless.
Even in STEM, post graduate is the minimum to make the degree count for anything
But note the article also points out "Of the new grads who do have jobs, about 41% are underemployed, working roles that never required a degree in the first place."
So while I'd assume that yes, some graduates are more selective (as they should be, as they usually need to pay off student loans), a huge number of them are taking jobs that don't require their degrees.
Since 2019, although now the gap is higher than ever (1.4%).
College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares
for academia (graduate school).
I'd argue the value of college has been steadily declining ever since we tried to push more and more people through it. When it's a filter it's a good signal, when it's a participation trophy far less so.
> The comparison is worth pinning down. "All workers" is the whole U.S. labor force, and most of them are older and more experienced than a new graduate, so a fresh grad starts at a natural disadvantage. For decades the degree more than canceled that disadvantage out. Now it does not.
> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.
I would postulate that there are two reasons why this is happening.
1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.
2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.
I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.
Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless.
I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.
> Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise.
Is your assertion that if fewer graduates struggled with these things, companies would post more jobs? Asking because there aren't enough actual¹, realistic² jobs to employ the current pool of job seekers.
¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.
² Qualification requirements that align with what the position actually needs.
Broadly, every company is on their own journey and makes their own discoveries in their own time, but Yes. I work with a swath of large employers in the midwest, workforce and economic development stuff, and there's a growing feeling among hiring managers that, the best way to put it is: the people they're interviewing out of college are, on the net, less equipped to succeed in the roles they're posting than their expectations on what level of capability college graduates should be at.
This doesn't mean there aren't great candidates.
This could be less on the individual and more on: colleges are getting worse at instruction/preparation (I'm bullish on this explanation among my colleagues; colleges never adapted to computers, let alone AI, the impacts of this just took a decade or so to shake out, which you should expect given the 16 year latency on education most students undergo) (though, again, ultimately its very complicated. multiple factors at play.)
For a lot of these companies this is all surfacing as: They're posting fewer entry level positions than they normally would (oftentimes not zero; just fewer), and if they have money in the budget available due to that, its going into AI.
> ¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.
Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates?
> Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates?
Interestingly (and anecdotally), as a 10-year+ experienced college dropout, I still see challenges getting hired for jobs that list degrees as a requirement. The only time I get a call back on "front door" applications is with the fateful addendum of "OR relevant work experience". (I wonder if agents and their lack of human discretion is amplifying this.) The article's assertion that a college degree still offers an edge beyond entry level still seems very much true.
If you haven't got a degree on your resume, it just gets autodropped at the application stage by an ATS. No human sees it. Same if you're missing keywords.
Outside of medicine, a non-CS engineering degree, preferably also a masters, remains a good pathway to a reasonable non-parasitic job, although relocation may be required.
law is a parasitic job, with shit life-work balance, if you want a job, unless you want to work solo, good luck finding a law firm that wants you.
medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
> medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
It only is because it effectively has a guild\cartel system preventing an oversupply of doctors and that we have an aging population that increasingly demands medical care.
Can it be replaced with good references and an interesting portfolio?
For those with a CS degree, I think the issue is that we aren't correctly using CS and AI to amass power as we rightfully should. We literally hold in our hands the power to delete many desk jobs from existence, also to offer various original new services, but somehow we're feeling crippled. This disconnect requires bridging.
Deleting those desk jobs requires understanding those desk jobs. Which means either working them or teaming up with someone who does
A lot of desk job work:
1. To the extent it's standard, it's covered in textbooks which are easily learnable by AI.
2. To the extent it's original, it often is independently rediscoverable by AI from a combination of general intelligence plus workplace training data over which the AI learns.
3. To the extent it's learned (by a human from another human), it'll still slowly be captured by workplace training data over which the AI learns.
4. To the extent it's undocumented, it's up to management to have the processes documented.
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the bar is higher and higher for less and less. donezo as a career.
Now I want to see the males/females ratio in that graph, I bet most of the unemployed are males, which is something weird I noticed where everyone who’s complaining about the job market are men, meanwhile women are hired and sometimes working two jobs on top of that.
The difference is only 11% of men versus 10.5% of women age 16-24 (PDF):
> By early 2026 recent grads sat at 5.6% unemployment
Which seems very far from your numbers.
That’s probably seasonal/part time/temp jobs given the age bracket, which is another something I noticed, there’s barely any deep studies across the ages. I think there are multiple reasons why females are more employed, but on top of them is the rise of service and nurturing economy (services healthcare etc) compared to other sectors, and these industries are dominated by women, and since there’s a general decline in general in say production or manufacturing, these economies boom, I mean, who’s gonna take care of boomers who dominate the wealth in general?
You're getting downvoted because people don't like what you say, but NPR had a piece confirming this just this April:
> Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.
In short, healthcare is the only field adding lots of jobs, and healthcare workers are something like 80% women. Men who are pursuing non-healthcare educational paths are much less likely to find a new job created for them; they'll have to compete for existing, filled jobs.
> Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.
This presentation of the stats sounds really misleading to me.
Let’s say there were 10 million quits and 10.369 million hires in that period.
5 million quits and 5.021 million hires among men.
5 million quits and 5.348 million hires among women.
In that case, yes it’s true that employment among women improved more than employment among men. No, it’s not true that an unemployed woman was 17x more likely than a man to find a job.
Also, the overall employment rate is higher for men than women and the rate has converged over the past several decades.
Thanks for sharing that! It’s something I noticed both online and IRL, it’s only guys (especially young ones) who are crying about the job market, I actually don’t know a single jobless female, all of them are working, and I know plenty who works two jobs!
Regarding the downvotes, I really don’t care about the fake online currency, I think their impact is negative in creating echo chambers in communities, and for some reason bringing men struggles is a taboo despite they suffer far more than women, suicide rates are clear example.
I like posts like this one because they are completely reasonable, perfectly accurate and easy to prove with links to articles, etc, and yet get downvoted because they dare to question TheMessage. HN resisted a long time compared to Reddit&Co but it eventually fell to the echo chamber syndrom.
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Are there people who think college education is a shortcut to generic employment? This seems like a very misleading statistic. Average earnings (including those unemployed), etc might be better. Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
> Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
This is so very easily said but how else is this supposed to work, exactly?
People have to start somewhere, and McDonalds experience doesn't count for any specialized job. Fuck, the "McDonalds-tier" jobs will often turn down graduates because they'll obviously walk the moment they get something better.
If no employer is willing to take a chance on graduates, then they just can't get any job experience. "A job that will pay for a roof over one's head" really isn't that extreme an ask.
As has been said a trillion times about AI and tech before AI: Senior level staff is going to age out, it has to be replaced or the entire industry gets sent offshore.
In terms of general unemployment across fields, youth unemployment is extremely corrosive to society.
This is already visible in how anti-AI sentiment is starting to boil over and the lurch rightward in politics. If this continues to escalate, the outcome will be nightmarish. Half of them bombing datacenters, the other half cheering as ICE raids the tech workers.
> or the entire industry gets sent offshore.
Assuming there are any seniors offshore either
I think the management answer to this is that you can just hire 9 offshore not-seniors for less money, and that somehow equals the experience of a single onshore senior. In that sense it's a kind of the experience equivalent of the 9 women/1month == baby analogy, and obviously wrong. Unless you're in management.
More or less correct. It's not that management believes in "9 offshore juniors", it's just that they don't know (nor care to confirm) who's actually working for them at the outsourcing firm.
The combined incentive of cost cutting at the outsourcing firm and foolish MBAs in the west opting for the cheapest outsourcing means that the offshore does actually employ juniors, who do build up the experience to become seniors.
> college education is a shortcut to generic employment
That was/is the societal narrative for the last forty plus years, yes.
Yep, I remember being told that it doesn't matter which major I pick because there would be jobs that wanted just any bachelor's degree.
I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.
How else would you sell it?
>Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
But as the graph also shows, graduate unemployment rate was lower for much of 2010s and before, so in some sense it really was "easier" with a college degree.
The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young.
We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young).
We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth".
Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.
The biggest problem that increasing housing supply can solve is the gap between minimum and median apartment price. In places with very constrained housing markets the cheapest slumlord apartments are very expensive (~70-80%) compared to the price of well maintained apartments. Increasing housing supply doesn't do much to the median housing price (since new houses are expensive), but it lets the price of shitty apartments drop a ton.
This is the problem - not that a brand new McMansion is going for 3,000 square and $900k - it's that the 750 crackshack is going for $500k.
> increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity
Why not?
(I guess I'm a "dunce", but I'm one that's ready for that conversation)
Being charitable here (though... when called a "dunce" it's hard sometimes to want to be charitable), the statement would be perfectly correct if slightly reworded to:
"increasing supply isn't going to solve many of our problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity"
It would just help with some of them.
But that's a statement that's obvious on the face of it - cheaper housing costs buy time if you lose your job, and makes it easier to have a bigger emergency fund, but it isn't an infinite reprieve. So. The charitable interpretation still hits a wall because that would be acknowledging that supply would help with some of them, and the "dunces" nonsense suggest that they wouldn't agree even with that.
(In some states in particular, though, home ownership is uniquely protected in ways that would help fight homelessness, so increasing supply and incentivizing selling-to-an-owner vs being a landlord could be very helpful too.)
I guess I'll be the one to point out that the richest American demographic is the 50-95%. And the ~75-85% are the actual backbone of the economy, with their relentless spending.
If there is a reckoning, the most pain will be the demographic here on HN, living in the suburbs. Not the billionaires living in the Hamptons or Napa.
The fuel of this fire is white collar high earners. Its also why not much is probably going to change, because these people also vote a lot. It's not billionaires and Black Rock driving up home prices, that's for sure...
Isn't basically every decile getting richer (i.e. able to afford more things) thanks to economic growth?
What if I don’t care about affording more things? And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?
No. It's a k-type curve where the high deciles are getting higher and the lows are getting lower, so to speak.
There is increasingly becoming more of a divide between haves and have nots, and it has a temporal component because of how equity has appreciated over the last decade or so. Both housing and stocks.
People from a decade ago have seen absolutely unsustainable appreciation in their assets while doing nothing. That is putting them at structural advantages against younger generations that will not see those same appreciations. It's like the bus has left without them. No matter how hard and fast they run, someone asleep on the bus will always be ahead of them.
I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.
It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy.
Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.
> I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.
What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US?
Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?
A bit more specifics, to follow up:
GDP growth rate, for instance, in the US doesn't have a significant inflection point around Reaganomics and its increases in deficit spending + "pro-growth" lowering of tax rates on the wealthy. We've never really gone away from that philosophy despite not seeing increases in growth + seeing a LOT of increases in inequality and the elites thriving while everyone else gets squeezed.
Perhaps "growth" is driven primarily by cultural and technological factors (especially the latter!) and inequality is driven primarily by whether or not a population has the balls to say "even if economies of scale suggest that wealth will concentrate in big mega-players, we want to fight that"? And the US had the will to do that 90 years ago, but was successfully brainwashed into giving up on it *despite the 50s in particular being still seen even by those on the right as a "golden age" of both growth and "everyman" quality of life?
If the PC revolution had started seven years earlier and the Iranian revolution had occurred seven years later how would our views of Carter vs Reagan (or some other Republican in 1984 instead) change? But which of those things did they actually cause personally?
Growth only lessens their power if it benefits those without, which, even by the most optimistic takes, hasn't really happened since at least the 80s.
I don't see aversion to growth. I see aversion to filling to pockets of the top 0.1% at the expense of the bottom 90%.
A rising tide raising all ships sounds great and all, until you notice the tide seems to only be rising on one side.
>I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.
People say that right up until someone wants to do something and then it's all "not in my back yard" and "won't somebody think of Alex Jones and his gay frogs" or whatever their line is.
I'd say nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is but it's not money. They'd made more money with growth. It's speculative bullshit "what ifs" that could be mopped up easily if they happened. The problem is people's beliefs, ideology, religion, whatever you want to call it.
Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc.
EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc.
I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.
There's a huge disconnect between perceived amount of building and actual need for housing, in my experience. People are used to seeing nothing, so when even a single building goes up they think it seems like a lot.
In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much.
It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.
This is also the cause of the gentrification anger and resulting NIMBYism.
If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both:
- expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford
- localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability
- overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need
And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.
"We" in GP was the previous generation, not a nefarious evil cadre. The prior generations followed jobs to highly desireable areas, affordable only because they had the expertise and education to get the high paying job in the first place. Every person that moves there lifts the ladder a little higher behind them just due to market factors.
I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.
The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed.
Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else.
It's far easier to remove the law on the books banning housing than it is to build an ecosystem of any economy from scratch in a new area.
We don't need any new cities, we need to allow existing areas to grow. If every city blocks housing, then even that new area is going to be blocked from growing as it grows.
We must stop everybody in their tracks that thinks it says "I don't want new housing or neighbors near me" because that is the literally robbing of our young people and of society of opportunity.
> The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed.
I'd add more nuance here, SF and many of the surrounding areas said we don't want population growth but they didn't say they didn't want economic growth. And that's a nasty combination for cost-of-living because if you have new higher-grossing, higher-paying businesses displace older ones, you're going to see a crapload of residential displacement and housing inflation.
SF didn't want to be Manhattan residentially, but they didn't do much to try to avoid being Manhattan industrially.
People who rented in SF got screwed because of that.
People who owned property didn't. They made out wonderfully. They kept their property, with the existing characteristics in many places so that they still had a nice big SFH instead of living in a condo like in Manhattan. And the fact that it's worth ten times as much is hardly a downside to them!
Sure, that plot of land would be worth even more if you could build a giant tower on it, but that increase in value is much less marginally useful or desirable to them than their home and neighborhood staying more or less the same shape.
If you want to change that, you have to be really specific about the incentives and the motivations of the current players. "Economic growth" as a sales-pitch alone doesn't resonate against entrenched non-financial NIMBY interests. Or necessarily promise anything to change the property-owner-vs-renter power imbalance.
The problem (edit: "a problem") is that this down zoning is basically state and federally enforced.
Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.
And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.
So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.
And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.
> Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.
> And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.
> So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.
> And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.
I don't think you can run this example in any state.
Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.
But the Metroplex "proper" - which now includes the popular new surrounding cities - has gotten a lot more expensive over the same time frame.
There's a demand aspect that means some places can build into the growth, and others can't. What's the old saw? Location, location, location. There's all the land in the world to grow outwardly in the area, but it doesn't happen uniformly in every direction, and it hasn't prevented rising costs in the popular areas. It's less acute than SF because the raging single-family-zoning NIMBYism isn't accompanied by being landlocked, but the combo of NIMBYism + popularity/demand constraining where new construction happens mean that supply hasn't kept up with demand. And the money you'd save by living somewhere else, for many, doesn't justify giving up the location they want, so those other areas don't have a strong economic case for growth (why invest in a project there instead of a project on the north side?).
(THAT part is universal, and part of why I wonder just how much Temecula would actually want to grow: would growth just look like Riverside or San Bernadino? Folks with means aren't choosing the inland locations first... and unlike in TX, the weather is enormously different.)
> Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.
I still think the solution involves rapid transit (which could be cars maybe) - you need the outlying towns where there is space and room to be directly connected to the economic centers in a way that makes them practical.
Then the area that is low density can grow - connected to the city center but not contributing significantly to vehicle traffic.
So there’s tons of empty housing? Why are people building new housing then, is it just that much better quality that the empty housing is the old crap?
All the empty housing is not near where jobs are, you could make the houses dirt cheap and if there are few jobs then they're actually relatively expensive to the population.
Also, yes lots of housing has unbelievably expensive deferred maintenance and many sellers are trying to act like their homes aren't huge money pits.
Yeah.. In Texas, there is loads of housing, and loads of affordable housing.
In Canada - not so much
We've spend the last fifty years shipping every job and industry overseas. What did we expect to happen?
We build new housing, but it just isn’t keeping up with demand in those few hot cities where young people want to live. Yes, Toledo and Buffalo (in the USA) have cheap housing to get, but those aren’t where people want to live.
This is a big part of the problem; in the past when you had these situations the "kids" would move to new cities where new activities were happening and build them up (hell, Silicon Valley is basically an example of this).
That seems to have dried up, nobody is building massive employment centers far from the existing major cities.
Couldn't agree more. Completely aligned. Quote I refer to for this:
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
Perhaps they should vote, unfortunately they don't. They are unreliable as a base so politicians ignore them and their needs.
College graduates have been saddled with debt for a few decades now. Universities know that most of the student base gets a federal loan and once the money changes hands, don't care if it can ever get paid back.
This has led to administration bloat and majors that are completely useless when you graduate. Federal loans should be eliminated and universities should back the loans themselves.
That would unfairly couple the success of their students with their own success /sarc.
The government has a history of inflating anything they offer cheap money for. Housing, healthcare, education.
In our area parents can get several thousand for opting out of public school. That can be used to offset private school tuition. What happened? Private school tuition rose by about the amount the government was giving. It’s no more affordable, the government is on the hook for money, and the private schools have less incentive to compete since they got a 50% bump for doing nothing.
Any time the government offers handouts fraud, waste, and inflation will follow.
I keep going back to the debate with myself. Do I give my now-young kids 500K in an ETF in 14 years or do I send them to college? And the debate is not about how they will spend it (I can hold on to it too), it’s about whether to spend the money or just pass on the wealth to them. People have given me tons of reasons why college is good for them - independence, etc etc. I can find a way to give them independence without spending 500k. I haven’t settled the debate but articles like this are not helping the college path.
This is the easiest niche to pick on but I am mid career for cybersecurity. I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable. Really I'm not sure how new people to tech could even enter the industry, it seems like at the lower levels the entire industry is essentially closed.
However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
> I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable.
My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine (https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse...). As you said, he was unhirable in this field and now works in a completely unrelated job in a hospital.
Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault. The apocalyptic narrative warning of a dire skills shortage are still being pushed out by industry:
Cybersecurity workforce shortage reaches 4 million despite significant recruitment drive (2023) https://www.csoonline.com/article/657598/cybersecurity-workf...
It's led to an expensive, unforgivable mess for a lot of young people and their families.
Anytime you see a lot of media claiming there is a shortage of some career it's a negative signal. The field will shortly be flooded
Same for the retiring cobol programmer myth. All those jobs were offshored years ago.
> Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault.
It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.
Edit: If you need a sure thing, go into healthcare. The world is going to keep getting older, and the demand for care will not end in our lifetime.
(day job is cybersecurity and risk)
I personally as a general rule don’t hire people who work in cybersecurity if they were not traditional developers first. The chances of you understanding “cybersecurity” without also understanding how general software works is extremely low.
This is true for most sub-fields. The average person in them is either a failed dev or more of a pencil pushing box checker. The quality employees are devs with extra specialized expsrtise
Security, qa, devops, data emgonerkng, the list goes on and on.
Infosec also adds the angle that you want someone with actual grey or black hat hands on experience
I'm actually pretty good at data emgonering, one time I accidentally wiped our production db.
This is broadly true for all concentrations in cyber. There is no entry level. Your first job should be learning how what you want to focus on works… be it networking, sysadmin, devops, vendor risk management, etc.
Unfortunately, cybersecurity was a hot topic in the education market and people got sold on the idea that they could get a six figure job with nothing but some theory and an entry level certification.
> Your first job should be learning how what you want to focus on works.
Then what was the purpose of sitting for a degree?
Kind of funny, my cousin studied software development, then she pivoted to cyber security last minute because she was uncomfortable about finding work, she's been through a few different companies so far, so I guess it worked out for her.
100%. I started out in cybersecurity and was complete shit. I gave up and went into software engineering and devops instead. Now returning to cybersecurity again and things finally make sense
> A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
I graduated with an AS in programming in the mid-late 1990s. I continually sent resumes for 18mos and got back 2 replies.
I had 2 major strikes against me. I was a new coder. I worked in a region that was reluctant to consider new hires (even for no-skill jobs) w/o an introduction.
My scholarship came with job placement but the entire program was axed by the Contract With America prior to me graduating. Apparently the animosity toward helping folks off the bottom rung outweighed any platitudes about jobs.
I eventually eked out a living doing local IT work but I never did reach a living wage.
The Contract On America as many of us called it. And Newt's legacy has metastasized into even more virulent forms.
> However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market.
The problem isn't necessarily with job _experience_. It's the acronym. Most employers seem to believe that YOE stands for years of _employment_, which has effectively cut off anyone who wasn't previously employed at a relevant position. You can gain experience in almost anything by working hard at home (and 90% of that would absolutely carry over to a FT position), but you can't do the same for employment (unless you accept fabricating your job history). Cybersecurity is actually a field where hacking away at home, messing around with codebases, doing ctfs can actually give you TONS of experience, but barring you coming up with major zerodays, no one cares.
Have a friend just graduated in cybersecurity. He’s going into the military with it.
The absolute wild opposite (for cybersecurity) to this is that higher level individuals are in such insane demand that if you are underpaid even during the current wage suppression, going to over market should be almost completely trivial.
Of course, people actually good at security are rare and in high demand. This is totally aligned with OP’s statement. IMO you shouldn’t even be thinking of going into cybersecurity straight out of college. There’s just too much you have to learn about how software works for it to be a reasonable first job out of university. There will always be exceptional people, of course, but as a general rule I’m not hiring new grad cyber folks. Seems dumb
Cybersecurity seems to be either working to fill out forms to satisfy some requirement of some company/government office, or being akin to an exhacker actually trying to improve security.
Colleges seem to be producing tons of the first, hardly any of the second.
Are the companies hiring fewer people than they need? If not then perhaps the fault is not with their standards but with an oversupply of applicants.
> Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site
It certainly can, companies just don't want to pay for that training. That's really where the "maniacal obsession" with job experience comes from. Companies just want to save money on training.
I’m just a swe, but I kinda thought cyber is a good place to be, since the proliferation of insecure vibecoded apps.
Companies have never cared about security, because there are almost no consequences to data breaches. A hospital network could get ransomwared for 48 hours, and no one cares. Critical data gets leaked? So what, pay a fine. You either pay a fine to the hackers, or you pay a fine to the government, or you pay a fine to customers, but no matter what its substantially less than a fully staffed security team, not just because security professionals are expensive, but because security professionals slow everything else down, they'll spend all day telling everyone what they can't do, which == lost revenue growth.
The only thing keeping security companies in the business is compliance/certification. If you've been around these compliance programs for long enough you know: they're box-checkers. But, sometimes you need to check that box, begrudgingly, annoyingly, so most companies will prefer to just outsource that security work to some managed security services provider, then think about it once a year when audit time comes around.
What is a cybersecurity professional going to do about a bunch of vulnerabilities in an app that someone else decided to deploy on a network they are responsible for?
99% of cybersecurity in the commercial sector is a box checking compliance exercise.
Most companies sadly don't care about security whatsoever.
Yep, I think my megacorp's cybersecurity department is just a bunch of checklist punchers that now just copy and paste any of our technical writeups into ChatGPT, and I am not even joking. Fucking infuriating.
They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
I know _for a fact_ that most companies don't care. There might be a select few out there that genuinely do, but most don't. I've literally reported numerous GLARING vulnerabilities to companies in various different industries, only for the vulnerabilities to remain unpatched for MONTHS. Few of the most comical examples, one major game studio was compiling their Linux binaries with FULL DEBUG SYMBOLS AND INFO plus they were shipping a 600M .sym file with practically full paths and all source info. Literally all the paths and function signatures to every single one of their functions was in there. I had to submit FOUR bug reports before they patched it (didn't even receive a bug bounty). The second one was with a major multinational telecom that was distributing routers that _had an open telnet port to the wide internet_ ... with a default password. And there were countless more. The telecom one I had to BEG them to ship me a new router, or to at least do an over the air update, because "they didn't understand what the problem was".
Shipping debug symbols isn't a security vulnerability. It might be sloppy, but we all know that security through obscurity doesn't work. Especially not with modern analysis tools and access to the executable code.
That's what it means to be a cost center. Anything over the minimum translates to wasted effort and inefficiency.
There would not be such a proliferation if cybersecurity were a well-respected field.
what about oscp certification?
https://tinyurl.com/cronus-eating-children
I think the article is correct to point out remote work as a big culprit, but for the wrong reasons. The article says "Employers, the Fed argues, are wary of hiring inexperienced people into remote roles, where the on-the-job mentorship that turns a new grad into a productive worker is hard to deliver." And I agree that's a factor, but I really think that what changed in the late teens is that remote software and networks finally got good enough so that the hit you got to productivity from employing people in low cost of living areas really went away.
I lived through lots of "offshoring frenzies" that never went very far in the past, but things are different this time. Like in the fallout from the .com bust in the early 00s, there was all this talk about how we'd ship all software development to India, and a lot of companies did try to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. And top companies were still paying crazy high salaries for entry level top talent in the Bay Area because they knew it was worth it.
Now, though, I feel like companies are smarter. They know time zone overlap is key, so I've seen a lot more offshoring to Latin America, Canada and Europe where there is sufficient overlap with US time zones. Since even US folks spend so much of their time on Zoom etc. anyway, it doesn't really matter if your Zoom colleague is in your same city or thousands of miles away. I've worked with excellent colleagues from Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland etc. before, and the network speed was good enough so that videoconferencing quality was great. And this is a far cry from the early 00s when I was on choppy voice-only conference calls with a team in India.
So new grads are not only competing with other new grads, they're competing with highly competent, experienced grads from all over the world, most of whom have salary expectations much lower than US new grads.
So what are remaining high-paying white collar jobs which aren't exposed to this type of foreign competition?
I'm thinking lawyer, since legal skills aren't as portable across international borders?
Forget white collar. Figure out a career that makes use of your hands.
Or make enough money to retire in the next couple years.
AI’s coming for them. It’s impossible to predict what lawyering will look like in four years.
I wonder what the impact of the rising base rate of employees with college degrees is. In 1992, a fresh college graduate had better educational attainment than 42% of the labor force. In 2016 (latest date I found numbers for), that was down to 32%. https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/educational-attainment-of...
That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average member of the labor force.
Compare under 27s with a degree vs without and you see the problem is youth unemployment. If you are 25 you’re better off with a degree than without though.
In the U.K. youth unemployment is about 2005-6 levels. It was far higher by 2010.
Isn't getting a college degree actually making you more selective, too, leading graduates to pass on jobs they would otherwise have taken?
I've known a few college graduates who have come up in this market. From what I see, the common pattern is to try and get a position in your field for 3-10 months. Somewhere in that time range, they burn out. Then they apply for something field related for a few months. Then anything. Once they've exhausted all options they usually give up.
We will likely have a similar concept in our country as China's "lying flat" movement unless we make a big shift.
This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.
"College grads are fully employed" certainly wasn't true in 2013 but the chart ain't that hard to read.
The news here is how much it's changed.
2011 and 2013 were the years most tilted in the other direction since 1991 (unemployment rate 2 percentage points lower among new grads than all others). Only since 2019 have new grad overall had a higher unemployment rate, and it's climbing.
One of the interesting aspects here is that bad economies generally favored new grads because the unemployment baseline was higher and employers were picky and favored "any degree" over "no degree". I wonder how much of the change is from less of a preference for "any degree but not much experience" to "experience regardless of degree" in work that doesn't exactly need a degree. And how much is from job availability shifts eating away at entry level roles combined with the ever-present "get a degree to get a good job" pro-college marketing for most of recent US history.
Yeah, I also wanted to question the "now" in the headline. But if you can believe the article's data, this is new - new since 2019.
>as China's "lying flat" movement
No, you miss that "lying flat" is only possible when cost of food/living is low and housing is abundant.
I believe the closest US equivalent is to get on disability to subsidize those costs. (Especially effective in cheaper areas.)
Getting on disability is insanely difficult and pays jack shit. That is not a US equivalent by any measure.
Even then, it's only possible when someone is willing to subsidize it, unless both food and housing are free.
Our lying flat is opiods. Generating dark money and killing off the useless, isn't late-stage capitalist empire great?
American parents on average may be less willing and financially able to support deadbeat adult children than their Chinese peers.
Bonkers to call college graduates deadbeats. These aren’t addicts or slackers. They had to have some level of achievement their whole lives and managed to finish a degree.
Deadbeat adult children? That’s definitely American thinking.
That’s why I tell people family isn’t #1 in America it’s like #3 or 4
Nonsense. Supporting adult children after they've finished education equates to putting family last, not first. Some youths need a forcing function to reach their full potential.
Hah, I speed ran that process when I graduated with a useless degree back in the dotcom days. I graduated and gave up any hope within 3 months. I was working at the shopping mall selling suits after that. I've since told anyone who will listen that college degrees are worthless and school loan debts are the kiss of death. Not many will listen, but I try.
BA/BS in many fields and also depending on the university and social connections are worthless.
Even in STEM, post graduate is the minimum to make the degree count for anything
But note the article also points out "Of the new grads who do have jobs, about 41% are underemployed, working roles that never required a degree in the first place."
So while I'd assume that yes, some graduates are more selective (as they should be, as they usually need to pay off student loans), a huge number of them are taking jobs that don't require their degrees.
Since 2019, although now the gap is higher than ever (1.4%).
College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares for academia (graduate school).
I'd argue the value of college has been steadily declining ever since we tried to push more and more people through it. When it's a filter it's a good signal, when it's a participation trophy far less so.
> The comparison is worth pinning down. "All workers" is the whole U.S. labor force, and most of them are older and more experienced than a new graduate, so a fresh grad starts at a natural disadvantage. For decades the degree more than canceled that disadvantage out. Now it does not.
> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.
I would postulate that there are two reasons why this is happening.
1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.
2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.
I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.
Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless.
I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.
> Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise.
Is your assertion that if fewer graduates struggled with these things, companies would post more jobs? Asking because there aren't enough actual¹, realistic² jobs to employ the current pool of job seekers.
¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.
² Qualification requirements that align with what the position actually needs.
Broadly, every company is on their own journey and makes their own discoveries in their own time, but Yes. I work with a swath of large employers in the midwest, workforce and economic development stuff, and there's a growing feeling among hiring managers that, the best way to put it is: the people they're interviewing out of college are, on the net, less equipped to succeed in the roles they're posting than their expectations on what level of capability college graduates should be at.
This doesn't mean there aren't great candidates.
This could be less on the individual and more on: colleges are getting worse at instruction/preparation (I'm bullish on this explanation among my colleagues; colleges never adapted to computers, let alone AI, the impacts of this just took a decade or so to shake out, which you should expect given the 16 year latency on education most students undergo) (though, again, ultimately its very complicated. multiple factors at play.)
For a lot of these companies this is all surfacing as: They're posting fewer entry level positions than they normally would (oftentimes not zero; just fewer), and if they have money in the budget available due to that, its going into AI.
> ¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.
Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates?
> Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates?
Yes but I can't promise Hard Data about Estimates (for anything): https://kagi.com/search?q=data+on+ghost+jobs&r=us&sh=RKCfaG9...
It'd be nice to see a break down by major.
Interestingly (and anecdotally), as a 10-year+ experienced college dropout, I still see challenges getting hired for jobs that list degrees as a requirement. The only time I get a call back on "front door" applications is with the fateful addendum of "OR relevant work experience". (I wonder if agents and their lack of human discretion is amplifying this.) The article's assertion that a college degree still offers an edge beyond entry level still seems very much true.
If you haven't got a degree on your resume, it just gets autodropped at the application stage by an ATS. No human sees it. Same if you're missing keywords.
Outside of medicine, a non-CS engineering degree, preferably also a masters, remains a good pathway to a reasonable non-parasitic job, although relocation may be required.
law is a parasitic job, with shit life-work balance, if you want a job, unless you want to work solo, good luck finding a law firm that wants you.
medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
> medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
It only is because it effectively has a guild\cartel system preventing an oversupply of doctors and that we have an aging population that increasingly demands medical care.
Can it be replaced with good references and an interesting portfolio?
For those with a CS degree, I think the issue is that we aren't correctly using CS and AI to amass power as we rightfully should. We literally hold in our hands the power to delete many desk jobs from existence, also to offer various original new services, but somehow we're feeling crippled. This disconnect requires bridging.
Deleting those desk jobs requires understanding those desk jobs. Which means either working them or teaming up with someone who does
A lot of desk job work:
1. To the extent it's standard, it's covered in textbooks which are easily learnable by AI.
2. To the extent it's original, it often is independently rediscoverable by AI from a combination of general intelligence plus workplace training data over which the AI learns.
3. To the extent it's learned (by a human from another human), it'll still slowly be captured by workplace training data over which the AI learns.
4. To the extent it's undocumented, it's up to management to have the processes documented.
the bar is higher and higher for less and less. donezo as a career.
Now I want to see the males/females ratio in that graph, I bet most of the unemployed are males, which is something weird I noticed where everyone who’s complaining about the job market are men, meanwhile women are hired and sometimes working two jobs on top of that.
The difference is only 11% of men versus 10.5% of women age 16-24 (PDF):
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/youth.pdf
How is that relevant? From TFA:
> By early 2026 recent grads sat at 5.6% unemployment
Which seems very far from your numbers.
That’s probably seasonal/part time/temp jobs given the age bracket, which is another something I noticed, there’s barely any deep studies across the ages. I think there are multiple reasons why females are more employed, but on top of them is the rise of service and nurturing economy (services healthcare etc) compared to other sectors, and these industries are dominated by women, and since there’s a general decline in general in say production or manufacturing, these economies boom, I mean, who’s gonna take care of boomers who dominate the wealth in general?
You're getting downvoted because people don't like what you say, but NPR had a piece confirming this just this April:
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/10/nx-s1-5773327/women-men-jobs-...
> Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.
In short, healthcare is the only field adding lots of jobs, and healthcare workers are something like 80% women. Men who are pursuing non-healthcare educational paths are much less likely to find a new job created for them; they'll have to compete for existing, filled jobs.
> Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.
This presentation of the stats sounds really misleading to me.
Let’s say there were 10 million quits and 10.369 million hires in that period.
5 million quits and 5.021 million hires among men.
5 million quits and 5.348 million hires among women.
In that case, yes it’s true that employment among women improved more than employment among men. No, it’s not true that an unemployed woman was 17x more likely than a man to find a job.
Also, the overall employment rate is higher for men than women and the rate has converged over the past several decades.
Thanks for sharing that! It’s something I noticed both online and IRL, it’s only guys (especially young ones) who are crying about the job market, I actually don’t know a single jobless female, all of them are working, and I know plenty who works two jobs!
Regarding the downvotes, I really don’t care about the fake online currency, I think their impact is negative in creating echo chambers in communities, and for some reason bringing men struggles is a taboo despite they suffer far more than women, suicide rates are clear example.
I like posts like this one because they are completely reasonable, perfectly accurate and easy to prove with links to articles, etc, and yet get downvoted because they dare to question TheMessage. HN resisted a long time compared to Reddit&Co but it eventually fell to the echo chamber syndrom.
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Are there people who think college education is a shortcut to generic employment? This seems like a very misleading statistic. Average earnings (including those unemployed), etc might be better. Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
> Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
This is so very easily said but how else is this supposed to work, exactly?
People have to start somewhere, and McDonalds experience doesn't count for any specialized job. Fuck, the "McDonalds-tier" jobs will often turn down graduates because they'll obviously walk the moment they get something better.
If no employer is willing to take a chance on graduates, then they just can't get any job experience. "A job that will pay for a roof over one's head" really isn't that extreme an ask.
As has been said a trillion times about AI and tech before AI: Senior level staff is going to age out, it has to be replaced or the entire industry gets sent offshore.
In terms of general unemployment across fields, youth unemployment is extremely corrosive to society.
This is already visible in how anti-AI sentiment is starting to boil over and the lurch rightward in politics. If this continues to escalate, the outcome will be nightmarish. Half of them bombing datacenters, the other half cheering as ICE raids the tech workers.
> or the entire industry gets sent offshore.
Assuming there are any seniors offshore either
I think the management answer to this is that you can just hire 9 offshore not-seniors for less money, and that somehow equals the experience of a single onshore senior. In that sense it's a kind of the experience equivalent of the 9 women/1month == baby analogy, and obviously wrong. Unless you're in management.
More or less correct. It's not that management believes in "9 offshore juniors", it's just that they don't know (nor care to confirm) who's actually working for them at the outsourcing firm.
The combined incentive of cost cutting at the outsourcing firm and foolish MBAs in the west opting for the cheapest outsourcing means that the offshore does actually employ juniors, who do build up the experience to become seniors.
> college education is a shortcut to generic employment
That was/is the societal narrative for the last forty plus years, yes.
Yep, I remember being told that it doesn't matter which major I pick because there would be jobs that wanted just any bachelor's degree.
I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.
How else would you sell it?
>Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
But as the graph also shows, graduate unemployment rate was lower for much of 2010s and before, so in some sense it really was "easier" with a college degree.