(no subject)

[tisiphone]

Maybe the US has overvalued college educations, leading to diminishing marginal returns on an exceptionally expensive proposition.

Comments

[indicolite.livejournal.com]

One thing that the article doesn't cover is whether the education that the janitor etc. has is an American education. The article describes "17 million college-educated Americans" but does not define whether they mean 'residents of the US who have a college education from some college on Earth', 'citizens of the US who have a college education from some college on Earth,' or 'residents/citizens of the US who have an education from some college in the US.'

I can definitely guess that at least some of the people in that statistic are those who have a higher education degree from a non-English speaking country, move to the US, and do not yet/ever have the English to get a job that is theoretically commensurate with their education level.

Another scenario is that, even though they may have the English, they do not have acknowledgement of their degree as valid and equivalent by the professional organization in the US governing this (e.g. engineering, medicine, law, etc.) even though they may have listed it on whatever form the Bureau of Labour Statistics used to gain this information, because they worked hard for their degree in their birth country and consider themselves college-educated, but cannot work in their field.

Anecdote is not the singular of data, but I know a great many people in Canada in one or the other of these situations.

[jabber.livejournal.com]

Thank you for completely taking the air out of my sail. Here I was, ready to make some glib comments about "What do you expect, when we go around calling it "facilities engineering" ". And here you are making an extremely valid point.

My mother, a Psych Ph.D. worked as a janitor and otherwise menial laborer, for about 10 years, before her use of the English language and social network grew to a point where she could reenter her field.

Those immigrant Ph.D.'s, man, oming here stealing American janitorial and factory/warehouse jobs. We need walls around the borders and around our ivory towers as well.

[indicolite.livejournal.com]

My father has a master's in engineering and does not work in his field because his degree was not acknowledged when he entered Canada, and his English is too poor to go back to university to retrain as an engineer here. My mother left while in the thesis stage of her PhD in chemical engineering; she ended up re-entering college (what Canadians call college, and Americans would call a vocational/community college, I think) to take a three-year nursing diploma, completely different.

The situation would be even worse for someone who, say, has a PhD in Armenian literature, or a degree in Hungarian law - even if they had the English, they would have to train all over again to work as a lawyer in the U.S., not to speak of having the money for law school; while the few American universities that may have a position for an Armenian lit specialist have hundreds of American humanities grads clawing for that position.

The article points out the problem but glibly, and does not, at all, suggest a solution.