Study: Nearly half overqualified for jobs

[struggle4progress]

By USA Today

Published: Sunday, January 27, 2013, 9:34 p.m.
Updated 4 hours ago

Nearly half of working Americans with college degrees are in jobs for which they’re overqualified, a study out on Monday suggests.

And the study, released by the nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity, argues that the trend is likely to continue for newly minted college graduates in the next decade ...

Vedder, whose study is based on 2010 Labor Department data, says the problem is the stock of college graduates in the workforce (41.7 million) in 2010 was larger than the number of jobs requiring a college degree (28.6 million).

That, he says, helps explain why 15 percent of taxi drivers in 2010 had bachelor’s degrees versus 1 percent in 1970. Among retail sales clerks, 25 percent had a bachelor’s degree in 2010. Less than 5 percent did in 1970 ...

http://triblive.com/usworld/nation/3374330-74/percent-degree-college

[Warpy]

1. Pretty soon they're going to require a baccalaureate to drive those cabs

or wait those tables. The same thing happened to the high school diploma in the last Depression. Before then, a solid 8th grade education was adequate for most jobs and a high school education prepared you to teach primary school.

Degree creep has already happened in some parts of the country. I remember one particularly circumlocutive "help wanted" ad in the Boston Globe in the early 90s. Careful deconstruction of the verbiage showed that what they were looking for was a stock boy! With a 4 year degree!

Insane!

But expect it to happen, kids.

[Kalidurga]

2. I have been over qualified for every job I have ever had...

and that was before getting a degree. I will be attending a 4 year university in the fall, because there literally are no jobs available if you have only a 2 year degree. I will still look for a job with my 2 year degree, but I very likely will still be doing some sort of cashier position, maybe at the bank down the street though instead of at a retail store.

[davidn3600]

3. Thanks to free trade...the job market now heavily favors employers, probably forever

[Sherman A1]

4. Agreed

I work with many folks, degrees or not who are exceptionally overqualified for the jobs they are doing.

[quaker bill]

5. And yet we "reform" education to make more

because having more training and more degrees will cure the economy. Guess what, it won't. Flooding the economy with degrees and training, something we have apparently already done, has not helped create the jobs that might use all this training.

We are working the wrong end of the equation here.

[quadrature]

6. having a degree is sometimes a negative

suppose you plan to bag groceries for a career.

you could start at 18, out
of HS.

or you go to college, and start at age 22.

the non-college person will always have more
experience.