Why a BA is Now a Ticket to A Job in a Coffee Shop [View all]

[steve2470]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/27/why-a-ba-is-now-a-ticket-to-a-job-in-a-coffee-shop.html



Too many college kids are living in Mom's basement, or working at Starbucks. Like most personal finance columnists, I get the letters from them: what do I do? How do I fix this? For many, the answer is grad school. But I get the letters from grad students too. A while back, I found myself talking to a professor whose school has a number of impressive-sounding graduate programs that were originally conceived as add-ons for a professional degree in law or medicine or business. They are now attracting a number of students who just go for the standalone degree. He didn't understand what the career path was for these kids, and he wasn't sure that they did either.

"It sounds good, so they can persuade their parents to pay for it," he said, a touch guiltily.

A new paper from Paul Beaudry, David Green, and Benjamin Sand argues that these worried kids--and their worried parents--are not just imagining things. The phenomenon is all too real. Skilled workers with higher degrees are increasingly ending up in lower-skilled jobs that don't really require a degree--and in the process, they're pushing unskilled workers out of the labor force altogether.