education & pay

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Jul 30 15:01:45 PDT 2000


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


>
> At least one in five employed B.A.s was in a non-college job,
> according to a 1994 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (and
> this without even considering the problem of credential inflation
> that has been mentioned several times here).

There is still another complication here. (And I have no idea as to what the political or social significance of this is -- it may be a mere oddity or it may be important.) Possibly a fairly large number of those B.A.s in non-college jobs are nevertheless in them for reasons related either to the college education or to the reasons that led to that education: test-taking ability. When Jan applied for the Post Office job she held for 18 years it was in the middle of the 1981-82 recession -- and over 200 people applied for 18 openings. The job could have been done by an 8th grade graduate, and only required a high school diploma, *but every single one of the people hired had a bachelors and a number of them had postgraduate work. It was a new unit (for computerized fwd of mail) with all new employees, and hence seniority within the unit was determined by test scores. (That seniority made the difference, among other things, on whether one worked minimally civilized hours or the shift hours that account for Post Office employees having almost as high a divorce rate as cops.)

Another point, though off the present thread. That scattering of college graduates throughout the work force means that the intellectual skills (whatever they are) provided by college training can be found in many unexpected locations within the working class.

Carrol



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