Are College Degrees in Korea Becoming Worthless?
This is what happens when everyone goes to college and want the same jobs:
Last year, 71 percent of high-school graduates went on university, but only 59.3 percent of university and college graduates were able to find jobs. The number of unemployed people between 15 to 29 years of age has surpassed 400,000.
Now young jobless people often cause a headache for their parents who still have to support them.
Yet young graduates continue to insist on jobs with major conglomerates in Seoul, which are not only growing scarce but extremely competitive, while small businesses have a tough time finding people to work for them.
A study by the Ministry of Employment and Labor shows that there will be a shortage of high-school graduates to the tune of 320,000 by 2020 and more than 500,000 excess university graduates.
Unless university graduates lower their sights and seek a wider range of job options, the day may come when a degree becomes utterly useless. (Chosun Ilbo)
You can read more at the link, but I think it is arguable that college degrees with a few exceptions in both the U.S. and Korea have been devalued to where they are becoming glorified high school diplomas.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-27/guest-post-college-waste-time-and-money Is college a waste of munny?
“Only” 59 percent of Korean degree holders were able to get a job?
That’s actually not too bad. I figure in America, joblessness among college educated kids are way worse.
Anybody that wants a job can find (or make) one. The folks wandering around wailing are exactly the type that welcomes government handouts and accepts the chains of a slave. BTW, did you notice how Mr. Mom-jeans used his Nobel Prize-winning ways to bomb yet another country? And I lost track of how many boots on the ground.
Is college a waste of munny? Yes and no. It is waste of munny if you major in useless degrees, like how most white people go for (sort of a cop out for being dumb). But it can be valuable if you go after math/science/technology oriented majors that most Asians (Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Japanese, etc) that tend to go for. Without Asian scientists and technicians engineering, making, and running all the sophisticated computers and technologies, both US and Canada would collapse. The few white people who do make it in technology, quickly move up their posts and become bosses. They’re good at telling other people what to do due to all the old white boy’s clubs, but are useless technicians. Unfortunately for them, those top leadership jobs are much fewer in numbers.
The myth that not enough Americans are getting technical degrees has been pushed by the tech industry so foreign workers can be hired for substantially less pay.
Facebook spends big money to lobby for immigration “reform” because they “can’t find enough skilled tech workers” while Microsoft lays off another 18,000.
There is an interesting article about a tech company that hired cheap guest workers, for a fraction of the pay, and made the American workers train them before being laid off.
…but, yes, worthless degrees are worthless… even more-so when students treat them as extended high school and for-profit universities are happy to accomodate that attitude.
Getting a degree is never a gaurantee for success but having one provides more opportunities to succeed than not having one.
Asians don’t dominate the science and technological field in America, Tom. Most engineers in tech, aerospace, military, etc are not Asians.
If you’re talking about pharmacy, nursing, law firms, software design or some research positions, yeah, you’ll find a fair amount of Asians there. But those Asians are cream of the crop.
EASY SOLUTION
Employment in STEM Occupations: 2011
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
STEM jobs% (total American workforce%)
White: 70.8 (66.9)
Asian: 14.5 (5.5)
Black: 6.5 (10.8)
Hispanic: 6.5 (14.9)
Women: 25.8% (47.5)
It is obvious that Asians are the problem as they have STEM jobs at a rate almost 3 times their representation in the non-STEM workforce. If there were hiring quotas to strip Asians of these excess jobs, which would then be handed to black and Hispanic workers to equalize their representation, the problem would be solved.
Another solution might be to reclassify fruit and vegetable picking as applied botany and janitorial services as micro-environmental engineering.
For women, prostitution could be reclassified as reproductive neuroscience.
For white males, quantum chromodynamics could be reclassified as construction work and organic chemical engineering as food services.
See. Problem solved… without affecting American high-tech productivity.
I should be the president.
JoeC,
“Getting a degree is never a gaurantee for success but having one provides more opportunities to succeed than not having one.”
You are quite correct… though companies are wising up to the fact that universities are churning out degrees for students with no useful knowledge or skills… but with an attitude that runs counter to what makes a good cog in a corporate machine… though that complaint likely surfaces every generation.
It seems many high schools have dumbed down their standards to institute Nobody Fails policies… and universities have responded by offering for-profit classes (math/science/English) that are equivalent to what most high school students studied a generation ago.
I encourage anyone interested to read this… and the rest of his site.
http://professorconfess.blogspot.kr/2013/06/all-remedial-classes-in-one-place.html
Wow, that’s an interesting site, CH. I bookmarked it. “Explorations in Algebra”? Holy crap.
I took college algebra in eleventh grade, since I was done with all of my math courses (finished calculus in tenth grade). It was easy, obviously…but I didn’t realize how handy those three college credits would be.
After taking calc 1,2,3, and dif equations and getting my first degree, I decided to get my teaching degree so the first would be more useful (I never got it, but it was a thought). One of the requirements at the teaching college was college algebra…they wouldn’t accept calc 1,2,3, dif eq as a substitute. But, luckily I’d taken college algebra in eleventh grade.
Then I went to get my RN and…exact same thing. “Do you have college algebra?” Calc 1,2,3, dif eq (and the fact that I’d had a number of classes which required advanced mathematics) didn’t matter.
WTF
“finished calculus in tenth grade”
Daaaaaamn, Liz. How does one do that?
I didn’t go to 8th grade and was not able to take Algebra I so I self-studied the Algebra I book all summer from 9am to 11am, and worked through every example. Most things I figured out but some I was not clear on. The biggest problem is that I could DO algebra but did not FEEL algebra.
For this reason, Algebra II was pretty miserable my freshman year. The rest of high school was geometry, trigonometry, and senior year calculus. I suppose I could have taken geometry and trig together in 10th grade and finished calc in 11th…
…but how does one go about calc in 10th grade? Did you skip geometry or trig?
I must say the biggest thing I learned from all this math is that math is taught incorrectly to some extent.
I really didn’t understand the point of trig until I took electromagnetic theory and didn’t truly understand calc until kinematics. Much of the abstract mathematics would have been easier to grasp if had been taught in conjunction with more real-world concepts like, “This is your AC volts, this is your amps, this is your frequency, this is your duty cycle and this is your time… how many watt-hours were involved?” Instead, there was a lot of “find the area under this random and pointless curve” while you are wondering “Why the fukk would I ever care about that and how is it going to get me rich or laid?”
There is a really big difference between being able to roboticly do abstract problems on a test… and being able to recognize a problem in the real world and intuitively know how to solve it mathematically.
Off my math soapbox.
(I have a transistor theory soapbox, too… as they are being taught wrong as well)
DC Schools: $29,349 Spent Per Pupil, the Most Expensive in the Nation.
83% Not Proficient in Reading and 81% Not Proficient in Math
http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/terence-p-jeffrey/dc-schools-29349-pupil-83-not-proficient-reading
CH, I took algebra and geometry before highschool, and (if I remember right) I took algebra II and trig at the same time in ninth grade.
I agree 100 percent that practical application should be taught in conjunction with abstract problems, but I had a lot more trouble with some aspects of practical application (I think most women do, if I remember correctly male sex hormones are the biggest factor in the development of the parts of the brain that handle things like formal logic, analysis, spatial reasoning, direction sense and hyper-focus). I’ve forgotten it all anyway. My husband is the engineer and he still actually remembers most of the stuff.
The teachers in DC schools probably get combat pay, Denny.
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