My opinion is that the greatest harm that Universities do their students is to instill a false sense of belonging to the economic elite. Indeed, higher ed marketing is full of "Million dollars more" than not getting a degree, and so they set expectations that cannot be met.
Case in point, a young graduate that I met over the weekend. I was walking Wolfgang down Canton Street (Roswell's "restaurant row") to get him used to crowds of people. Since most people love a puppy, this was a slow process - walk 5 feet and wait while sumdood scratches Wolfie's ears.
One of those sumdoods was a young graduate having a beer with his chums. He'd been out of school since May, but was still unemployed. Three things struck me from our brief conversation:
1. It seems that I'm an idiot or something, because he let me know a couple times that he knew all about what I was saying, only more so. Sure wish I was as smart as he is.
2. He's simply unable to find any work, or even get a reply to his resumes. His major? International Relations. Seems passing strange that he's not already Deputy Undersecretary at State Department.
3. I mentioned the guy from Canrig I met in the Denver Airport while I was grabbing a burger. The guy was flying back out the the Bakken oil field, and lamented how they simply couldn't fill their open positions and that they train unskilled newbies. Seems that $75,000 a year is the starting point, and hard workers can make six digits with overtime. Unskilled hard workers.
Our young hero the recent graduate seemed slightly contemptuous when I mentioned this. No doubt it would be a step down for a (do doubt highly regarded) International Relations grad sleeping in his parent's basement to get crude oil under his fingernails while making six figures.
If this guy takes two or three years doing unpaid internships and the like, that's a quarter million dollars that his University indoctrination will have cost him. They say that education is expensive, but boy, howdy. But I guess that there is a certain type (an expensively educated type) who will prefer #OCCUPYWALLSTREET to #OCCUPYBAKKENOILFIELD.
False class consciousness. He thinks that he's fit to Rule, because of his education.
I blame crossing guards.
ReplyDeleteI grew up secure in the knowledge that I was so insignificant that if I was to cross the street and get hit by a car, everyone would agree that it was MY fault.
Now, all the little kiddies are so important that they assign actual adults with better things to do to dress up in silly reflective vests and wave stop signs at passing cars so that Mommy's Uterine Wonder won't have to look both ways before he crosses the street.
Is it any wonder that children who believed that the whole world stopped so they could cross the road would grow up to be douchebags drinking beer on sidewalk barstools too proud to do some actual work?
I've heard that coal companies in West Virginia have problems similar to those of Canrig. A basic unskilled grunt starts about $45 grand, and if he can pass the electrician's entrance exam (i.e. his shoes are tied correctly) he'll draw that pay while they teach him to be an electrician. Once he graduates from that training his pay goes to about $60 to $70 grand. Yet they still can't find enough people to fill the available jobs.
ReplyDeleteI guess the scions of the elite would rather work off their student loans making $28 grand a year in a cubicle near a coast than live in West Virginia. Their loss; West Virginia is pretty country.
Yep, they DO push them in the wrong way... Nothing wrong with hard work! And they CAN earn a bunch of $$ for doing that 'manual labor', if they'd "stoop" to actually doing it!
ReplyDeleteThey'll train him to be a certified electrian? Paying him the whole time? Jeez, if I was in that region and needed work, hell, coal dust is like other dirt: washes off at the end of the shift.
ReplyDeleteWas an electrical contractor doing rock/sand plants for a long time.
ReplyDeleteCollege grads work for me now.
firehand coming from a coal mining area ever heard of black lung and why coal miners die young. Even with modern machinery it's hard dangerous work.
ReplyDeleteThe skilled trades and practical college majors are the way to go. If only the high school counselors and parents could see the light.
ReplyDeleteSean's take is a new one to me, but I rather like it
ReplyDeleteThe douche bag is living out his parents "snowflake" theory. The snowflake theory is that every person is like a snowflake....an individual and unique; never to be duplicated ever again.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunatly, mommy and daddy never seem to go to the logical conclusion with that analogy...that jr is landing in the snow bank with all the rest of the snowflakes and getting blown around by the winds of life!
Steve
We run into the same thing in the Merchant Marines. You do need a high school diploma and to have not committed any violent crimes, but beyond that, a tugboat deckhand starts at 50k a year working 14 days on/14 off with full benefits, with the most onerous task of the trip being that they have to help with dinner. Advancement is paid by employers, and encouraged, and the 6-figure mark is about normal after 3 years, and on-the-job training quailifies one to be a licensed mechanical engineer if you don't like to drive a boat, and mechanical engineers seem to do OK, too.
ReplyDeleteDon't neglect the weirdness and friction in the hiring process. Re. the culture of friction (seen at a higher skill level), see http://southbend7.blogspot.com/2012/10/is-resume-screening-software-really.html . And at the unskilled-will-train level...
ReplyDeleteI looked into Canrig because I have a smart hard-working Korean friend. She's likely to relocate next month anyway. Ever since her newspaper work laying out ads went away, she's been unhappy with stressful jobs paying a lot less than $75k. (E.g., assistant manager at a little beauty supply store, and unskilled caring for people too ill to care for themselves.) I thought she'd be interested in $75k, so I tried to use the Canrig site to find jobs that might match the Canrig guy's description. I did find a class of jobs, "Crew Worker", matching the "train unskilled newbies" part of his description nicely. But I couldn't find any information about pay. It's not so interesting to tell my friend about a job which might be $12/hour to relocate to an expensive boomtown. More generally, an applicant can't make a sane tradeoff between locations. Behind the scenes, Canrig might know full well that it's paying $35k in South Texas and $40k in Wyoming and $75k in North Dakota. Given this knowledge, different candidates would make different choices. The Canrig guy you met in the airport complained that he, knowing how much Canrig pays in the most lucrative area, doesn't find applicants even in this most lucrative area. But the website tries to shoehorn an applicant into pre-selecting regions to apply for without being given any clue about which region(s) would be most lucrative. The result doesn't tell you much about whether people would choose to relocate to a lucrative area if they knew.
The website also has some annoying usability issues. It's harder than necessary to figure out how to "just list all the jobs for me to skim --- *all* of them, since I am an unskilled outsider and don't know enough yet to guess whether to look in 'Maintenance & Support' or 'Land Drilling Operations' or 'Technical Services' or what." And it's unnecessary to refuse to display more than 13 entries per page. And it's unnecessary to refuse to use the HTML "A" hyperlink tag for hyperlinks, and instead use some hand-rolled Javascript partial emulation of hyperlinks, an emulation which doesn't support my usual habit of clicking the middle mouse button in order to open the ad in a separate page. And it's unnecessary for the emulation silently ignore middle-click instead of giving some hint that this is the right place to click (but that apparently only left-clicking is supported).
So it seems to me that the company conceals its value proposition ($75k salary for relocation and unskilled hard work) awfully well. Even knowing what I was looking for, I couldn't find any information that might verify it (or disconfirm it, for that matter); can you? The company conceals it so well, in fact, that the concealment seems to be a sufficient explanation for the observed result of not getting many suitable applicants. So while I do tend to believe that people like the young graduate described in the original post are a real problem, the result observed by the Canrig guy does not seem to be very strong evidence for this belief. I interpret it more as evidence for "Canrig has actual organizational incentives against stating salaries publicly which are considerably stronger than any claimed organizational interest in hiring people" and "Canrig complacently tolerates a level of friction in the job posting and hiring process that would likely be a firing offense in a sales process" than literally "[Canrig] simply couldn't fill their [unskilled] open positions [at $75k]."
I second Mr. Newman's observations.
ReplyDeleteAnd as a fortysomething IT guy who just got laid off (job got sent to India), but I'm not inclined to move to North Dakota if the only jobs available are oil field roustabout--a fine job, if you're nineteen and fit, but I'm not up to 120-hour work weeks dragging drill pipe off of flatbed trucks any more, or "water truck driver," CDL holders only, 5+ years experience only, $40K to drive water trucks up and down icy unpaved mountain roads in the Badlands in the middle of a North Dakota winter.
I see a lot of job listings for electricians and managers, but I'm not an electrician, not a diesel mechanic, don't have a pilot's license, I'm not a management puke, and my degree appears to be in the wrong field. So it's not immediately obvious to me that it's in my interest to move to some isolated boomtown where the landlords want $4000 a month for a studio apartment, first and last month's rent in advance please, plus $6000 security deposit, and roll the dice. If Canrig needs people with my skill set, they're being pretty tight-lipped about it.
There an age ceiling in the Merchant Marine?
ReplyDeleteAhh, to know everything without actually having done anything.
ReplyDelete