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When Roz Tuplin graduated in 2010 she thought that a post-graduate degree in English Literature would be good grounding for a job in the media.
She knew she would have to gain work experience, but after a year of trying to get a placement, she has decided to pay employers £65 a day to let her through the door.
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Access to internships, many said to have been arranged through well-connected parents, has been an area of controversy.
In April, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the schemes were unfair on the less well-off and the common practice of making young people work for nothing is barring entry to those from poorer backgrounds.
Although Ms Tuplin has saved to pay for the work experience she recognises that she is in a privileged position.
Though philosophy is routinely dismissed and disparaged - as useless as English, as dead as Latin, as diminished as library science - more college students are getting degrees in that field than ever before.
Though the overall figures remain small, the number of four-year graduates has grown 46 percent in a decade, surpassing the growth rates of much bigger programs such as psychology and history.
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"The demise of philosophy, and, more generally, of the liberal arts, is grossly exaggerated," said Jeff Robbins, a professor of religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa.
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The word philosophy comes from the Greek philosophia, meaning "love of wisdom," and its study is defined as, well, even philosophers can't agree on an exact interpretation. Plato described it as "the science of the idea."
Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, and Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and principal research scientist at the center, are two of the nation’s leading experts on technology and productivity. The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for the pair, whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology.
Indeed, they were originally going to write a book titled, “The Digital Frontier,” about the “cornucopia of innovation that is going on,” Mr. McAfee said. Yet as the employment picture failed to brighten in the last two years, the two changed course to examine technology’s role in the jobless recovery.
The authors are not the only ones recently to point to the job fallout from technology. In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work. “This last repository of jobs is shrinking — fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs — and we have a problem,” Mr. Arthur writes.
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Source: Steven J. Davis, Jason Faberman and John Haltiwanger using data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Recessions, as dated by the NBER.
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Bill Clinton put his finger on a distressing aspect of the U.S. jobs situation in a recent television interview. The former president remarked that openings are being filled at only half the rate of previous recessions, even though current unemployment is much higher. He stressed the bleak outlook for job-seeking construction workers and the need for retraining and skills development.
He has a point: Construction workers can't easily become nurses. And, given the weak housing market, an early return of boom times in construction is highly unlikely. So skill mismatch will persist. It slows the pace of job filling by making it harder for employers to find suitable hires.
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occasionally someone remembers that our lives are so short, the time is so precious, and they push aside the pile to look again on the "Promised Land." And then they do something important. They quit their job.
This happened to Kai Nagata this week. Kai was a Canadian TV reporter who suddenly resigned because he realized he could be doing more if he was doing something else. In his words:
"I quit my job because the idea burrowed into my mind that, on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life."
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. The Fiscal Times recently talked with Martin Ford, author of The Lights In the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, about how advances in robotics will affect future job markets.
Ford’s prediction?
Machines and computers are getting better at an accelerated rate, and I think within maybe 5 to 10 years things are going to get to the level where machines begin to surpass the ability of most people to do routine work. I base this partly on my belief that most of the work out there in the economy is routine in nature. There aren’t that many people that are paid to think creative thoughts
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while we certainly like to think that the jobs we do are important and that we are good at them, the reality of the situation is that most jobs could feasibly be done by machines (journalism included).
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Scientists have documented the health benefits of staying in a long-term romantic relationship, including reduced illness and longer life. Employees who stick with a single company rather than job-hop tend for the most part to be better compensated financially and to be more productive and creative, other research has found. Another study shows that continuing to root for one's hometown team helps ease the anxiety of moving to a new city.
Studies looking at loyalty and trust suggest that these qualities may be fundamental to human relationships, some psychologists say. In life, there are few guarantees that another person isn't going to hurt us, they say. Therefore, staying loyal to someone, and preserving a mutual feeling of trust, allow people to be able to function with others without constantly suspecting their motives, they say.
: Today, ManpowerGroup issued its sixth annual survey of global "Talent Shortage" finding a pronounced shortage of skilled workers around the world (PDF). Also today, the New York Times has a front page story about the difficulties that college graduates have in the United States finding jobs.
There is obviously a policy problem here, and some of it has to do with what universities are (or are not) doing.
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employers simply aren’t finding anyone available in their markets. Another 22% of employers say their applicants lack the technical competencies or “hard” skills needed for the job, while candidates’ lack of business knowledge or formal qualifications is the main reason identified by 15% of employers.
• Approximately three-quarters of employers globally cite a lack of experience, skills or knowledge as the primary reason for the difficulty filling positions. However, only one in five employers is concentrating on training and development to fill the gap. A mere 6% of employers are working more closely with educational institutions to create curriculums that close knowledge gaps. -
Here is a figure from the NYT article showing employment success rates of recent college graduates:
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In 2006, the last full year in which the U.S. federal minimum wage was a constant value throughout the whole year, at least before 2010, approximately 6,637,649 individuals in the United States earned the 2010 equivalent of $7.85 per hour1 or less.
For 2010, the first full year in which the U.S. federal minimum wage was a constant value through the year since 2006, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that an average of just 4,361,000 individuals in the United States earned the same equivalent of the current prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.85 or less throughout the year.
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In terms of jobs lost, that means that 2,276,949 of the jobs lost in the U.S. economy since 2006 have been jobs that were directly impacted by the series of minimum wage increases that were mandated by the federal goverment in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
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