There are 18,000 parking lot attendants in the U.S. with college degrees.

“There are 18,000 parking lot attendants in the U.S. with college degrees. There are 5,000 janitors in the U.S. with PhDs. In all, some 17 million college-educated Americans have jobs that don't require their level of education.”

I don’t want to demean folks getting jobs. I think it is an even bigger problem when folks remain unemployed because they refuse to take a job because it “is below them”. From my angle, if you need a job then any honest work is a blessing.

But this article points to the generalization about college that is the weakness in the discussion. Not all college education is created equally. A degree in Art History or Recreation Management today rarely generates a related job for the college graduate after graduation. But high school kids head off to college, financed by debt and think: “They wouldn’t be offering this degree if graduates weren’t getting jobs.” Colleges are not financing many of these college educations (the taxpayer is) and so they never face the pain of their graduates not being able to pay back the loans, when their grads have received an interesting but not-in-demand skill set.

We need more Science and Engineering graduates to gain a competitive advantage in the world economy. But today only 5% of US college graduates major in engineering and of those half are from outside the US. We need folks that are trained in a number of technical subjects from science to electronic microscope repair. We don’t need more Celtic History majors to reclaim our manufacturing advantage.