In the last couple years, there have been more jobs than people who need them, yet many of these jobs go unfilled. What’s happening is an odd inversion of where employee scarcity usually exists: it’s generally Silicon Valley type jobs that have trouble getting filled because, while there are lots of workers, there aren’t enough with the proper education. What’s happening now is it’s low-wage service jobs that can’t get filled, because there are too many people with degrees in the field. People are going to college more and more because they can’t live on poverty wages, which is leaving poverty-wage jobs unfilled.
This is kind of what I’ve assumed would happen for a while. For most middle-class jobs, you don’t actually need a college education to perform them. I temped in an office job once doing work I could have performed in seventh grade, but, since I didn’t have a degree, I never could have applied for a job there. Most of my coworkers had completely unrelated degrees; the guy who trained me was a theatre major. Requiring a college education is simply a way of weeding people out of the application process: when everyone wants a middle-class job, some are going to have college degrees, which, frankly, makes them overqualified for things like data entry. But, since you’re going to get college-educated applicants, why even bother with people who don’t have degrees? Just put “degree required” on your application and thin the herd.
So then a college degree becomes a requirement for any job with a decent wage even though the education itself is rarely applicable. Now everyone needs to go to college to get any sort of decent salary. It becomes just a badge of “I could afford college,” a way to keep the children of middle class parents from slipping into the working class and a way of keeping the working class from improving their station.
But everyone getting college degrees doesn’t magic a bunch of middle-class jobs into existence. And, once you have more people with degrees than jobs that require them, you see what we’re seeing now: people who are overqualified for low-wage jobs who can’t get employed at a middle wage. The glut of applicants that requiring a college degree was supposed to reduce has returned because all the people getting turned away got degrees. I worry the result is they’ll just start requiring a master’s degree for middle-wage jobs.
Requiring college experience was never about the education, it was just putting up a barrier of entry. There still just aren’t enough jobs with decent wages for all the people who need them. And now we’ve got a low-wage worker shortage. The right thing to do would be, at the very least, to dramatically increase the wages of service and labor jobs so people are willing to take them again, but it’s hard to see that happening in the current climate.