Oversell college. Waste. Unemployment

It increasingly looks like I was more correct than otherwise in my arguments that maybe we are overselling college. Here is an excerpt from the editorial in the Register Guard, which quotes a report from Skills2Compete-Oregon.

[In] 2007 only 29 percent of Oregonians were employed in jobs that required four or more years of college. Another 19 percent worked in jobs that required only a high school education or less. The majority — 52 percent — held middle-skill jobs. What’s more, nearly half of all job openings until the middle of the next decade will be in middle-skill fields.

The report surveyed current and projected demand in 30 middle-skill occupations, and found that employment in all of them is expected to grow. The median income — half earn more, half earn less — of electricians was $56,800 in 2006, and Oregon will need 12 percent more of them by 2016. Radiology technicians’ median income was $53,500, and the number of jobs in that field will grow by 28 percent. Firefighters’ median pay was $46,400, and their number will grow by 12 percent. Paralegals had a median salary of $39,400 in 2006, and over a 10-year period the number of jobs is projected to grow by 15 percent.

Oregon is not preparing its labor force to fill these jobs.

I suppose it is really easy for me to say, "I told you so!" But, I do remember how my opinion was not quite well-received.

Anyway, watch the group's testimony at a House Committee hearing:

Law. Business. Politicians. Problem.

As one with a background in academia and engineering, with a dabbling of economics and journalism, I can not but think that the problem with politics is that it is dominated by people from the "wrong" professions :-) Here is the Economist:

Politicians' previous professions vary greatly by country

WHEN Barack Obama met Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, it was an encounter not just between two presidents, but also between two professions. A lawyer, trained to argue from first principles and haggle over words, was speaking to an engineer, who knew how to build physical structures and keep them intact. To find out why some professions are prevalent among politicians The Economist trawled through a sample of almost 5,000 politicians in “International Who’s Who”, a reference book, to examine their backgrounds. Some findings are predictable. Africa is full of military men, while lawyers dominate in democracies such as Germany, France and, of course, America. China has a fondness for engineers. But other countries have their own peculiarities. Egypt likes academics; South Korea, civil servants; Brazil, doctors.

Those were the days, my friend

Once upon a time there was a tavern, Where we used to raise a glass or two. Remember how we laughed away the hours, And dreamed of all the great things we would do. Refrain: Those were the days my friend, We'd thought they'd never end, We'd sing and dance for-ever and a day, We'd live the life we choose, We'd fight and never lose, For we were young and sure to have our way. Lalala lah lala, lalala lah lala Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days.

Then the busy years when rushing by us.
We lost our starry notions on the way.
If by chance I'd see you in the tavern,
We'd smile at one another and we'd say:
Refrain:

Just tonight I stood before the tavern,
Nothing seemed the way it used to be.
In the glass I saw a strange reflection,
Was that lonely person really me.
Refrain:

Through the door there came familiar laughter.
I saw your face and heard you call my name.
Oh, my friend, we're older but no wiser,
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same.
Refrain:

Tax protests. Fox News. Bizarro world!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Nationwide Tax Protests
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Economic crisis. Stay the course. False Dawns.

A couple of days ago, the official state economist of my wonderful state--Oregon--came out with the depressing news that unemployment had reached 12.1 percent. It simply is beyond awful that one in eight Oregonians interested in being productive has not been able to find work :-(
I told my students that we would find out on Friday whether Oregon is the worst in the country, in terms of unemployment rate. Turns out that Michigan beat us, not by much though. With 12.6 percent unemployment rate, Michigan is in quite a slump. The question for Michigan is whether the state would end up matching its 1982 record of 16.9 percent unemployment.

Chris Wilson at Slate has put together a really neat animated graphic where he shows, by county, that:

As early as August 2007, for example—several months before the recession officially began—jobs were already on the decline in southwest Florida; Orange County, Calif.; much of New Jersey; and Detroit, while other areas of the country remained on the uptick.

Too bad that the interactive map that Wilson has done is not available with an embedding option.

Given that employment is still at an awful stage, I am beginning to get ticked off when media reports focus only on the ups and downs in the stock market indices. All the more the reason why I appreciated Krugman's column, where he notes:

The 2001 recession officially lasted only eight months, ending in November of that year. But unemployment kept rising for another year and a half. The same thing happened after the 1990-91 recession. And there’s every reason to believe that it will happen this time too. Don’t be surprised if unemployment keeps rising right through 2010.

How much ever we might be upset and frustrated with everything from TARP, AIG, foreclosures, GM, ...., we have no option but to keep up with trying everything possible to prevent a global depression. We simply have no choice in this. Again, way better to channel Krugman's words:

History shows that one of the great policy dangers, in the face of a severe economic slump, is premature optimism. F.D.R. responded to signs of recovery by cutting the Works Progress Administration in half and raising taxes; the Great Depression promptly returned in full force. Japan slackened its efforts halfway through its lost decade, ensuring another five years of stagnation.

The Obama administration’s economists understand this. They say all the right things about staying the course. But there’s a real risk that all the talk of green shoots and glimmers will breed a dangerous complacency.

So here’s my advice, to the public and policy makers alike: Don’t count your recoveries before they’re hatched.

Schwarzenegger: California's wasted years

I was one of the many who could not believe that an actor with no political track record whatsoever could be elected as the governor of the largest economy in the US--California. Has the Governator been any better for California? Read this from Reason:

When Gray Davis, a Democrat, became California’s governor in 1999, the state’s budget was $75 billion. Tempted by dot-com windfalls and beholden to public-sector unions, Davis bumped that number to $104 billion in four short years of boom and bust, after which he was bounced out of office for his fiscal irresponsibility and replaced by a Milton Friedman–quoting action hero who promised to bring “fiscal sanity” back to Sacramento. Five years later, after facing another boom, another bust, and a series of bruising political defeats at the hands of public-sector unions, Schwarzenegger had hiked the budget to an astonishing $145 billion. In 10 years, state spending in nominal terms increased 92 percent.

One good way to measure fiscal stewardship is to see whether state spending growth exceeds the rate of population growth plus inflation. Under Davis, budgets rose an average of 6.7 percent a year, as opposed to a population/California price index growth rate of 4.8 percent. Under Schwarzenegger, spending has increased 6.8 percent annually, compared to a population/inflation rate of just under 5 percent. A governor who was swept into office by damning Davis’ $38 billion budget deficit, vowing not to raise taxes, and mocking his predecessor’s vehicle license fee hikes announced on February 20 that he would address his own $42 billion budget deficit by raising taxes and doubling those same fees.

Sometimes I wonder if politics and politicians here in the US are any better than what I experienced in India. Maybe it goes with the territory?

Bye bye to liberal arts colleges :-(

Back in 1990, David W. Breneman, an education economist then at the Brookings Institution, stirred debate in higher education by publishing an article titled “Are We Losing Our Liberal Arts Colleges?”

A paper being presented here today at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association looks back at his study and answers his question with an emphatic yes.

It is interesting that Breneman examined this question that long ago. Anyway, the Chronicle report adds:

Mr. Breneman was concerned at the time that many historic liberal-arts colleges were shifting away from their emphasis on the arts and sciences and were instead becoming “professional colleges,” which train a large share of their students to enter fields like business or nursing. He worried that such transformations were diverting the colleges from their traditional missions and undermining the intellectual coherence of their offerings.

In their paper, "Where Are They Now? Revisiting Breneman's Study of Liberal Arts Colleges," the researchers updated Mr. Breneman’s analyses using federal data from the 2006-7 academic year on the degrees that colleges awarded, by discipline. They could not find data on nine institutions that he listed. Of the remaining 203 colleges, 67 were found to offer too many graduate degrees or too many degrees in professional fields to be classified as liberal-arts colleges under his terms. Of those, 37 had drastically changed their missions, with 19 now being classified as comprehensive colleges and 18 as master’s universities. A few others had been subsumed by larger institutions.

BTW, I work at a university that promotes itself as "Providing an academically challenging and unique comprehensive public liberal arts education." The majors with largest enrolments are business, criminal justice, ....

Taxes: quote of the day

"True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going."

I agree with Robert Reich's comment there. Reich clears a lot of misconceptions about taxes.

Speaking of budget issues