Should I have gambled?

I rarely found students to be at fault.  I have even told them so.  The system is messed up, and is set up much to the disadvantage of students like the ones at my university, most of whom do not come from privileged backgrounds.

But then, I never followed up those talks with students by telling them that they should take my classes and major in the programs that my department offered!

The following commentary was published in August 2014.
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College: The million-dollar gamble

Will you be at ease with your 18-year-old gambling with a million dollars?

High school students are told that they need to go to college because of the difference of a million dollars in lifetime earnings that a college degree makes. While that figure itself is debatable, it means that we place enormous pressure on 18-year-old high school graduates to choose wisely.

Most of them do wisely allocate their time between classes and part-time work and the occasional toga party and graduate hoping to land that dream job that will start delivering the million dollar premium.

However, more and more college graduates are finding out that there are very few meaningful full-time employment opportunities. As the Economic Policy Institute noted, "the Class of 2014 will be the sixth consecutive graduating class to enter the labor market during a period of profound weakness."

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York echoed a very similar trend: By "historical standards, unemployment rates for recent college graduates have indeed been quite high since the onset of the Great Recession. Moreover, underemployment among recent graduates — a condition defined here as working in jobs that typically do not require a bachelor's degree — is also on the rise, part of a trend that began with the 2001 recession."

The unemployment and underemployment of college graduates is worsened by their debts. Inflation-adjusted average debt of the graduating classes has tripled in 20 years; the average Class of 2014 graduate owed about $33,000.

Such a context makes a high school graduate's college investment a risky bet towards that debatable million dollar differential.

It is not always the students' fault when they find themselves unemployed or underemployed after graduating. After all, one only needs to recall any number of movies from the past and be reminded that college students were all not scholars every waking moment either.

So, what happened?

The social contract has changed.

Even until a few years ago, it did not matter what students studied (their academic majors) as long as they were able to earn the diploma and demonstrate their abilities to prospective employers. Employers, in turn, knew well that they had to invest in the new hires and train them with respect to the content of the job as well as with soft skills like communication.

Now, employers are no longer eager to make that investment. Corporations have abandoned the commitment to invest in the young, firmly guided by an ideology that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Thus, students are rarely able to land valuable paid or even unpaid internships in corporations, and it is now up to the graduates to prove that they are competent with the content knowledge and job skills.

Which is why the risks associated with the million-dollar college bet appear to be heavily on the students themselves. Would it be too much to ask corporations not to always wear the blinders of short-term profits and to look at the longer term, too?