daily nchrzzkzn
thureday, epril 22, 1976
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by id EGOtfO (SlUUG
Who Needs College? is the headline blazing
across the cover of one of the news magazines this
week.
Who needs college indeed?
What a question to appear around UNL, which
with graduation on May 8, must be one of the
earliest schools to turn job-hungry masses into the
streets.
Such articles forecast gloom and doom and
dreadful unemployment problems for students,
especially those in disciplines once regarded as the
backbone of education-the liberal arts.
A dime a dozen, or perhaps worth even less on
tfy; current market, humanities majors face the
roughest course-as today's ConPro column
documents elsewhere on this page.
So another gloomy spring begins-as the
starting salaries of American college graduates is
only six per cent higher than the average
American worker. In 1969, the figure was 24 per ,
cent, which says something about the devaluation -,
of the diploma.
What am I doing here, writing papers and
taking tests and subjecting myself to all sorts of
abuse with the excuse "I'm a student"? one might
be tempted to ask.
The expectations that accompany one who
chooses and completes a college education are
part of the job market fiasco.
All traditional notions about the value of an
educated man or woman are falling. And it isn't
a disaster at that, that the world learn the value
and reward of all people's skills and all people,
r Intrinsic value remains, the meaning of a
college education to the individual student. The
rewards of academic work are few and seldom
occur, but they remain enormously self-satisfying.
Economic realities await, though, because one
can't live on a diet of old tests and paperback
biology books. For graduates, job hunting will be
a long trip.
Vince Boucher
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con YouVe. heard story before;
job:' market no easy street
By Neil Klotz
77rs w fte rsf w a two-part series on how students
can face the future job market.)
A good job is hard to find. You've probably heard it
before, and even if,. you haven't you could have
guessed.-. ..'V'" -
This year's job offers to college grads are down 1 6
per cent from last year's, which were down 1 8 per cent '
from the year before. Unemployment among human
ities B.As runs 15 per cent, double the national
average, but still better than the 20 per cent unemploy
ment among non-college youth in their twenties, which
is still better than the 43 per cent unemployment
among Blac teenagers.
Statistic piled on statistic boggles the mind. If you
can face the numbers with the realization that a major
crisis looms, you're doing a lot better than most pro
fessional observers of the economy, who are scrambling
to find any comforting platitude in the storm.
"Young people who have to wait to find work learn
patience and openmindedness," preaches Time, the
weekly conventional wisdom magazine. And at a recent
higher education convention in Chicago, one workshop
came up with this gem: if nothing, a liberal arts educa
tion can help a student mentally through a period of
high unemployment. As if Proust, Matisse and Stravin
sky go better on an empty stomach.
Business Week is a little more realistic. It quotes the
chief economist of Ford Motor Co. saying, "Unem
ployment insurance and welfare are the two reasons
why there isn't blood in the streets with today's un
employment rates." And this year, about 2 million un
employed will exhaust their benefits. The economy
must create enough jobs to absorb them and you-and
all those Black teens who want to work. But the typi
cal business response has been to head for the cellar to
get out the steel shutters.
Unrealistic expectations
Much of the problem stems from the creation of un
realistic expectations. The United States and other
rich nations hold out their success as a model to the de
veloping countries, even though we already consume
three-fourths of the world's resources with only one
fourth of the population. The poor nations couldn't
follow into affluence no matter how hard they pulled
on their bootstraps.
In the same way, we see displayed as a model of the
"good life" the lifestyle of 4 per cent of all Americans
who hold one-third of the cash and two-thirds of the
stock. The carrot and the stick is used on everyone else
to provide an incentive to work, but there aren't
enough carrots to go arou&d.
To keep the poor pacified, there's welfare. For the
middle incomers, there's higher education. Formerly
students were told that a B.A. would buy them a ticket
to the ever-inflating good life. But after a short time
there was standing room only. While college grads have
doubled in the last ten years, professional and mana
gerial jobs have increased by only one-third.
So most students are stuck in limbo land where they
float about collecting more degrees and hoping to find
someone scalping tickets for the big show. Or they
settle, for jobs that don't use their taknts and push
non-college youth further down the economic scale
and often out of the job market and into the streets.
The showdown at the job gap comes to this: either
unlimited consumption of consumer goods will con
tinue to be the measure of the good life and the aim of
' work; or the good life will center on the freedom to
fulfill oneself personally through work. The desire for
the switch is there. According to one estimate, 80 per
cent of all Americans are underemployed: tLtt is, they
don't think their jobs utilize all their skills and talents.
Most of them have been told, probably as early as
their first session with a high school counselor, that
they must give up their idle dreams of satisfaction.
Most probably realize that they don't enjoy their eight
hour-a-day stint, but console themselves with the com
fort of a few evening hours, a few weekends and a few
years after retirement.
ven the economy wants the showdown at the job
gap to come. As it turns out, the "realism" of search
ing out existing jobs and molding yourself to fit, not
only is unsatisfying, but increasingly won't work.
Take, for instance, the transitional mass resume
bombardment technique of job hunting. Some com
panies now receive as many as 250,000 resumes a year
and according to one survey, even an average size com
pany rejects immediately 246 out of every 257 resumes
it receives.
The same roulette happens when you answer a
newspaper ad for a job: 95 to 98 per cent of all
answers are automatically chucked. The only way to
even have a chance, say job consultants, is to tailor
your resume or case history letter exactly to the ad's
specifications and omit everything else so there's no
excuse for screening you out. But even if you get the
job, how many of your personal goals did you have to
screen out in the process?
Employment agencies
Employment agencies are only a slight variation on
the matching game. According to the Federal Trade
Commission, private employment agenu place only
about 5 per cent of their clients. Overall, they only get
jobs for 4 per cent those entering the work force for
the first time.
The agencies really are not into finding you a job.
They have to match existing jobs with the most mar
ketable job hunters, quickly, otherwise they can't
financially stay afloat. High turnover is the name of the
game, so if you don't promise a quick commission by
being in one of the demand professions, you've filed in
Never-Never Land.
As it is, almost half of the 4,000 employment agen
cies in America fold each year and are replaced by
another 2,000 new ones who promise you the key to
every executive washroom in town. -
Instead of molding people to already existing jobs,
the answer for the pre-showdown economy as well as
later-is molding jobs to fit people.
Far from being a Utopian pipedream, this basic prin
ciple has been expanded into a comprehensive tech
nique for getting jobs now by a small groups of career
counselors who claim an 80 to 90 per cent success rate.
A good job is hard to find, they say, but easier to
create. Next week well look at how they do it. .