ROBERT B. REICH @ http://robertreich.org/

[Plane]

The Commencement Address That Won’t Be Given

Friday, May 18, 2012

Members of the Class of 2012,
 
As a former secretary of labor and current professor, I feel I owe it to you to tell you the truth about the pieces of parchment you’re picking up today.
 
You’re f*cked.
 
Well, not exactly. But you won’t have it easy.
 
First, you’re going to have a hell of a hard time finding a job. The job market you’re heading into is still bad. Fewer than half of the graduates from last year’s class have as yet found full-time jobs. Most are still looking.
 
That’s been the pattern over the last three graduating classes: It’s been taking them more than a year to land the first job. And those who still haven’t found a job will be competing with you, making your job search even harder.
 
Contrast this with the class of 2008, whose members were lucky enough to get out of here and into the job market before the Great Recession really hit. Almost three-quarters of them found jobs within the year.
 
You’re still better off than your friends who didn’t graduate. Overall, the unemployment rate among young people (21 to 24 years old) with four-year college degrees is now 6.4 percent. With just a high school degree, the rate is double that.
 
But even when you get a job, it’s likely to pay peanuts.
 
Last year’s young college graduates lucky enough to land jobs had an average hourly wage of only $16.81, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s about $35,000 a year – lower than the yearly earnings of young college graduates in 2007, before the Great Recession. The typical wage of young college graduates dropped 4.6 percent between 2007 and 2011, adjusted for inflation.
 
Presumably this means that when we come out of the gravitational pull of the recession your wages will improve. But there’s a longer-term trend that should concern you.
 
The decline in the earnings of college grads really began more than a decade ago. Young college grads with jobs are earnings 5.4 percent less than they did in the year 2000, adjusted for inflation.
 
Don’t get me wrong. A four-year college degree is still valuable. Over your lifetimes, you’ll earn about 70 percent more than people who don’t have the pieces of parchment you’re picking up today.
 
But this parchment isn’t as valuable as it once was. So much of what was once considered “knowledge work” – the kind that college graduates specialize in – can now be done more cheaply by software. Or by workers with college degrees in India or East Asia, linked up by Internet.
 
For many of you, your immediate problem is that pile of debt on your shoulders. In a few moments, when you march out of here, those of you who have taken out college loans will owe more than $25,000 on average. Last year, ten percent of college grads with loans owed more than $54,000. Your parents have also taken out loans to help you. Loans to parents for the college educations of their children have soared 75 percent since the academic year 2005-2006.
 
Outstanding student debt now totals over $1 trillion. That’s more than the nation’s total credit-card debt. 
 
The extraordinary rise in student debt is due to two related facts: the cost of a college education continues to increase faster than inflation, and state and local spending per college student continues to drop – this year reaching a 25-year low.
 
But this can’t go on. If unemployment stays high for many years, if the wages of young college grads continue to fall, if the costs of college continue to rise and state and local spending per college student continues to drop, and if the college debt burden therefore continues to explode – well, you do the math.
 
At some point in the not-too-distant future these lines cross. College is no longer a good investment.
 
That’s a problem for you and for those who will follow you into these hallowed halls, but it’s also a problem for America as a whole.
 
You see, a college education isn’t just a private investment. It’s also a public good. This nation can’t be competitive globally, nor can we have a vibrant and responsible democracy, without a large number of well-educated people.
 
So it’s not just you who are burdened by these trends. If they continue, we’re all f*cked.


ROBERT B. REICH

[kimba1]

Actually i see this as a goodthing. The pressure lies squarely on the colleges to make it affordable. Changes needs to made . Either out of work teachers start making thier own school or whatever.
The problem is to ensure seemimg nonimportant courses don't get lost.

[Xavier_Onassis]

The percentage of total revenues received by colleges that go to the faculty has decreased by around 20% since 1977. administrators have hired more deans and assistants and raised their own salaries, and the money that has gone to computer technology has all come out of the faculty's share of the budget.

A BA degree today is MORE important to the well-being of the nation and the future of the graduates than a high school degree was 50 years ago.

There should be more online courses available in a streamlined system with fewer administrators. At my college, we had 1400 students and more people in the administration than on the faculty, but only about four of the administrators actually had the power to change anything. We had powerless administrators with BA and MA degrees making twice what full time faculty earned. Because the administrators are nearest to the money, they grab more and more of it. It is a common assumption that when a faculty person becomes and administrator, he or she has received a promotion. It always meant that they got more salary. This is an invalid way of looking at the situation.

There is no more important thing a person can do at a university than teach the students. The students are the purpose of the institution, and what they learn is the most important thing a university provides.

The main business of a college or university is to teach the students, NOT to administrate them. 

[Plane]

Very interesting observation XO.

Do you think this problem will continue to worsen?

Is there compeditive pressure from lower ranking schools?

[kimba1]

Thank you xo, thats exactly what i'm trying to say but i just can't say it right

[Xavier_Onassis]

The problem from the less competitive schools is keeping up standards. The students do not study, will not attend the remedial classes they desperately need, and do not read. The graduation rate tends to be something like 30% or less. That is to say that after 5 years, fewer than 30% graduate with a BA or BS degree.

What is needed is not competition, but dedication of the student to learning the material and cooperation with other students and using the many resources, such as faculty office hours, to learn.

We had a speech teacher who set forth specific objectives for his classes and adhered to them quite rigidly. His requirements were sound, and required students to deliver four speeches using logic, organization, and proper diction. He gave examples of speeches on videos of good and better speeches and took attendance every day. About two thirds of his students failed to comply with the perfectly reasonable expectations, and missed speeches. Other professors tended to allow students to give the speeches they had missed in their offices, generally all during the last two weeks of classes, with no audience and therefore no student critiques, but he did not.

I was on the grade dispute committee and every semester students who had failed his courses disputed their grades to avoid having to retake the course. Not a one of them could deliver any coherent speech about why they thought they had been misgraded. All had failed deliver the required speeches or to turn in the required critiques of other students' speeches. The grades were given in numeric form, with a 60 as the lowest possible passing grade of D.

After three years of passing only a third or so of his students, the college refused to renew his contract. I was not a close friend of this fellow,but he was a businesslike, articulate and friendly Black fellow who graduated from FSU with a cum laude degree who never got angry about anything and was good at telling jokes and a great public speaker.

When  I was in college, I spent well over 40 hours per week studying in addition to attending classes. My students never showed any evidence of studying half as much.

[kimba1]

I took speech, that`s not easy to learn.the teacher was good but it`s not easy thing to verbally convey thoughts to a group. I still can`t give instructions on how to tie a shoe with my back to the crowd.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Effective public speaking generally does not involve verbal directions on how to tie a shoelace.

I suppose a giant shoelace and a posterboard would be the best way to describe this to an audience. A visual presentation is going to be more effective than verbal directions alone.

A good speech should be well organized, well enunciated, and prepared in advance. It should be no longer than necessary to get the ideas across.

Speech is a more difficult subject than those one passes by matching A B C statements on a paper test. If the speaker is not prepared, it shows.

[kimba1]

alot of us froze at the beggining of the course.

but no props were used for the shoe tying part. it was brutal.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I don't think that this would be a worthwhile way to begin a speech course.

It would serve to inform the teacher about who the most creative people in the class were, but a good teacher should not start a course with a really difficult assignment if he wants to inspire the whole class to study and dedicate themselves to the course.

I can see where this would be useful as a beginning assignment at MIT or Cal Tech, where the students have been seriously screened by the admissions office, but at a community college, this would be a poor way to start the course.

[kimba1]

misspoke

the shoe tying was done at the end. the nervousness was at the begining.

[Xavier_Onassis]

http://www.wikihow.com/Tie-Your-Shoes

Here is where to start, if the need to speak about that issue ever returns.