Students who enroll in college — and the families who often help pay — expect a good job at the end of the commencement walk. But what does a good job even mean in the United States today?
In the new book The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change, Ellen Ruppel Shell examines the harsh realities of the nation’s labor market. Robots and computers continue to absorb positions once held by middle-class Americans, companies look for cheaper labor overseas, and even as productivity grows, wages remain stagnant. Meanwhile, policy makers have slashed supports that might soften those blows, like public education and welfare, and trumpet the return of industries in permanent decline, like coal mining. To compound the problems, notes Ruppel Shell, a professor of journalism at Boston University, employment has become a necessary condition for full citizenship: Many people gain access to health insurance, retirement investments, family leave, and professional development through a job.
It’s little wonder that these forces leave people anxious, angry, and depressed.
In her book, Ruppel Shell tells the story of Marienthal, an Austrian factory town that was devastated by the Great Depression. Psychologists who visited to meet with its citizens expected to find them ready to overthrow the capitalist system. Instead the demoralized people — mainly the men — snitched on one another and withdrew from the community. However, women and some of the men found richer lives in unemployment and new ways to sustain themselves. Americans, too, Ruppel Shell says, may need to discover that resilience.
She spoke with The Chronicle about the skills gap, entrepreneurialism, and higher education as a sorting mechanism.
How have the trends of rising inequality, the fraying social-safety net, and automation affected the job market?
We have a slightly larger number of very-high-skill jobs, but the middle-skill jobs have been hollowed out, which widens the gap between the top and the bottom. So when you talk about averages, it can be misleading. Hedge-fund managers, Silicon Valley engineers, top people in law firms — folks like that are doing extremely well. But lower-wage service jobs have increased, and at a much faster pace than the high-level jobs, replacing a lot of the middle-skill jobs.
Have colleges oversold their position as a ticket to good employment?
Absolutely. When I wrote an op-ed about this for The New York Times last May, I got a lot of mail from college professors saying, You’re absolutely right. But college administrations are very unhappy with this argument. They want to increase their enrollment. If we’re saying that college is going to enhance your opportunities, what are those opportunities? A very large number of college graduates are underemployed in the United States. They have a degree, but they are unable to find work that reflects the skills it confers. Increasing the number of people with a degree is not going to increase the demand.
So this problem of underemployment is only going to grow, in part because with digital technology and other automation, the demand for skills has actually declined since 2000. When I began my book, six years ago, a lot of economists were in denial about this, but now they’re coming around. What are we going to do with all these highly skilled people who cannot make a living applying those skills?
Do you think the college degree is being used by employers to filter applicants by class or some other status?
There’s no question. If they weren’t, then students would get more advantage to having just some college. If they’ve invested, say, two years of their lives in college, they’ve presumably learned a lot. Yet those two years don’t advantage them much in the job market. Clearly, as a college professor, I think exposure to two years of education is a wonderful thing. But as a leveler in terms of socioeconomic equality, it’s not very effective.
What’s changed is that industry now requires you to plug and play. That is, you must have a specific skill a company can use right away.
There’s tremendous evidence that a college degree is a sorting mechanism — and that disadvantages those who are unable to complete the degree. It doesn’t seem to be the education that’s the advantage, but the credentialing. Once you’ve got the degree, you are being selected by employers because you’ve shown that you can graduate from college.
Should we then rethink how we certify people for work?
Many of us, certainly of my generation, attended college and are now working in technical fields that we didn’t study. We’re self-trained to a certain degree, and that works. You get an English degree or a history degree, and then you’re given the opportunity to develop your skills in the workplace. What’s changed is that industry now requires you to plug and play. That is, you must have a specific skill a company can use right away, maybe one you developed as an intern or by going through a certification process, either publicly supported or paid for yourself. So industry now doesn’t have to provide you with those skills.
Is there a “skills gap” in this country?
The skills gap is a fiction. There are enough talented and trainable people in the United States that, if they don’t have the immediate skill, they have the ability to acquire it very quickly. There’s no evidence that there is a lack of skilled workers, for example, in advanced manufacturing.
At Sinclair Community College, in Ohio, I talked to students who were graduating from an advanced-manufacturing program, and they were having a very difficult time finding a job. They’d done two years, some of them, after 20 years working at General Motors. They got a great education. But when they got out, the opportunities were not there. Those who did find jobs, they were extremely low-wage.
The idea in industry is: Train up this army of labor for us. Silicon Valley, for example, chooses the best and brightest — and in manufacturing, the cheapest — among this large army. Pit these workers against each other, and that’s partly why we have this political situation right now. People are blaming each other, but the reality on the ground is many are struggling. They’re being told there are all these opportunities, all this growth. Well, yeah, but the opportunities are often low-paid service jobs. Plenty of them.
What do you think of the popular narrative that in the future, everyone will have to be an entrepreneur?
That is such a burden on young people, the idea of the self-driven, self-made person. Most Americans work for companies and are not entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs on average don’t employ a lot of people. Most actually only employ one person, and that is the entrepreneur.
Steve Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford University and said that young people shouldn’t settle for anything, that they should follow their dreams and do what they love — presumably become entrepreneurs. But the idea that each and every one of us should throw off convention to become a self-made visionary of our own heroic future is preposterous. It’s setting a goal that very few of us can achieve.
There’s another category now that business loves to throw around: “intrapreneur.” It’s the idea that you would apply all your creativity, all your ingenuity, for the good of the company. That’s quite dangerous, too, because that encourages overwork. Workplace depression and anxiety are very common sources of psychiatric issues in the United States.
Work provides meaning and structure in one’s life. Will we have to renegotiate our relationship with work? And what would that look like?
We just have to renew our understanding of work as broader than a job. When I talk to young people, I say, Whatever your talents or proclivities are, how can you apply them outside the employment context? That is how you protect yourself from the ups and downs of a very fickle job market and free yourself from the anxiety that your job is not a source of passion. A job is meant to give you the financial wherewithal to lead a life. The idea that you hook your identity to a particular job, or that you look to your employer to gift you with meaning, is a very dangerous calculation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
