If You're a Waiter, the Future Is Rosy

From the New York Times via This Modern World:

But some economists point to those same federal forecasts to poke holes in the argument that the key to job creation is more sophisticated education and knowledge. Yes, the greatest increase is expected to be for registered nurses (an increase of 623,000 jobs) and college and university teachers (an increase of 603,000).

But according to forecasts issued last month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 7 of the 10 occupations with the greatest growth through 2012 will be in low-wage, service fields requiring little education: retail salesperson, customer service representative, food-service worker, cashier, janitor, waiter and nursing aide and hospital orderly. Many of these jobs pay less than $18,000 a year. Forecasting an increase of 21 million jobs from 2002 to 2012, the bureau predicted 596,000 more retail sales jobs, 454,000 more food-service jobs and 454,000 more cashier positions.

Forecasts like these raise fears that many Americans will end up disappointed after spending years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on college degrees. "The education-and-training solution, while it sounds good, is simply too facile," said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. He noted that the number of Americans with college degrees who are unemployed for more than six months has quadrupled in three years.

Click here for the rest (and grumble about the annoying NYT registration procedure).

For some years now my standard response to people who say to me that the unemployed should just go to college to improve their job prospects is this: imagine that everybody who wanted a job went out and got a degree; we'd still have the same kinds of unemployment issues--there simply aren't enough good paying jobs to go around, and it has very little to do with going to college. It looks like this scenario is quickly becoming reality.

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