of the twenty-first century. Email has undermined postal work. E-commerce is replacing tens of thousands of retail workers. Computers can process applications and documentation faster and more accurately than humans. Robots replace factory and industrial plant operators. Advanced machinery can cut more trees, haul more coal, drill deeper wells, handle more parcels, and otherwise surpass the outcome, cost, and effectiveness of human-based processes. In the emerging economy, lower-paying jobs for the unskilled remain, but they are in hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, airports, car-rental operations, and the like. There are high-paying jobs—for a small number of workers—in the high-salary, high-energy, and technologically rich design, development, marketing, and related digital sectors. What is missing—what used to be the “guts” of the North American economy—is low-skilled, well-paid, and stable employment for people of average or even below-average ability and accomplishment.
The shift to a technology-enabled economy and the requirements for an up-skilled workforce has altered the fundamentals and created new challenges for young adults seeking to replicate the success of their parents and grandparents. The vast majority of the high-paying jobs and expansive career opportunities require advanced technological and scientific skills, high levels of motivation, curiosity, and inventiveness. Only a small portion of the student population is suited to positions of this type and is capable of meeting the educational and training needs of the advanced workforce. Furthermore, the college and university system is not well placed to respond to these twenty-first century realities. Finding a way forward for the average student and worker is one of the greatest challenges of the coming generation.
This is the cornerstone of the new American economy: excellent opportunities for those with the best and most relevant credentials, uncertain prospects for the generalists, and significant challenges for those without the basic skills needed in the high-tech era. Over the next twenty years current trends are likely to accelerate, with greater technological displacement of work, increased specialization, major shifts in the nature of employment, career preparation, and lifelong work. Many—but not all—of the best paid and most secure posts will go to college graduates, as they have in the past few decades. But if the best jobs do go to college grads, it doesn’t follow that all college graduates are assured of excellent opportunities, particularly if the colleges and universities continue to flood the employment market with hundreds of thousands of non-specialist graduates who are not properly prepared for a workforce that is already dramatically different than that of their parents and grandparents.
The nature of the evolving economy shows both halves of the Dream Factory reality. For those who select the right fields of study and have the right mix of motivation, intelligence, work ethic, and entrepreneurship colleges will continue to produce “dream” results. The new high-technology economy will require thousands of highly skilled and well-trained individuals—and the best schools and the best programs will deliver superb results for their graduates. Some areas of study will struggle—will accounting continue to lead to career success for graduates in the face of mass digitization?—while others will produce remarkable results. Watch for digital design and design generally to maintain their current trajectory. Colleges attract the best and brightest within contemporary society, including some students who are brilliant and have remarkable analytical, writing, and research skills. These graduates, who enter brilliant and leave brilliant, will make fine employees or entrepreneurs, as they have always done. Each year, the colleges will find recent graduates who have had great results after leaving university. The message will be that Dream Factories work.
But they do not work for everyone. If advocates of college expansion have their day—Clintonesque visions of universal post-secondary education abound in the modern world—there will be many more weak students attending university. Weak students become weak graduates, and weak graduates make poor employees. Moreover, poorly prepared and underskilled high school graduates rarely succeed in the math- and science-rich, technologically sophisticated fields, the ones that have real and sustained employment possibilities. The overproduction of graduates in prominent fields, such as law and business, reduces the career prospects and income levels of the whole sector. That the wage premium for college graduates has largely disappeared is a classic illustration of the basic operation of supply and demand. But in the emerging tech-driven twenty-first -century economy, these graduates will be even further removed from the employment mainstream.
A post-graduation experience of unemployment and underemployment is not the career trajectory touted by the college recruiting offices and post-secondary advocates preaching about the benefits of university degrees. The life of the average American, counting on a college degree to put him or her on a higher-income path, has shifted dramatically. So, too, has technology ravaged the employment and income prospects for unskilled industrial workers. The reality is that the twentieth century is gone, the twenty-first century is here, and the pace of technological change in the workforce is accelerating. Those institutions and individuals that understand the transitions and seek education and training accordingly have the potential to flourish in the modern economy. They will make their parents and colleges proud and will find eager employers. But the current college and university model is far from ideally suited to the new tech-based economy.
There is a brass ring in America, and the number of billionaires continues to grow. But the trajectory is less dramatic and far more personal than the standard American narrative has it. Hard work, sacrifice, saving, and risk-taking are the skills needed for financial success.
5
Unprepared for Work
Over the past twenty years or so the gulf between employers’ expectations and those of young job hunters has widened dramatically. Not only do many Millennials not have the specific skills and abilities that they need in order to be hired, but psychologists tell us that often they have a set of attitudes and traits that put them at odds with prospective employers in terms of work ethic, salary increases, and promotion.
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