of university graduates, in numbers beyond the capacity of the labour force to absorb them, has lowered their value overall and individually, especially at the bottom end. Richard B. Freeman, a Harvard-based labour economist, fears that American college graduates may suffer further from international competition. As he noted, “The college graduate situation has a global dimension—6 million bachelor’s graduates in China that affect the U.S. market as well—which is very different than in the past.”[8] Freeman is right. But add in millions more from Turkey, India, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and many other countries. In the 1960s, as we showed earlier, North American and northern European countries had the global lead on post-secondary education. Now, North American graduates are swimming in what looks like an ocean full of fish with mortarboards on their heads. Companies looking to build high-tech operations near a pool of skilled labour can choose among a few key sites in North America, but they can also go to Hong Kong, Melbourne, Oulu, Stockholm, or Copenhagen; to several cities in Germany or Istanbul; or to leading high-tech and higher-education urban areas in India. And the choices don’t end there.
In technology, North America set the gold standard immediately after World War II and held pride of place into the 1970s. But its leadership has steadily eroded—despite the continued success of Stanford, University of Texas at Austin, University of San Diego, Waterloo, MIT, Harvard, Duke, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and several other major centres. Imagine, if you will, a global firm (say a former American-centric multinational like Sun Computer Systems that now has much of its research capacity in Asia) trying to decide on the best location for a new digital research centre. Their eyes—if they are smart—will scan a few American hotspots, contemplate Bangalore, consider London or a European centre, and then take a good hard look at China. A quick check of Beijing would reveal dozens of excellent universities, topped by Tsinghua University, one of China’s best and a world leader in engineering, math, computer science, and other scientific fields. A check of the student population and workforce will reveal thousands of creative, eager, highly skilled workers who are willing to work for wages that are lower than those in the West. North American schools produce many graduates of comparable quality—Tsinghua is on par with Stanford, Princeton, Waterloo, and Toronto in this area—with the important caveat that many of the undergraduate and graduate students in these institutions were born in Asia, too.
The Employment Crisis
The employment crisis has hit unevenly. For graduates with specialized degrees—from Accounting and Electrical Engineering to Medicine and Digital Communications—the evolving scientific and technological economy still provides excellent opportunities. High incomes, multiple job offerings, and rapid advancement exist in the world of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Cisco. But many of the jobs in the evolving “new economy” belong to the service sector. While some young adults—most notably in the deservedly derided finance sector—discovered world-class opportunities for wealth and advancement, the majority left university to find that most jobs offered low incomes, short-term contracts, and insecurity. Having gone into debt to pay for their degrees, the graduates find themselves in low-paying, undependable jobs with few prospects for advancement. Not many parents and young people expected that four to six years of academic study would lead to work as a cashier, though in 2008 more than 356,000 cashiers had college degrees, up from 132,000 in 1992.[9] Of course, as Matt Gurney points out in the National Post, there’s a fairly easy fix for the student indebtedness problem—get a job straight out of high school, save like crazy, and go to university later.[10]
In country after country, the rapid expansion of university systems and the number of degree holders have clashed with the needs of a stagnant and uncertain workforce. Much of this had little to do with universities, save for the expectations built up through personal and family investments in the education of young people. The serious economic problems in North Africa in recent years did not start with the universities. The same was true in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, and other European countries, where broader economic forces wreaked havoc with national and regional economies.
In some nations, the dashed expectations sparked activist youth movements. Such was the case with the Arab Spring movement that swept across North Africa and the Middle East after 2010, the Occupy movement in the USA and Canada that attacked increasing inequality, and regional social and cultural protests against inequality and social injustice elsewhere in the world. Young adults in Greece, including those with and without university degrees, struggle with crushing rates of youth unemployment (around 50 percent officially) and declining wages. Not surprisingly, having been raised to expect better outcomes, many Greek youth joined the mass protests that spread across the country in the wake of Greece’s cataclysmic debt crisis in 2015.
Most unemployed and underemployed young adults did not become revolutionaries, or even protestors. They struggled with their realities, continued to search for work and—following closely on the ideological foundations of the modern university, which linked outcome to individual effort and ability—largely blamed themselves for their inability to find work. In some instances, they were right. Decent jobs could be found in non-urban places—remote Indigenous reservations (“reserves” in Canada), the pre-2015 oil fields in North Dakota and Wyoming, and certainly for trained professionals in the poorer districts of the major cities —but these were not always attractive to college graduates raised to expect a more comfortable middle-class life.
Suffice it to say that many college and university graduates struggled—and so did those who started along the degree path and opted out. Those with large student loans carried a major burden into an adult life of low wages and uncertain employment prospects. As if it were not already difficult enough to find work, many of the new jobs were part-time and often with few or no benefits.
The harsh truth is that colleges and universities have been grossly oversold—most notably by the institutions themselves. The result has been that for some time now the dream has been in danger of dying, although governments have largely ignored the mounting evidence and the public seems blissfully unaware of it. Colleges and universities continue to promote the supposed advantages of a post-secondary education, arguing that they are not job factories, but institutes of higher learning, and that intellectual improvement should not be connected to crass questions of employment. Meanwhile the system undergoes a massive reorientation of its programming toward professional and technical fields of study.
Opening universities and colleges to women, minorities, Indigenous peoples, children from working-class families, and the disabled brought many thousands of talented and capable people into the advanced educational system. The world has been surely blessed by the perspectives, abilities, and contributions of young adults who, in earlier times, would have been locked out of career advancement through college educations. The same holds in the developing world, where university degrees had, for generations, been the exclusive preserve of the wealthy, the well-connected, and the highly gifted. To a point—imprecise and never examined—the opening of the university floodgates served a valuable personal, national, and global purpose.
But at some stage a tipping point was reached. Universities let in too many students for the employment market to absorb. The overemphasis on personal choice allowed young adults to select their own fields of study, skewing the skills of those graduating in favour of the educational interests of seventeen- to twenty-one-year-olds. A world desperate for highly skilled engineers got more psychology graduates. An economy eager for people with advanced technical skills got thousands of wildlife biologists. A national workforce that had space for a few hundred fine arts graduates a year could not absorb thousands of them. University education still worked for many, but not all, and increasingly not even most, of the first-year students who ventured, bright-eyed and more or less eager, onto the world’s campuses each year.
Governments kept the floodgates open, and even expanded opportunities. American president Barack Obama urged more and more young people to go to college, apparently oblivious to the fact that sending more students into the system, not to mention weaker ones, watered down the quality of the country’s skilled workforce. There was method in this seeming madness. With the global economy in
