best institutions attracting many times more applicants than there are first-year spaces. In one of the many perversions of the United States’ post-secondary education system, institutions are rated on the ratio of applicants to admissions. Clearly, a college that turns down more students is more selective and therefore more elite and more attractive. And so institutions seeking to position themselves as among the very best in an intense and overcrowded North American marketplace make a strong effort to recruit more applicants, even when they already have ten to fifteen times more would-be students than spaces.
The Jobs Crisis
But as the truth about graduate outcomes slowly became clear, the return on investment or ROI—an acronym that took over from a high-quality education as a primary goal for post-secondary education—started to decline. It also started to split between career-ready degrees and more general fields of study that lacked a precise career focus. Business schools, the weak cousin of colleges and universities in the 1960s, had become institutional superstars by the 1990s. Top business faculty members attracted rock-star salaries and attention. Students who had flooded into Arts and Science programs like lemmings in the 1970s and 1980s shifted gears in the 1990s and 2000s and headed for business schools. Even the prestigious American liberal-arts institutions—Colorado College, Middlebury College, and Swarthmore College—did the previously unthinkable and added business and economics degrees to what had once been the best Arts and Science undergraduate degree programs in the world.
The job crisis, which started in the low-skill industrial sectors, has started to infect the professional ranks. Law students, lured into degree programs by the prospect of high-profile and high-income jobs, have faced brutal job prospects across the United States and Canada in recent years. In the mid-2010s, thousands of new law graduates struggled to find articling positions, ringing up mountains of debt, and then failing to find the lucrative jobs they expected. The crisis here was driven higher by the out-of-sync career and salary expectations of aspiring lawyers who may have watched too many episodes of Law and Order or seen Michael Douglas’s turn in Wall Street (“greed is good”) as an enticement rather than an indictment against a failed financial system.
But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, as a self-educated American lawyer once said, and students eventually caught on and responded to the collapsing job market. In the United States in 2014, law school admissions fell by some 40 percent over the previous high. Law schools felt they had two choices: close their doors (several did) or lower their academic standards to fill their classrooms and pay the bills. The latter practice was particularly noticeable at the larger for-profit schools that had sprung up to meet the seemingly insatiable demand for legal careers. Canada, incidentally, followed a contrary track, with continued strong demand for spots in law schools—but equally severe difficulties for graduates looking for articling positions and full-time employment. In fact, two new law schools opened in Canada, both in smaller regional centres that had struggled to find lawyers willing to work in the areas.
In 2012, some American law schools, in desperation, reportedly gave in to the temptation to game the system.[12] After-graduation surveys are often pretty superficial and do not inquire deeply about the positions that former students hold. Surveyors simply want to know if the graduates have a job and if the position is related to their law degree. So, the solution must have seemed obvious. The law schools hired their own graduates and gave them quasi-legal jobs that were of long-enough duration to cover the survey period. The results improved, the law schools looked better, and no one complained; at least, not until the truth came out. When it was revealed that certain law schools responsible for training the nation’s lawyers had betrayed the very principles they were teaching, many observers were disgusted, although the scandal did not get nearly as much attention as did the New England Patriots’ “deflate-gate” scandal in the American Football Conference finals in January 2015.
Other law schools have become bottom-feeders. The classic example is Florida Coastal School of Law. In 2013 the median score of its entering class lay in the bottom quarter of everyone in the country who wrote the LSAT test, something that the LSAT administrators say makes it unlikely that these students will ever pass the bar exam. Nevertheless, the school charges nearly $45,000 a year in tuition. Ninety-three percent of the 2014 graduates had debt averaging $163,000—this for a degree they may well be unable to use, if they graduate.[13]
A substantial number of graduates in many disciplines, particularly in the Arts and Sciences, have had dismal job experiences. As a result, many students have chosen to continue their studies at graduate and professional schools in a search for careers and a decent salary. The continued pursuit of graduate qualifications has, for many aspiring students, proven disappointing as well. This is particularly true at the Master’s level, where ROIs in certain Humanities fields have dropped below zero—a fancy way of saying that the cost of completing the degree plus the loss of deferred income is greater than any increase in earnings associated with the degree. So no million-dollar bonus here. This career calculus is fine if the motivation for completing the degree is learning and self-fulfillment. If the students (and the parents and governments that fund the system) select the degree in anticipation of a better job and higher income, then the outcome is a disaster.
Four Backup Careers for New Teachers
These are Canadian examples for teaching graduates who can’t find jobs or want to delay their entry into the field, but the ideas are universal. For Royal Canadian Mounted Police, for instance, substitute FBI.
1. Teaching abroad
There are many countries where English teachers are highly sought (e.g., South Korea, the Middle East, and Japan). If you’re an adventure seeker, teaching abroad on a one- or two-year contract is a great option. The classroom experience could prove useful when you return.
2. Private tutoring
You can work with tutoring companies such as Alliance or Kumon, or manage your own students. The rates are good—up to $30 per hour.
3. Private schools
People shy away from teaching at them because of the stereotype about affluent students being entitled and unpleasant to teach. But this may not be true, and the classes are relatively small and teacher resources are abundant.
4. The justice system
Who says you have to stick to the classroom? The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has also been recruiting education graduates lately to work in civilian jobs as instructors, youth workers, or in victim services. Skills acquired in teacher’s college—flexibility, planning, and multitasking—are useful in the justice system too.[14]
The oversupply of people with undergraduate degrees has morphed, in short order, into an oversupply of people with graduate degrees. Where there were once too many people with Bachelor’s degrees, there are now also too many with Master’s. A good portion of this is artificial, though, since the largest field of graduate studies in North America—by a very significant degree—is in education. In the high-demand areas, where the continental economy truly needs highly skilled and well-trained people, like mathematics, computer science, and engineering, the vast majority of North American PhD students and graduates are international students. Not so in education. In this extremely inflated field, enrolment is driven by the immediate salary bump for teachers that follows graduation.
The evolving patterns of the modern workforce have destroyed dreams by the hundreds of thousands. Many Chinese families who borrowed heavily to get their children into a North American university have seen them struggle to find work when they returned home. Thousands of American young adults have lived in undergraduate-like poverty as they searched for work, and large numbers have moved back in with their parents. Failure to launch, much more than the title of a mediocre movie, became the hallmark of the Millennial generation. While many coped with long-term underemployment and unemployment, others ascribed failure
