Career Advice

Future-proofing your career - Charlie Ball

It's all going to change

The examples in my first paragraph help to illustrate the point. Some of the world's largest companies didn't exist 45 years ago.
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Communication is vital

What are the consequences of a world where everyone can network with everyone? Good communication skills will become even more vital.
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Information overload

The internet provides unparalleled access to an unimaginable amount of poor quality information. And some good stuff too. To parse any of this needs research skills.

College Costs

Sunday Reflection: What comes after the higher education bubble? - Glenn Reynolds

Conventional colleges may be overpriced and underperforming, but those 19th century methods of teaching and learning are being challenged by 21st century alternatives.

Case in point: the Harvard/MIT EdX model. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have announced they're putting 60 million dollars into an open-source online education program. A list of courses will be announced this summer and will be implemented in the fall, but the bottom line is that people all over the world will be able to study subjects taught at MIT and Harvard for free, and get "certification" -- though not an actual diploma (yet) -- if they pass certain tests.

This isn't the only such venture. Minerva University -- a new school that aims to be the online Ivy, with involvement by former Harvard President Larry Summers and former Senator (and New School President) Bob Kerrey -- just raised $25 million in startup capital.

'Investing' in College? It Pays to Think Like an Investor - Jack Hough

PayScale, a Seattle data firm, examines the links between pay and variables like colleges and majors. Its analysis, which also ignores dropouts but accounts for students who take longer to complete their degrees, finds an average yearly return of 4.4% for degrees from 853 schools. That assumes students get financial aid, as most do.

Returns vary sharply; they are negative for more than 100 schools and over 11% a year for ones like Harvey Mudd College in California, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Virginia. Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford and Princeton are over 10%, but so is Queens College in New York—where state residents pay just over $5,000 a year in tuition, versus about $41,000 for Stanford.

The worst returns tend to come from schools whose programs focus on nursing, criminal justice, sociology and education, says Katie Bardaro, an analyst at PayScale. The best returns are often from schools with strong engineering, computer science, economics and natural-science programs.

There's a flip side: "It's a lot harder to successfully graduate from those engineering programs," says Ms. Bardaro.

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The riskiest investment is a high-cost liberal-arts college that lacks a strong brand name and doesn't offer much aid, says Mr. Schneider. By contrast, a high-cost school with a strong brand and plenty of aid may be a "good buy."

PayScale's Ms. Bardaro says students should research carefully the pay they are likely to secure before deciding how much to spend on college. After all, tuition and fees have increased 184% in 20 years after accounting for inflation, but wages for college grads have risen just 9%, according to Labor Department data.

Engineering Careers

It's time to give college a rethink - Ali Velsh

One word: Engineering

Whether you, your child, or both are financing college, to earn a decent return on that investment your student needs to base academic choices at least in part on employment trends. Universities, which have an interest in maintaining the status quo, aren't leveling with families about which courses of study make the most financial sense. "We know more about this than we ever tell young people," says Carnevale.

The plain truth is that if your child has the aptitude, he should pursue an engineering degree or study math and science. End of discussion.

Those majors can yield starting salaries of $50,000 and above. Accountants, actuaries, software developers, pharmacists, and nurses are also in high demand and highly compensated.

Engineering Careers

Going to college? You can study anything you like, as long as it's Engineering.

You're an Engineer? You're Hired - Christopher J. Gearon

At its worst in September 2009, the unemployment rate for engineers reached 6.4 percent, versus nearly 10 percent for all occupations. By the middle of last year, it had dropped to under 2 percent.

Engineering Students Use Factory Floor as Classroom - Christopher J. Gearon

Research shows that, compared to grad students in traditional programs, co-op students are "offered employment at a higher rate and progress at a faster rate," says Paul Stonely, CEO of the World Association for Cooperative Education, a Massachusetts-based organization that advocates for education integrating actual experience. They also seem to have higher grade point averages, higher graduation rates, and a better record of sticking with a chosen employer.

U.S News Rankings of Engineering Schools

More at Instapundit

Modern Jobs and Careers

Me, Inc. - Jim Manzi

The way I have put this is that workers in our economy are in a race between development of as-yet-non-commoditized cognitive capabilities on one hand, and wage reductions as capabilities are commoditized through technological advances (broadly defined) on the other. This has been going on for a long, long time, but it does seem to be speeding up — why?

My Jobs Speech - Arnold Kling

Career Prospects

It's All in the Risk for Silicon Valley Job Seekers - Joseph Walker

It's an exciting and lucrative time to be a computer scientist. Computer science graduates received more offers than their accounting counterparts for the first time since 2008, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Meanwhile, veteran engineers are also being recruited heavily by startups and established companies alike.

Your Well-Paid, Middle-Class Job Is in Danger - Ruth Mantell

While technology may replace some workers, it also creates opportunities to use new skills.

"Some types of engineers won't be doing the type of engineering they are doing now if someone comes up with a technology that makes what they do obsolete," Hallock said. "But they are likely to do something related."

To succeed, a worker should "be an active learner," Manpower's Joerres said.

"Taking on responsibility for invention and innovation gives you a better chance of remaining in a position than the person to your right or to your left," Joerres said.

Jobs and Migration

Why New York's future is fleeing - Fred Siegel

For more than 15 years, New York state has led the country in domestic outmigration: For every American who comes here, roughly two depart for other states. This outmigration slowed briefly following the onset of the Great Recession. But a recent Marist poll suggests that the rate is likely to increase: 36 percent of New Yorkers under 30 plan to leave over the next five years. Why are all these people fleeing?

For one thing, according to a recent survey in Chief Executive, our state has the second-worst business climate in the country. (Only California ranks lower.) People go where the jobs are, so when a state repels businesses, it repels residents, too.

Indeed, the poll also found that 62 percent of New Yorkers planning to leave cited economic factors -- including cost of living (30 percent), taxes (19 percent) and the job environment (10 percent) -- as the main reason.

Upstate, a big part of the problem is extraordinarily high property taxes. New York has the country's 15 highest-taxed counties, including Nassau and Westchester, which rank Nos. 1 and 2.

Most of the property tax goes toward paying the state's Medicaid bill -- which is unlikely to diminish, since the state's most powerful lobby, the alliance of the hospital workers' union and hospital management, has gone unchallenged by our new governor, Andrew Cuomo.

Employment After College

Plato and Thucydides are all well and good, but if you're going to spend all of that time and money on college, make wise practical decisions too:

1. Make sure that you graduate with realistic prospects for earning enough money to support (or help support) a family.
2. Don't get buried under a mountain of consumer and student loan debt.
3. Do something you really like to do.
4. Life has ups and downs, but quality work is generally recognized and rewarded.
5. Always keep learning.
   

The “Careers” of College Graduates - Daniel Luzer

In an update, of sorts, to the recent post about the influence of the Recession on current college graduates, Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post is letting us know that it’s actually even worse. Two charts explain it:

A HIGHER ED BUBBLE? - Glenn Reynolds

This sounds familiar:

So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.

Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn’t ask borrowers to verify their incomes.