I’m not certain how you reconcile this story about a chap with an MBA from a good school finding that the only job he could find was, essentially, a clerk’s position:
GRANDVIEW, Mo. — Don Carroll, a former financial analyst with a master’s degree in business administration from a top university, was clearly overqualified for the job running the claims department for Cartwright International, a small, family-owned moving company here south of Kansas City.
But he had been out of work for six months, and the department badly needed modernization after several decades of benign neglect. It turned out to be a perfect match.
After being hired in December, Mr. Carroll, 31, quickly set about revamping the four-person department, which settles damage claims from moves, and creating tracking tools so the company could better understand its spending.
with the mantra that education is the key to America’s economic future. I’m certain that Mr. Carroll is doing an excellent job for his new employer and that his new employer will benefit from the skills he brings to the job.
However, the situation brings up a couple of questions. Carroll has probably run up a substantial tab on his education. Has he paid it off? Will he be able to on the presumably unexpectedly low salary his new job brings? Post-graduate education is a pricey proposition and undertaking it is a risk. Not all risks pay off.
When you’ve got MBAs taking jobs as clerks what will the folks with BAs-only do? Or even worse those without any higher education at all? The primary beneficiaries of the race for degrees will probably be the educational institutions doling them out.
This situation reminds me of a comment made by my then-business partner when we were interviewing candidates for what were essentially entry level technical jobs. After interviewing the latest candidate from the same developing country who had a PhD in what was presumably a related field, I asked my partner about it. He responded “It’s the most over-educated country in the world” meaning that there were a lot more people with post-graduate degrees in the country than there were jobs for people with post-graduate degrees there.
Unfortunately, there is no United States for citizens of the United States to emigrate to when they can’t find jobs that their degrees have, presumably, prepared them for.
It’s possible that there’s more to this story than meets the eye. It may be that Mr. Carroll’s wife’s job isn’t portable or he’s underwater or that he has elderly parents he needs to take care of or some other reason that makes moving to where there are more jobs for MBAs unpalatable. I didn’t see any information in the story itself from which one could draw that conclusion.
Maybe it just means financial analysts arent needed much in a recession or in the slow recovery phase. Education is not a panacea and there are no guarantees about jobs in any field, but the US is still competing with other countries. Education is a means to an advantage. It does need to be changed to emphasize learning how to learn, since fewer people will have the same job for a whole career in the future.
Steve
I disagree. At this time, the primary beneficiaries of the race for degrees will probably be the companies who now have access to more quality employees at lower wages, thus increasing productivity and profitability.