17 Million Unnecessary College Degrees; Obama Administration Seeks to Increase the Number

In America today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.  Over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees.  So do thousands of janitors.

As Richard Vedder notes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.”  This fact is “incompatible” with “the relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership . . . . Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.”  These depressing statistics are also discussed at The Economic Collapse Blog.

We wrote earlier about the college debt bubble, and how greedy, government-subsidized college administrators are charging obscene amounts of money for largely useless and ideologically-slanted “educations.”  (100 colleges now charge $50,000 or more in tuition, compared to just 5 colleges in 2008-09, and federal financial-aid subsidies effectively reward colleges for increasing tuition to levels that would evoke outrage in other civilized countries.)

Image credit: Honeywell-Nobel Initiative’s flickr photostream.