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Thread: Hundreds of thousands of Master's degree holders, PhDs on food stamps

  1. #1

    Hundreds of thousands of Master's degree holders, PhDs on food stamps

    Hundreds of thousands of Master's degree holders, PhDs on food stamps


    Saturday, February 02, 2013 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer

    Shelling out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for higher education may no longer be the surefire path to a great career that it used to be. A recent report compiled by the education resource group OnlineColleges.net found that more than 300,000 Americans with either Master's degrees or Ph.D.s were receiving food stamps in 2010 -- and many more are likely on some form of government assistance today as economic conditions since that time have only continued to worsen.

    To give a point of reference as to how bad the situation truly is, there were fewer than 100,000 Americans with Master's degrees or Ph.D.s on food stamps in 2007, which means the overall number of people with extensive college educations on government assistance more than tripled in just three years. And if this trend continued at the same rate between 2010 and 2013, the total number of college educated on government assistance today has easily eclipsed more than half a million, and with no end in sight.

    According to the latest government data, more than 5,000 people working right now as custodians have Ph.D.s they are not using, and another more than 100,000 people with at least a bachelor's degree currently work in some sort of custodial position. A whopping 80,000-or-so people with at least a bachelor's degree also currently work as attendants at amusement parks and other recreational facilities, while nearly 320,000 college graduates currently work as servers at restaurants and cafes.

    "According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly one in three college graduates works in a job the Labor Department says requires less than a bachelor's degree," explains an infographic created by OnlineColleges.net. You can view that infographic here:
    http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2013/0...n-food-stamps/

    Not enough jobs or not enough intuition?

    As you will clearly see, the numbers on the graph are shocking, to say the least. They point to a very serious problem either with our educational system or with our economic system, or both. Getting a Master's degree or a Ph.D. typically takes a lot of time, effort, and money -- so why are an increasing number of educated folks finding it so difficult to get a job in their field that they are having to resort to menial labor positions for which they are overqualified?

    The most obvious answer is that economic conditions have become so dire that there simply are not enough available high-paying positions out there for people with college educations. And for many college graduates and people with Ph.D.s, the prospect of finding a job in their field is just unusually slim, perhaps due to the fact that their area of study was too narrow and impractical. Getting a Master's degree in Native American studies, for instance, will more than likely not generate the same level or volume of high-paying jobs as, say, a Master's degree in biology would.

    Another possible explanation is that today's college graduates simply do not possess the same level of drive and ingenuity that college graduates from previous generations had. This is merely speculation, of course, but it seems as though many college graduates lack the guidance and know-how to successfully navigate the working world following graduation. What do you think the primary reasons are that an increasing number of college graduates are unable to find well-paying jobs in their appropriate fields?

    Sources for this article include:

    http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2013/0...n-food-stamps/

    Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/038933_co...#ixzz2JnvhSbTe
    “The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner



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  3. #2
    Say hello to the new class of citizen: The Educated Poor
    1776 > 1984

    The FAILURE of the United States Government to operate and maintain an
    Honest Money System , which frees the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, is the single largest contributing factor to the World's current Economic Crisis.

    The Elimination of Privacy is the Architecture of Genocide

    Belief, Money, and Violence are the three ways all people are controlled

    Quote Originally Posted by Zippyjuan View Post
    Our central bank is not privately owned.

  4. #3
    I know of some available jobs for PHD's but it stands for post hole diggers.

  5. #4
    But, but, but ...there aren't any educated Americans! We must import educated workers. Americans are too stupid. If we just spend an extra trillion dollars on the Department of Education, then maybe Americans can become intelligent. Or maybe not.
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.

  6. #5
    This is what happens when you get a worthless degree. Finally finished mine in December, got a job right away and just now took another job and have had 4 offers in 5 interviews... sigh.

  7. #6
    These colleges should do a better job of career counselling. They shouldnt be pushing kids into glamourous careers with no jobs. They should be up front about posted job openings and the competition. But most importantly, the schools should close their doors and let the private sector do the educating.

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by robmpreston View Post
    This is what happens when you get a worthless degree. Finally finished mine in December, got a job right away and just now took another job and have had 4 offers in 5 interviews... sigh.

    Thats true. At my school there were some fields where kids got offers well before they graduated. Then the majority never got a job in their field.

  9. #8
    I have nephew that thinks going to a community college for "classes", while he has no major or any career field plans, is going to get him somewhere other than debt. They drill this higher education stuff into their minds so much that it's all they think about.



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by robmpreston View Post
    This is what happens when you get a worthless degree. Finally finished mine in December, got a job right away and just now took another job and have had 4 offers in 5 interviews... sigh.
    What was your major?
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by robmpreston View Post
    This is what happens when you get a worthless degree. Finally finished mine in December, got a job right away and just now took another job and have had 4 offers in 5 interviews... sigh.
    What is your degree?

  13. #11
    The only real difference between now and just a few years ago is that employers are paying more attention to what type of degree, and where they got it. I've seen a number of people going back for a 2nd degree when their 1st was a BFA or something they got from a for-profit school with accreditation issues (like the commercials you still see running in the middle of the day alongside the worker's comp lawyers).

    If you get a degree from a "hard" program like Math or Engineering, from a traditional school, you are not gonna have a hard time getting something in your field. From what I've seen firsthand, most new graduates from such programs were hired their last semester or 2 before graduating.

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by donnay View Post
    What do you think the primary reasons are that an increasing number of college graduates are unable to find well-paying jobs in their appropriate fields?
    I will give you the answer I think to be the correct one, however I am only going on my personal experience and reading the damn news about this for the last 20 plus years! So of course I may not be qualified to give a good answer on this.

    Out-sourcing and in-sourcing. That's it, I could go into to details about it, but don't desire to do so right now. Most of the jobs are still at these companies, they just prefer to not hire Americans.

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by RickyJ View Post
    I will give you the answer I think to be the correct one, however I am only going on my personal experience and reading the damn news about this for the last 20 plus years! So of course I may not be qualified to give a good answer on this.

    Out-sourcing and in-sourcing. That's it, I could go into to details about it, but don't desire to do so right now. Most of the jobs are still at these companies, they just prefer to not hire Americans.
    I agree. They (Corporations) are actively helping to implode this economy and put people in the poor house in the process. Colleges are literally making people mortgage their lives, all for a phony fairy-tale about the American Dream. George Carlin was spot on:

    “The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner

  16. #14
    Schiff regularly says when interviewed "the worst thing you can do if you run a business in America is to hire ", he cites the costs and regulations and advises businesses to hire abroad or hire as less people as possible.

  17. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by donnay View Post
    I agree. They (Corporations) are actively helping to implode this economy and put people in the poor house in the process. Colleges are literally making people mortgage their lives, all for a phony fairy-tale about the American Dream. George Carlin was spot on:

    George Carlin's language sucks and the audience clapping about it and cheering it on sucked even more!

    He is right that most political leaders don't really care about us, because they know they don't owe their jobs to us, they owe it to those that really put them in office and can take them out of office anytime if they don't perform as "requested." We do not have a real free independent press in America to report what is going on and who is really controlling America because the puppet masters control all of the major media outlets!

    When I see reporters on the news reporting BS, I wonder if they really believe it or if they know it is a lie but put on a happy face and just report it for the money. I mean the female BBC reporter reporting that WTC7 had collapsed when it was standing right behind her! It is kind of obvious there she was reading from a script and probably didn't have an idea where the WTC7 building was or even what it looked liked. The BBC got away with it though. They never revealed their sources and still act like it was nothing when it was a major screw up! You can literally get away with murder if you control the press. Mass perception, even when it is a lie, becomes the "truth" for most people. Once it is established as "truth" for the majority of people then it can be very hard to get them to change their minds about it especially when they are still plugged into the same media outlets for their "news."

  18. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by itshappening View Post
    Schiff regularly says when interviewed "the worst thing you can do if you run a business in America is to hire ", he cites the costs and regulations and advises businesses to hire abroad or hire as less people as possible.
    Is that how GE gets away with paying a 2.3% tax rate over the last decade, because of all the costs and regulations? Corporations know the "loopholes" and to think that regulations are the reason to not hire Americans is ignoring that reality.
    Last edited by RickyJ; 02-03-2013 at 03:44 AM.



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  20. #17
    Get a PhD in Biomedical science and life would actually feel good. Good hard science is usually funded by the NIH or NASA. Even then they spend too much. Hell, I am working towards my BS so that i could go somewhere.

    Too be honest, Don;t get a PhD in the social "sciences" or English

  21. #18
    American culture has a problem, on the whole we're ignorant, and with more education we're still ignorant. Further education does virtually nothing to prepare most people for the jobs they need to have.

  22. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by RickyJ View Post
    Is that how GE gets away with paying a 2.3% tax rate over the last decade, because of all the costs and regulations? Corporations know the "loopholes" and to think that regulations are the reason to not hire Americans is ignoring that reality.
    they're paying 2.3% on reported profits but when they hire they have to follow all sorts of federal and state regulations and pay payroll taxes so the "cost" of the employee is higher than it ought to be and a lot higher than elsewhere in the world

  23. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by CPUd View Post
    If you get a degree from a "hard" program like Math or Engineering, from a traditional school, you are not gonna have a hard time getting something in your field. From what I've seen firsthand, most new graduates from such programs were hired their last semester or 2 before graduating.
    Mechanical or electrical engineer are great for manufacturing fields with the larger companies. Or, do like me and get into automation robots (yes, I'm a job killer). The only college I have is from correspondance courses I took in the Army for promotion points. I got a job as an $8 an hour manual drill press operator in a CNC machine shop, thought they robots were cool, and started learning the machines and bots. Now facilities send head hunters after me as I have gotten into management, and am also well versed in applied automation.

  24. #21
    I fail to see a problem here,other than the fact that they are getting food stamps,of course.Do away with food stamps and such socialist truck and I would see no problem at all.

    In any free market economy,if hundreds of thousands of people are shelling out billions of dollars for a degree that others consider worthless,well that sounds like a personal problem,not a market failure.

    Suppose that hundreds of thousands of people were going into billions of dollars of debt to study how to be snake charmers or buggy whip makers,what debt does the rest of society owe them for their perhaps less than timely or intelligent choice?

    Nobody is forced to go to college,let alone get a higher degree.If the Masters or higher degree works out for you,great.If it doesn't,don't expect others to pay for your groceries.

  25. #22
    I wonder if it has become easier to get a degree today than it was, say 60 years ago. Are the universities lowering the standards and allowing more people to get the degrees? Maybe some of these folks would have been better off taking up a trade after high school. There is no shame in that. I'm surprised that bigger entities like corporations don't have their own universites. They could take only as many students as they need and have their employees trained for their position right out of school.
    I can understand the frustration of those who can't find work with higher degrees. If they want to work at a fast food place and a few other low paying jobs just to get by, they might not hire you because you are considered "over qualified".

  26. #23
    Quote Originally Posted by KrokHead View Post
    American culture has a problem, on the whole we're ignorant, and with more education we're still ignorant. Further education does virtually nothing to prepare most people for the jobs they need to have.
    The problem is that in the land of "rugged individualism" we are taught through our entire student careers to be wage slaves. If people were taught to be self-reliant then they wouldn't have to rely on an employer or the government to put food in their mouths.

  27. #24
    Let's honestly analyze this situation please. Tewnty-five to thirty years ago, those of us who went to college, were going there because we WERE QUALIFIED and could afford it (either through parents, scholarships, and/or loans which which you had to have some ability to prove you could pay back). The degreee itself mattered, but basically, the fact you had more "education" than half the people in the country, meant you had a leg up when it came to getting into a job/career. Sure, the name of the school meant something and the GPA meant something, but usually there was a job waiting for almost anyone with a college degree that wanted one.

    Then came 1992...that's when things started to change. That was the first real downturn in a decade. There were still jobs, but that's when what the degree was started to matter.

    Those of you who remember Clinton, remember his mantra about EVERYONE NEEDING to go to college? That's when the "needing college" explosion happened. Everyone was getting a degree mainly because high schools were grade inflating, and there were fewer restrictions placed on getting loans. Just so happened that by the end of the 90's, we had a "booming" false economy where anyone with half a brain and could understand a little bit about computers could get a fairly high paying job fairly easily.

    Then came the burst of the IT bubble. The high paying jobs were not there for everybody; only engineering, computer science, and other tech majors were finding those jobs. The liberal arts degree was not treated the way it used to be. That led to the explosion in MBAs, JDs, PhDs, etc. Not to mention, a lot of these people weren't all that bright to begin with; just pushed along with high grades, and little to no knowledge of anything other than what was written in their textbook.

    That part is on the individual and and on our pathetic public education system.

    Now, government has had a big role too. Tax incentives for off-shoring and on-shoring does not help. It should not cost less (disregarding salary) to hire foreigners than Americans. I see it in IT.

    Now where you an-caps, and libertarians who argue it's "our fault". At least in IT, I do not understand how we as Americans are supposed to compete with a completely different CULTURE (SE Asians, i.e. Indians). Even before we get into "cost", we are dealing with a people who WILLING ALLOW THEMSELVES TO BECOME WHAT AMOUNTS TO INDENTURED SERVANTS. What most of these on-shored "consultants" do, is go to a "company owned school" for about a year and get "trained" on American banking systems, basic mainframe programming, and a little bit of exposure to networking, internet, etc. It's much less exposure than in a CIS program at most American universities. However, in exchange for the "schooling", the Indian allows himself/herself to be put in an American job less than 48 hours of being told about it. They also allow themselves to be moved anywhere in the United States on 24 hour notice. For their work, they recieve no overtime pay, but are told to work about 75-80 hours a week (the "company" pockets the OT). They live 8-9 to an apartment, usually in some of the worst areas of the cities they are assigned to.

    American companies LOVE these people, even though many are clueless as to what they are actually doing. The "company" sells them as highly trained and experienced. Most of them are lying about their ages and experience, saying they're 30, when if they are 25, it's a stretch.

    And, these are their BEST people. Their lower-end "employees" are back in India in IT "sweatshops" writing code. It is the equivalent to "if 1000 monkeys sat at typewriters, they'd create the world's greatest novel."

    All for $28/hr.

    HOW IN THE WORLD IS A TRAINED AMERICAN IT WORKER (Programmer, DBA, Business Analyst, Data Analyst, Project Manager, Network Admin, etc.) WITH A MORTGAGE AND A FAMILY SUPPOSED TO COMPETE WITH THAT? An-caps, so is the answer to basically make yourself homeless or live in the hood, and leave your family to compete with this?
    "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness." -- Ronald Reagan, 1964





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  29. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by pochy1776 View Post
    Get a PhD in Biomedical science and life would actually feel good. Good hard science is usually funded by the NIH or NASA. Even then they spend too much. Hell, I am working towards my BS so that i could go somewhere.

    Too be honest, Don;t get a PhD in the social "sciences" or English
    Yea, that kind of $#@!s those of us who are not good at advanced mathematics or hard sciences....
    "Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses." - H.L. Mencken

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  30. #26
    Selling ideas in a global economy is a risky endeavor..

    Anything involved with computers other than hardware is an "idea"..

    It really doesn't seem to be an intelligent occupation choice for anyone but the very brightest.

    A nation of managers and warriors isn't going to last very long.

  31. #27
    Quote Originally Posted by DamianTV View Post
    Say hello to the new class of citizen: The Educated Poor
    which wouldn't exist if student loans weren't legal.

  32. #28
    One of the latest estimates of food stamp recipients is 47,100,000. Or, 1/7 Americans. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...tates-Combined

    So 320,000 of them is one in 1468. Hardly surprising, and consider that they didn't say what their age was, so they could be retired or unemployed after working 10 years.

    By the way, the idea that food stamp population exceeds population of 24 states says one thing liberals would love to repeat "America is full of space and immigrants won't hurt us!"

  33. #29
    Quote Originally Posted by Tpoints View Post
    which wouldn't exist if student loans weren't legal.

    Student "loans" should absolutely be legal, but the government should not be involved and a student who goes bankrupt should be able to discharge the debt...

    That'd cut the BS right now.

  34. #30
    Quote Originally Posted by tod evans View Post
    Student "loans" should absolutely be legal, but the government should not be involved and a student who goes bankrupt should be able to discharge the debt...

    That'd cut the BS right now.
    No, no debt should be allowed to be discharged with bankruptcy, how else do you discourage people from taking irresponsible loans?

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