In my last diary, I really appreciated the help and advice most people gave me, even if some of it it wasn't advice I could take or use due to my personal constraints - none of which any of you could be expected to know about until they came up. Some of the advice really helped me take Sunday just a little easier.
For the few people in that diary who said "Oh, the diarist is just an entitled little brat like all the rest of the recent college graduates," however, I feel compelled to respond on behalf of myself and my fellow college graduates, many of whom are my own students. I'm not calling any of them out specifically, but if they fit into one of the categories below, so be it.
I'm also talking to the people who shout "Get a job!" at the Occupiers, and who think that it's funny to make fun of the homeless and to snub the poor - both of which I seem to be well on my way to becoming. (What sits on a street corner with a sign that says "Will lecture for food"? A homeless Ph.D. Ha ha. So funny. Except not.)
I'm also talking to the people who think that college still works the same way it did when they graduated, whenever that was, before the age of crushing debt to get a four-year degree, never mind the graduate degree I'm about to receive.
I'm also talking to the lower- and working-class idiots who support cutting taxes (including funding for education) thinking it will somehow make them rich.
And finally, I'm talking to the corporate owners and the super-rich, who have funded the politicians who have cut education funding over and over and over again in the holy name of cutting taxes, while at the same time refusing consideration for employment to anyone who doesn't have at least the letters BA or BS after his or her name.
In this diary, I want to dig into two major problems: the realities of today's workforce and the meaning of "entitled." I'll discuss the second problem in detail myself, in a moment. For the first, I'll refer you to an excellent diary here on Kos which should be on the Rec List, a powerful book related to it, an article from The Winning Words Project on the corruption in most private industry's CEO class, and an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, with a short summary of how it all relates to what I'll say on the topic of entitlement later.
First problem: The realities of today's workforce
In "You pay what it takes to get the people you need, and if wages have to go up, then so be it," by Nulwee earlier today, the diarist demonstrates Peter Cappelli's powerful argument that the hiring issue today isn't with the graduates, and it isn't with the job searchers, and it isn't with the schools, and it isn't the economy. It's the demented supply-side economic argument having invaded the hiring process to the point where, as Cappelli puts it in his book Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It, employers expect an off-the-rack employee:
"Consider this analogy, drawn from outside the high-tech industry: A car manufacturer decides to buy a key engine component rather than make it. Despite the fact that the component’s requirements change every year and the car won’t run without it, the company simply assumes the market will deliver the new component on time, matching exact specifications, and at the necessary price. This behavior seems crazy—or at the very least represents a complete failure to manage risk—and yet that’s precisely what IT companies have been doing."
Cappelli, Peter (2012-05-29). Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It (Kindle Locations 461-465). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
Cappelli calls the current corporate hiring process the "hunt for the purple squirrel." Of course, there are no purple squirrels, but companies will let their computers sift through 25,000 applicants trying to find one anyway. This is not just hurting employees and the unemployed; it's hurting business and the economy in ways we can't really measure.
Go read the diary. Then go read the linked article. Then go get Cappelli's book on Kindle and read that too.
And then let's be clear, here. The problem is not entitled little shits who graduate from college and expect the world on a plate. The problem is entitled employers who set impossible standards and then moan about not finding the perfectly made widget to fit in their product without having to expend the time to train that widget.
An additional article I'll point you at is off-site, at The Winning Words Project. I'll just give you a taste of this one, and then I'll tie these first two articles together with the kicker from a third, before I go on to discuss the second major problem of definitions I already mentioned above.
Walmart has figured out that they can legally get away with paying their employees a wage they cannot live on with today’s cost of living, because what they won’t pay, the taxpayer will (in tax breaks, food stamps, housing assistance, and medical care, etc.). Are the extra dollars Walmart keeps by not paying 2012 wages, that make up a significant portion of their $15 billion in annual profits, signs of “hard work,” “self reliance,” or “discipline”? They are not. They are evidence of a masterful scam perpetrated on the American public. Instead of being revered for their “ability” to have obtained their fortune, they should be reviled for stealing from all of us, which they do every single day. Their payroll policies alone have cost the real “hard working Americans”—us, the taxpayers—billions, if not trillions of dollars in lost revenue from taxes we can’t collect on payroll that doesn’t exist, and government programs to pick up the slack they leave for the rest of us to pay from our pockets.
When the CEOs and other Senior Executives in the banking industry took millions of people’s pensions, 401ks, company stock options, and subprime mortgages, bundled them up into securities, derivatives, CDOs, and credit default swaps, and sold this junk to people who didn’t know that what they were buying was junk, was their wealth obtained through “self-reliance” or “discipline”? Hardly. When these same people came begging we taxpayers for $700 billion in “rescue” money, plus a $1.2 trillion loan at zero percent interest, then paid themelves enormous bonuses, was that “disciplined” or “self-reliant”?
And who is "Walmart"? Is it The Company, or is it The Bosses Of The Company? I'd be wiling to bet that, like the banking industry example, we're talking about the CEOs. They've found ways to swindle their workers and their customers and the American public at large. Why has it gone unnoticed? Why, that's just how we do business in America (one of the main reasons I will NOT work in the private sector ever again in my life. A bit of humor - my autocorrect corrected my misspelling of "private" to "pirate" and that's not too far from reality).
Finally, how this connects up to the problems I was talking about in my previous diary. Bear with me; we're almost there.
The problem facing me specifically in the area of employment in higher education is that funding is being cut dramatically. There are too many Ph.D.s competing for too few positions. Even the adjunctships are highly competitive these days. And we're told repeatedly that it's just that universities are too bloated, their faculty demand too much money, students aren't paying enough and on and on.
But like Cappelli's argument above, there's a major missing piece in the analysis. That piece is university administrators - specifically, the top level university administrators. These might be seen as analogous to the CEOs of private sector employers. And just like the CEOs of private sector employers, they are taking an inordinate amount of money away from the supposedly primary functions of universities and colleges: teaching and research, by which I mean faculty. Senior administrators get paid too much compared to the rest of the people who work with and for them.
Another major problem colleges are facing is the lack of public funding, which has been dropping every year since the middle of the 1970s. More and more of the cost is dropped on the backs of students in the form of tuition, which then spikes their debt which is the only way to go to school and graduate in a reasonable time (if you don't get lucky with a rich parent and/or a good scholarship paying your way), which is yet another problem for recent graduates. We keep hearing that services have to be cut and classes have to be dropped while construction of new buildings and stadiums and more money to sports funding continues across campus (because sports is the real reason for having a university, don't you know).
The university administrators aren't much better than the private sector fat cats, although there are a few that are doing the right thing. For example, today, the Chronicle of Higher Ed reported that several state university systems are pushing to hire a mind-boggling number of new faculty over the next three years:
At a time when he encounters many demoralized professors, as campuses across the nation slash budgets and freeze hiring, the University of Connecticut is one of a few that have recently announced plans to significantly expand their faculty ranks. In December, administrators there announced they would create nearly 300 tenure-track positions over the next four years.... [At] Iowa State, administrators are planning to hire more than 200 faculty over two years.
How are they doing it? Well, they spoke with consultants, first...
[R]evamping information-technologies services and centralizing purchasing, an area in which the consultants said the university could generate more than $20-million in savings. The consultants also recommended ways to increase revenue, such as by raising Connecticut's relatively low parking fees and increasing ticket prices for athletics events.... [Iowa implemented] cost-cutting measures, such as centralizing printing centers and reducing support staff...
Both these universities plan to hire over 100 new faculty over the next three years. And they didn't have to raise tuition exorbitantly to do it. Moreover, they are building ties to industry in ways that should help their students find jobs once they graduate - at least, as long as those industries follow Cappelli's advice to start training on the job after graduation again instead of setting impossible standards for incoming hires.
The way this all ties together is: it's the fat cats that are causing the unemployment problem, not the workers. It's the company and university presidents and CEOs that are creating this impossible situation for workers. And that has to change.
And yet, despite the documented evidence that it's the higher-ups and the 1% that are the problem, people in my situation continue to get the "get a job!" and "entitled little shit" and the bootstraps myth thrown at us. You know the bootstraps myth, right? It goes "you're the only one who can change this situation. No one else can do it for you."
The bootstraps myth is just that - a myth. I can't change a broken system on my own. Nor can you. But if we all work together to stop this and fix the problems, we might get somewhere.
Am I entitled? You're damn tootin' I am - but not in the way you might think.
Which brings us to the....
Second problem: The meaning of "entitled"
There are two different meanings for "entitled." The first one is the one that most of the people I listed above the fleur-de-Kos are using. The second one is the one that I, and my fellow jobless college graduates, are using. Let's dissect these, shall we?
About the first meaning of "entitled": Those I named seem to mean "entitled" to mean "give it all to me on a silver platter without me having to do any work for it."
Excuse me, but what was the last four to ten years we all put in getting our degrees, if not work?
What do the letters AA, AS, BA, BS, MA, MS, BBA, MBA, PhD, MD, JD stand for, if not work?
What does "work for it" mean, if not that?
Should we not have a reasonable expectation of being employable and of having the same opportunities our parents and grandparents had? Should we not have believed that the degree means anything in the job market? Should we have somehow magically predicted the future, where the wealth now is so grossly concentrated in the hands of so few people that there was never any hope for us to get a job after we graduated?
Well, forgive me, but if "work for it" means "predict the future," sorry. I lost my crystal ball when I entered graduate school.
Don't you dare tell me to work for it. I have been, for the last ten years. Don't you dare tell me I haven't paid my dues. I'm still paying them, and I will be for the rest of my life. Don't you dare tell me I somehow don't deserve the job that I've been working my ass off for for the last quarter of my life. Don't you dare.
About the second meaning of "entitled": I, and I'm sure most of my fellow grads, mean "entitled" here as "I have paid my dues, and have not received the return they were supposed to give me and that I was assured they WOULD give me. Hell yes, I have a right to feel cheated, angry, and outraged."
Believe it or not, I don't want a silver platter. I don't want a handout. I'm wiling to work, and work hard. Shall I show you the two hundred and fifty-seven applications I've sent out in the past nine months while I was also working full-time as an adjunct professor and writing a dissertation? On what planet is that not work? Each application takes, on average, two hours - and that's if I'm rushing through it. A good application takes twice that.
I just want to not have been sold a bill of goods and lies about what my degree would lead to.
I just want to realize the dream that I was told I was realizing.
I just want not to have been lied to.
I just want to not have been given a royal screwing.
I don't think that's too much to ask, and I certainly don't agree that it makes me an "entitled little shit."
What I was TOLD this process would lead to was the credentialing necessary to get the job I am called to do - teaching. What has actually HAPPENED, however, is that I'm deeply in debt for a degree that doesn't seem to be opening any of the doors that I was told it would open.
And let's be honest, I'm certainly not the only one that's happened to. I know engineering students who can't find work. I know math graduates who are scrambling to find a job. And let's not discuss the enormous number of my former students and classmates whom I've run across working at Wal-Mart, or Starbucks, or Denny's because there is no work that requires their knowledge and training that they killed themselves for for the last four to six years - at least, according to the dominant supply-side labor market meme that Cappelli exposes in his book.
And another thing. A degree is supposed to be your ticket out of poverty. For too many of us, it's become a double-edged sword. You needed the degree to get the job, but now that those jobs "aren't available," you can't get a lower-paying job because you're "overqualified." Try finding a temp-work job with a Ph.D. or even an M.A. Good luck with that.
The irony is, we were all told to go get a college degree so we wouldn't end up flipping burgers for a living. And now that we have college degrees, we can't even get a job flipping burgers! We're worse off than we were when we walked into our first college class.
Well, I didn't spend the last quarter of my life just to end up deeper in debt with no hope in sight. That's not what I signed on for and it's not what I was told I would get. I have a right to be angry about that. I have a right to say it's wrong. I have a right to say that I'm mad as hell about it. And I have a right to demand what I was promised.
So hell yes, you better believe I'm entitled. I'm entitled to be angry, I'm entitled to be pissed off, and I'm entitled to say why. Repeatedly and often. And when depression gets the best of me and I despair for my future and my students' futures, hell yes I'm going to say so.
"Mad as hell that I was cheated and lied to" is not the same thing as "give me all of it for nothing." It's not even remotely in the same ballpark.
You see, it only qualifies as "entitled" behavior if there's no justification for it. There's PLENTY of justification for how I feel, how I'm reacting and how I'm behaving.
And I'm not the only one who's entitled to feel this way.
If you are, too, then join me. Let's force them to give us what we are entitled to.