The linked post is, to some extent, trying to explain why there seems to be an increase in political activism. I don’t know about that but the data in the article is interesting from a demographic’s perspective.
Did America produce too many frustrated college graduates in the 2000s and 2010s?
….
Basically, the idea here is that America produced a lot of highly educated people with great expectations for their place in American society, but that our economic and social system was unable to accommodate many of these expectations, causing them to turn to leftist politics and other disruptive actions out of frustration and disappointment.
Source: The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis – by Noah Smith
And:
Basically, when a trend goes on long enough, people start to think there’s some sort of structural process underlying the trend, and therefore they assume the trend will continue indefinitely. For upwardly mobile people, or people in an economy that’s growing rapidly, or people whose stocks or houses are appreciating steadily in value, good times might come to seem normal.
And then what happens when it turns out that good times aren’t baked into the nature of the Universe? Suddenly, the mediocrity of reality intrudes upon the complacent expectations of eternal upward growth — housing prices plateau or fall, incomes hit a ceiling, economic growth stalls out.
Since 2010 – post Great Recession – many of the traditional career paths for humanities grads vanished:
- Media / publishing
- Law (still growing but much slower than in the past)
- Education/teaching (plummeting elementary enrollments in much of the country)
- Universities dramatically increased adjunct instructors rather than full time professors.
What happened was a collapse in the number of students pursuing humanities degrees after the Great Recession:
The comments on the Noah Smith column, above, are amazing and written well.
My oldest daughter entered college in 2005, at a time when students were encouraged to pursue their passions – and where a humanities degree would be seen as a ticket to many opportunities. Her study was in eastern European history and Slavic languages and thought she would possibly work in international business or government. She graduated in 2009 into the worst job market since the Great Depression, spent her first year working in retail, and retrained as a patent paralegal which she worked in for two years. Eventually, she returned to college, earning a BSN and MSN degree and now works as a psychiatric nurse practitioner. Her story makes the above information personal.
A lot of students who graduated in those years had a tough time, which literally impacted their career for their rest of their lives.
