COM Prof: College Can’t Guarantee Well-Paid Work

A college degree, especially for poor students, is not the cure for inequality that some observers believe, Ellen Shell argues in her new book, The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change. Photo by Cydney Scott

Some years back, Ellen Shell says, an economic analysis defined a “good job” as one that pays $40,000 or more a year and comes with health insurance and a pension. “Unfortunately,” she says, “by that standard, fewer than one in four Americans has a good job today.

For many analysts, college has been part of the answer to finding better paid work and a middle-class life. Shell, a College of Communication professor of journalism, begs to differ. In The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change (Currency, 2018), published this week after eight years of research and reporting, Shell writes, “People everywhere wish for the same thing—an education that will launch them into a life of productive, purposeful, and fairly compensated work. Wishes not being horses, only some will ride.”

The book explores the cost—political, social, economic, and personal—of our growing anxiety over jobs and suggests ways we can regain control over our working lives. Her research took her from Appalachia to the Midwestern Rust Belt to the East Coast and included interviews with dozens of workers, as well as economists, computer scientists, psychologists, and historians to unveil the myths surrounding how to build good work in a world that is increasingly globalized and where middle-class jobs are threatened.

BU Today asked Shell, codirector of COM’s Science Journalism Program, to talk about her findings.

BU Today: You’re dubious about college as a moderator of inequality?

Shell: As someone who saved what seemed to be every spare penny to support my daughters’ achieving their educational goals, I fully believe in the importance of education for all. Students who are prepared to complete a rigorous college program should be encouraged and given the financial support to do so. But college per se cannot and should not be touted as the only, or even the best, path to financial security, and the fact that it is touted as such has led to disappointment and—in many cases—despair.

Individuals who attend, but do not complete, college, too often amass debt with little or no benefit, and also experience opportunity loss from the years they spent in a futile pursuit. This is particularly true of low-income individuals who can least afford to sacrifice years of their lives and take out loans in an effort that lands them in a worse position than where they began.

You quote federal statistics that say by 2026 only 25 percent of jobs will require a bachelor’s degree. A Georgetown study projects that in just two years, 65 percent of jobs will require “postsecondary education and training beyond high school.” What are we to make of such dueling claims?

These claims are not dueling. The federal projections refer to a bachelor’s degree. The Georgetown report refers to all sorts of postsecondary education—apprenticeships, community and two-year colleges, culinary school, nurse’s aide training programs, and military training, among many others. Contrary to popular thinking, digital technology has lessened, not grown, the demand for mid-level skills without radically increasing the demand for high-level skills.

So we will need people with advanced degrees, but we’ll need even more people for whom advanced degrees offer no advantage. The fastest growing job category is personal healthcare aide, a job that as of now requires no college at all, and in many states very little formal training of any sort.

Researchers say poor students with a college education will earn more than they’d make with just a high school diploma. Can you explain why you doubt this “earnings premium”?

I do not doubt this “premium,” but challenge it as a measure of whether more young people should attend college. Low-income individuals do benefit from a college degree, but not nearly as much as do high-income individuals. This is in part due to the fact that low-income individuals are far less likely to attend selective institutions and partly due to discrimination effects. Low-income individuals who attend college but fail to obtain a degree are worse off still.

Lithuania boasts one of the most educated populations on the planet, yet its gross domestic product is not impressive. A few years ago, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked Russia, a country not known for its focus on income equality, as the most highly educated nation in the world.

What will reduce inequality, if not higher education?

We need public sentiment—and policy—to insist that any work worth doing is worth rewarding with a living wage and a secure future. Entrepreneurship is often a good thing and should be encouraged, but entrepreneurship per se will not solve what I call our “national jobs disorder.” In surveys, college students the world over cite Google as the most desirable place to work. But as one computer scientist I quote in the book points out, “not all of us can work for Google,” nor should many of us strive to do so. Rather than attempt to contort ourselves to meet the quixotic demands of the “job market,” we should shape jobs to meet the talents and proclivities of those who seek them.

To make that happen, we need to make the creation and sustaining of good jobs an explicit goal of innovation—that is, in order to address the challenges of a digital, globalized economy, we need to innovate good work, just as we have innovated technology. As I hope I make clear through the stories of scores of people at work in everything from high-end motorcycle design to custom-clothing manufacture, it is well within our reach.

Ellen Shell will read from her new book, The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change, on Friday, October 25 at Porter Square Books in the Porter Square Shopping Center, 25 White St., Cambridge, at 7 pm.