1. Teaching abroad
There are many countries where English teachers are highly sought (e.g., South Korea, the Middle East, and Japan). If you’re an adventure seeker, teaching abroad on a one- or two-year contract is a great option. The classroom experience could prove useful when you return.
2. Private tutoring
You can work with tutoring companies such as Alliance or Kumon, or manage your own students. The rates are good—up to $30 per hour.
3. Private schools
People shy away from teaching at them because of the stereotype about affluent students being entitled and unpleasant to teach. But this may not be true, and the classes are relatively small and teacher resources are abundant.
4. The justice system
Who says you have to stick to the classroom? The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has also been recruiting education graduates lately to work in civilian jobs as instructors, youth workers, or in victim services. Skills acquired in teacher’s college—flexibility, planning, and multitasking—are useful in the justice system too.[14]
The oversupply of people with undergraduate degrees has morphed, in short order, into an oversupply of people with graduate degrees. Where there were once too many people with Bachelor’s degrees, there are now also too many with Master’s. A good portion of this is artificial, though, since the largest field of graduate studies in North America—by a very significant degree—is in education. In the high-demand areas, where the continental economy truly needs highly skilled and well-trained people, like mathematics, computer science, and engineering, the vast majority of North American PhD students and graduates are international students. Not so in education. In this extremely inflated field, enrolment is driven by the immediate salary bump for teachers that follows graduation.
The evolving patterns of the modern workforce have destroyed dreams by the hundreds of thousands. Many Chinese families who borrowed heavily to get their children into a North American university have seen them struggle to find work when they returned home. Thousands of American young adults have lived in undergraduate-like poverty as they searched for work, and large numbers have moved back in with their parents. Failure to launch, much more than the title of a mediocre movie, became the hallmark of the Millennial generation. While many coped with long-term underemployment and unemployment, others ascribed failure to their own shortcomings. Few looked across a landscape of destroyed expectations and identified structural or fundamental flaws with the economic and educational order.
From about 2000 to the present, the experience of young adults has mirrored and contributed to the changing employment landscape across North America and around the world. Some succeeded and did extremely well. Ivy League graduates continued to land six-figure jobs on Wall Street. High-tech firms in Massachusetts, north Texas, and California scoured the graduation lists at MIT, Harvard, University of Texas–Austin, Stanford, and the University of Waterloo to find the highly skilled workers they needed for their new economy firms. In short, there was wealth and opportunity for the few; struggle and frustration for the many. More than the mantra of the Occupy movement, this described the real-life experience of college and university graduates in general.
4
The Death of Average
In August 2015, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton released a major statement on college and university education. It was a sweeping Obama-esque kind of transformative initiative aimed at public expectations, parental aspirations, and the dreams of millions of young Americans. Clinton promised that, if she were elected, her government would provide massive increases in funding for universities, free college tuition, and major changes and many billions of dollars’ worth of other electoral goodies, all tied to the usual Learning = Earning formula of youth career preparation.
The Clinton plan is not simply unwise, but for a number of reasons it is counterproductive, reinforcing the false dream of millions of American young adults and putting increased national emphasis on one of the most narrow and uninformed public policy priorities of this generation: the idea that higher education always equals more income. America already has a college and university participation rate that is arguably too high, and now Clinton wants to expand it. In an interview, she said, “I want every parent to know that his or her child can get a degree or you can get one yourself.”[1] One hopes that she meant every child or person sufficiently intelligent and motivated can get one.
If the United States somehow had an endless supply of jobs requiring a college degree—something that is clearly not the case —her statement would make sense. True, the plan will not fund students at private colleges, only at public ones, but the prospect of free tuition at state universities and colleges is bound to increase enrolment, especially in the absence of strong entrance requirements. Is a college degree or diploma really the answer to America’s social and economic problems? Of course the United States has serious problems of social and economic equality, but higher education is not the panacea that by itself will cure them; certainly pouring more money into the system isn’t the answer. As it is, there are some private colleges with relatively low tuition fees (Berea College in Kentucky charges $870 a year), and the Clinton plan doesn’t pay for living expenses. There are a number of sources of money already available to needy students; notably, for Americans, the Pell Grant, which provides up to $5,700. There are a good number of public colleges with tuition fees lower than that.[2] And then there’s the question of fraud. The rules to prevent this aren’t clear, but you’d have to be naïve to doubt that fraudsters are already devising schemes to profit from Clinton’s plan, should it be enacted. It’s an all-round bad idea.
Disappearing Jobs and Careers
The obsession with the Dream Factories has become a serious American problem, and a global one too. While there are always improvements that can be made in the world’s most complex, comprehensive, and diverse post-secondary system, the reality is that governments—and politicians like Hillary Clinton—are looking at the wrong end of the problem. As economist James Bessen wrote, “This is today’s great paradox. Since the beginning of the personal computer revolution, the median wage in the United States has been stagnant. Information technology may even be hurting many white-collar workers, especially those with a college education. Voice mail systems have taken over from switchboard operators, automated teller machines do tasks of bank tellers, and computer systems have automated a whole range of routine clerical tasks. Workers in these occupations have to find new jobs or learn new skills to remain employed.”[3] For a generation, hoping to reproduce the positive and career-building experiences of the 1960s and 1970s, North American politicians and government officials have expanded the university and college system, believing that preparing an infinite number of young people through undergraduate education was the key to national competitiveness and personal opportunity.
For the college and university dream to work, graduates have to find stable jobs with decent salaries and good career prospects. Students, parents, governments, and institutions can control the input—the number of enrollees and a considerably smaller number of graduates—but the second half of the equation—careers—is tied to the vagaries of the global economy. In a crucial study of the technological revolution, Rik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argued:
[D]igitization is going to bring with it some thorny challenges. This in itself should not be too surprising or alarming; even the most beneficial developments have unpleasant consequences that must be managed. The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by soot-filled London skies and horrific exploitation of child labour. What will be their modern equivalents? Rapid and accelerating digitization is likely to bring economic rather than environmental disruption, stemming from the fact that as computers get more powerful, companies have less need for some kinds of workers. Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot people, as it races ahead … [T]here’s never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the right education, because these people can use technology to create and capture value. However,