This new reality highlights the need for a highly specialized workforce, but it also suggests that the Western economy will require many fewer workers than at present. With China, India, the Middle East, Turkey, and other countries churning out hundreds of thousands of highly motivated, well-trained, and eager young STEM professionals, it is by no means certain that the current demand for workers in these fields will hold. This is where things get really unnerving. The economy is shifting—and certain highly skilled workers will have the best opportunities in the workforce of the twenty-first century. Logic clearly suggests that young adults should head to the STEM disciplines where assured employment awaits. But will it? It is equally possible that competitor countries will emerge to displace leading North American firms. To the degree that there are more jobs, they may well be in Taiwan, China, and South Korea (where most of the digital economy is based) or in emerging economies in India, Turkey, or Brazil. Or not. The reality is that no one knows for sure. And it is upon precisely these uncertainties and ambiguities that young people are expected to chart their educational paths and career aspirations.
Here is the dilemma that faces governments, parents, and young people when it comes to making sense of the evolving work environment. Everyone has no doubt heard—many times—about all of the new jobs, professions, and opportunities that will be available for young people in the future. It is easy to recall these optimistic and even enticing views. Futurist gurus predict that young people will have four, five, six, or more careers in their adult lives, so fast-changing will economic realities be in the coming years. Gone, they say, are the lifelong company careers, offering steady career progress, solid benefits, and security through to retirement. If the life of the company man or woman is disappearing, worry not, the story goes, for well-trained, flexible, and educated individuals will be able to adapt to an exciting, dynamic, and upwardly mobile workforce that is full of opportunity and adventure.
CST Careers 2030, a thoughtful exploration of the future of work completed by a company that helps parents save money for their children’s college and university studies, provides an enticing view of what is in store. Old-economy jobs might be disappearing, but Careers 2030 paints a portrait of an economy moving, creatively and with dispatch, in exciting new directions. Consider some of these jobs of the future, according to CST: system tangilizer, integrated roofing systems designer, gamification designer, makeshift structure engineer, or robot counsellor. (Go to CST’s website,[8] listed in the endnotes, if you would like to find out what a “system tangilizer” or a “gamification designer” is.)
In fairness, the future of work is as unknowable today as it was for any earlier generation, so CST’s guess is as good as yours. Who in the 1930s could have fully imagined the world of work in the 1950s and 1960s? Similarly, the comfort and optimism of the 1960s was no foundation for the employment possibilities of the twenty-first century. Current career forecasts show an interesting mix of traditional and new jobs, a focus on the persistence of work in the personal-service fields, and some quirky possibilities in the world of high technology. They also suggest that a good deal of employment in the future will be based on a client-contractor, rather than employer-employee, model.
The End of the American Dream
But there are real problems with this view of the future of work. First, it turns out in fact that someone in 1930 could have guessed pretty accurately what the world of work would have been like in 2015, because, amazingly, 90 percent of people in the North American workforce are doing jobs that existed over a hundred years ago.[9] How is that for an employment world in rapid transition? Second, it’s elitist: the largest employment categories are not computer scientists and medical technologists, let alone neuroscientists or mining engineers. Rather, the largest employment categories are retail clerks, cashiers, office clerks, food preparation workers and servers, registered nurses, and customer service representatives. Overall, it’s a pretty traditional and unglamorous workforce, with the majority of workers doing low-skill, low-salary nineteenth- and twentieth-century work for the most part. There will be great, interesting, and lucrative jobs for some people in the future, but not for everyone, and not for all college graduates, either. It doesn’t matter how many graduates are produced by all of the world’s universities and colleges. Most of the jobs, even in the twenty-first century economy, will be basic, often menial, and with only a small percentage requiring highly specialized skills.
Unless technology really takes off, and unless companies produce waiter-robots, completely self-cleaning homes, digitally controlled hairdressing systems, self-driving trucks (whoops, those are on the way), total-technology fast-food restaurants, mechanized garbage collection, and nursing robots, there will continue to be a lot of very basic, service-oriented work in national and global economies. And it’s hard to imagine that those jobs will ever pay very well or return the cost of a college degree.
In the West, the combination of globalization and technological change has begun to seriously undercut one of the most valuable elements of post–World War II prosperity and social success. For more than fifty years, the economy produced well-paid, stable work for millions of people with moderate skills or expertise. These jobs—in auto plants, government offices, manufacturing operations, mines, forestry, processing plants, and the like—were often unionized, with excellent wages, benefits, and job security. Across North America, a stable and prosperous society emerged, based on middle-class opportunity and the stability of relatively low-skilled and reliable employment.
This was the magic of post–World War II America. Average people—high school graduates with reasonable work habits, but no particular entrepreneurial instincts or specialized skills—found that the economic order worked quite well for them and their families. The jobs were not necessarily personally fulfilling—few workers truly loved factory work for General Motors, the line in a Milwaukee sausage plant, or a regular shift in a Kraft food-processing operation. These were not the careers of the superstars and the exceptionally talented. But they provided decent opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people. Based on the nature of the late-twentieth -century North American economy, these industrial and white-collar workers could buy a house, provide for their families, and enjoy a comfortable life. This became the new normal—the realization of the American Dream, which offered a reasonable level of prosperity for millions of North Americans of average ability.
College graduates had it even better. The burgeoning middle class found a wealth of opportunities for those young people who completed their degrees. Nothing was assured, but on the whole most college graduates did well, entering middle management or the professions, or using their skills to launch one of the hundreds of thousands of new businesses and franchises that marked the expanding Western economy. For college graduates, this was the perfection of the American Dream, and the source of the belief that the Dream Factories had truly created personal opportunity and growth prospects.
Throughout the postwar years of economic expansion and prosperity, North America offered two major career paths for young people. Unskilled unionized work served a large portion of the workforce while college-educated graduates self-selected into largely white-collar employment and had a similarly great run through the 1960s and 1970s. Not everyone made it into one of these two paths. (The United States also had a third option—the military—that attracted thousands of young adults each year.) A considerable segment of labour was not unionized, notably coal mining, which persisted into this period. The unemployable struggled, as they always have done. The lesser-skilled young men and women found jobs in the growing low-end service sector, either using these positions as a launching pad into a life of work or hanging on to the lower rungs of the American career ladder.
But imagine if one changed the qualification from a college degree to a union card in the mid-1960s. The standard university data indicates that college degrees provide much more substantial earnings over the course of a career. Yet income data