Why Good Jobs For Graduates Are Missing

US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained. America today is like India of yesteryear, with engineers working as bartenders, taxi cab drivers, waitresses, and employed in menial work in dog kennels as the offshoring of US jobs dismantles the ladders of upward mobility for US citizens.

The latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the real wages and salaries of US civilian workers are below those of 5 years ago. It could not be otherwise with US corporations offshoring good jobs in order to reduce labor costs and, thereby, to convert wages once paid to Americans into multi-million dollar bonuses paid to CEOs and other top management.

Good jobs that still remain in the US are increasingly filled with foreign workers brought in on work visas. Corporate public relations departments have successfully spread the lie that there is a shortage of qualified US workers, necessitating the importation into the US of foreigners. The truth is that the US corporations force their American employees to train the lower paid foreigners who take their jobs. Otherwise, the discharged American gets no severance pay.

Over the last year (from June 2006 through June 2007) the US economy created 1.6 million net private sector jobs. As Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services reports each month, essentially all of the new jobs are in low-paid domestic services that do not require a college education.

The category, “Leisure and hospitality,” accounts for 30% of the new jobs, of which 387,000 are bartenders and waitresses, 38,000 are workers in motels and hotels, and 50,000 are employed in entertainment and recreation.

The category, “Education and health services,” accounts for 35% of the gain in employment, of which 100,000 are in educational services and 456,000 are in health care and social assistance, principally ambulatory health care services and hospitals.

“Professional and technical services” accounts for 268,000 of the new jobs.

“Finance and insurance” added 93,000 new jobs, of which about one quarter are in real estate and about one half are in insurance. “Transportation and warehousing” added 65,000 jobs, and wholesale and retail trade added 185,000.

Over the entire year, the US economy created merely 51,000 jobs in architectural and engineering services, less than the 76,000 jobs created in management and technical consulting (essentially laid-off white collar professionals).

Except for a well-connected few graduates, who find their way into Wall Street investment banks, top law firms, and private medical practice, American universities today consist of detention centers to delay for four or five years the entry of American youth into unskilled domestic services. America as the land of opportunity has passed into history.

*The above has been excerpted from “Return of The Robber Barons” by Paul Craig Roberts. Roberts served as Assistant Secretary to the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He was an editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal and Business Week. In 1993, Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States. Currently he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate and a frequent contributor to EconomyInCrisis.org.