ICYMI – April 10, 2013
If you are like me you try to read as many articles, blogs and books as possible but just cannot catch all of them. “In Case You Missed It” is my way of pointing out a few “reads” that I think are too good to miss.
Why a BA is Now a Ticket to A Job in a Cofee Shop – Megan McArdle
The number of jobs requiring high-skilled labor has declined.
There’s a growing perception out there that a college degree no longer delivers the value that it used to.
An employee takes orders at a Starbucks in Washington, D.C on December 27, 2012. (Drew Angerer/Getty)
Too many college kids are living in Mom’s basement, or working at Starbucks. Like most personal finance columnists, I get the letters from them: what do I do? How do I fix this? For many, the answer is grad school. But I get the letters from grad students too. A while back, I found myself talking to a professor whose school has a number of impressive-sounding graduate programs that were originally conceived as add-ons for a professional degree in law or medicine or business. They are now attracting a number of students who just go for the standalone degree. He didn’t understand what the career path was for these kids, and he wasn’t sure that they did either.
“It sounds good, so they can persuade their parents to pay for it,” he said, a touch guiltily.
A new paper from Paul Beaudry, David Green, and Benjamin Sand argues that these worried kids–and their worried parents–are not just imagining things. The phenomenon is all too real. Skilled workers with higher degrees are increasingly ending up in lower-skilled jobs that don’t really require a degree–and in the process, they’re pushing unskilled workers out of the labor force altogether.
Critics slam MSNBC host’s claim that kids belong to community, not parents – Hollie McKay
Parents and media critics were aghast after a host for MSNBC called for collective care of a community’s children instead of parents taking care of their kids themselves.
MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry recorded a commercial for the network in which she stated that children do not belong to their parents, but are instead the responsibility of the members of their community.
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children,” she says in a spot for the network’s “Lean Forward” campaign. “So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
Harris-Perry’s views ignited a firestorm of anger and disbelief.
“The notion that children belong to a state government rather than their own flesh and blood is the most disturbing statement made in recent political times. Melissa Harris-Perry is dead wrong. It’s unfathomable that any true American could make such a pretentious and naively ill statement,” media communications expert, and parent, Angie Olszewski told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “The government can’t properly run their own budgets schools and public systems. Why would anybody think they could rear children?”
Texting in traffic: Adults worse than teen – Larry Copeland
Forget teenagers. Adults are the biggest texting-while-driving problem in the USA. What’s worse — they know it’s wrong.
Almost half of all adults admit to texting while driving in a survey by AT&T provided to USA TODAY, compared with 43% of teenagers. More than 98% of adults — almost all of them — admit they know it’s wrong. Six in 10 say they weren’t doing it three years ago.
“I was a little bit surprised,” Charlene Lake, AT&T’s senior vice president-public affairs, says of the survey of 1,011 adult drivers. “It was sobering to realize that texting while driving by adults is not only high, it’s really gone up in the last three years.”
