BY MARTIN KICH
There is no good news in this pandemic—only bad and worse news.
An article written by J. Edward Moreno and Justine Coleman for The Hill opens:
College graduates are poised to enter one of the most difficult job markets in U.S. history.
Nearly 4 million people are expected to graduate with a college degree this academic year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
They will do so amid soaring unemployment and shuttering businesses.
Making matters worse, these students have historically high levels of student debt, and the sizable percentage who worked their way through college may have become unemployed before they even graduated and may come from families whose resources, financial and otherwise, have been hardest hit by the crisis.
So, as contingent faculty are starting to be furloughed, as support for graduate assistants is being reduced, and as everyone employed in higher education is rightly concerned about the sustainability of offering post-secondary education online, there is naturally much more discussion of an unprecedented calamity and even the collapse of higher education.
Certainly, some colleges and universities are going to close, and many are going to endure some torturous adjustments. But a brief look at some of the statistics on employment during the first months of this pandemic will suggest why some sort of wholesale collapse is unlikely.
First, here is a chart from Brookings on the sectors most vulnerable to job losses:
Although these industries do employ some college graduates, the bulk of those working in them do not hold college degrees.
And here are two charts on unemployment by level of education. The first is from Forbes:
The second is from the Washington Post:
And this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests why those with college degrees are more likely to have continued to be employed during this pandemic:
Just to be clear, I do not mean in any way to dismiss the suffering of those who have long been most economically vulnerable in our society. Nor do I mean to dismiss the calamitous personal circumstances that are being faced by some of our faculty colleagues and staff who have worked at our colleges and universities—and in many instances have devoted themselves to our students and our institutions.
But, even though many of those who are losing their positions at our institutions would seem to provide very pointed evidence to the contrary—and even given the widespread student and faculty dissatisfaction with the abrupt, wholesale move to online classes–the economic incentives for getting a college degree have probably never been clearer.
We all know that a college degree does not guarantee economic security or satisfying employment. On the other hand, the pandemic is offering further evidence that not having a college degree does dramatically increase the likelihood of economic insecurity and employment that has at least as many challenges as satisfactions.
P.S. The next post by me will be a follow-up to this one. So if this one has for some reason left you feeling perturbed, you might want to read the next one before venting.
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“There is no good news in this pandemic—only bad and worse news.”
This common sentiment is so wrong-headed it needs correcting whenever people express it. Novel flu pandemics are not new, and they happen often, multiple times every century for millennia. In every previous such outbreak there was never much more to do than to bury bodies, in any case a less than 1% fatality rate put the risks so far down the list of things facing our ancestors it would hardly have been worth the effort. But this time, for the first time in human history, collectively, the human race is trying to stop the outbreak, and we have collectively solved so many problems it seems worth committing resources to that task. There is never been a novel virus identified this quickly, there is have never been the possibility of developing treatments (whether adapted retrovirals or a vaccine) fast enough to help, logistical systems have never been so resilient to these shocks – and academic research and education have played a key role in creating the situation.
So no, however horrible a pandemic is almost everything about this outbreak is good news.
I agree that advancements in science and logistics have given us an unprecedented capacity to address this pandemic. But the way in which we have actually addressed it has been dismal. First China tried to ignore it and then had to lock down a city of 10+ million people for several months in order to contain it. But even though everyone knew that was happening–I knew it in rural western-central Ohio, as it was happening–the governments in Europe were largely slow to react, and even though the U.S. government could then also see the effects of what was happening not only in Asia but also in Europe, we proceeded as if the oceans still protected us. So, in all but a few Pacific rim nations, where the response has been appropriate, we have had to create massive economic disruption and to push our emergency medical capacity to the brink in order to contain the virus. The European Union has not provided much in the way of a cohesive response, with Italy in particular having been left largely on its own, and the response in the U.S. has been simply incoherent. Now, we are re-opening largely on the basis of still more wishful thinking and in response to very vocal but hardly representative political discontent.
Furthermore, this pandemic isn’t over, and I say that not just because a second surge seems likely in response to the impulsive and chaotic way in which we are “re-opening” and, if one does not occur now, then one is very likely occur in the fall or winter, but because of what is occurring right now. The toll that the virus is taking is still ongoing and actually increasing nationally if the Northeastern states are taken out of the calculations. And the promises of accelerated production of everything from PPE to treatments and vaccines have generally been more rhetorical and self-congratulatory, rather than actual. I have seen media reports that despite the early re-opening in Georgia, the confirmed cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have “surprisingly” not risen. Well, it would be more reassuring if those declarations were being made three to four weeks after the “re-opening,” rather than a week later. And it may actually take a bit longer because it appears that residents of the state have generally been more reluctant to re-open than the governor has been. It is also clear that the toll from the first several months of the year was undercounted and that in a few states such as Florida and several of the Plains states, there have been active efforts to obscure the actual counts.
In sum, I find little to cheer about in the fact that the wealthiest and most scientifically advanced nation not just on Earth but in human history has become an object lesson in how not to handle a pandemic of this kind. Like most Americans and most people in other nations, I am very grateful to everyone who has been working so hard to compensate for what is clearly a systemic failure–to everyone from the doctors and nurses to the bio-medical researchers, from the EMTs, police, and firefighters to the food-processing workers, the truck drivers, and the grocery clerks, and the leaders of government and the civil servants at all levels who have taken this crisis seriously. But the fact that we have the resources to do so much better than we have done seems to me to compound the scope of the tragedies of this ongoing pandemic.