Category: economics

Overeducated and underemployed: are college degrees a thing of the past? Should they be?

In 1990 I was nearing the end of my college days. An older adult (in his late 30s), told me that I would never be taken seriously until I had gotten an MBA.

I was like: “Isn’t four years of college enough to work in the marketing or the accounting department?” But apparently not, according to the thinking of that era.

Back in my college days—about 35 years ago—young people were encouraged to get as much higher education as possible.

***

Should we blame the Baby Boomers? Why not? My parents, neither of whom had a college degree, ended up doing well. My dad started his own business. My mom started a second business with my dad. They prospered, but they both had to take roundabout paths to success, without college degrees.

Both of my parents reported that their fellow Baby Boomers with college degrees had a much easier time of it. As a result, “thou shalt go to college” was drilled into my head from an early age.

I did go to college. I got a four-year degree in economics. It helped me land my first job.

In the decades after my graduation, however, the landscape started to change. The college degree lost the scarcity value it had had in my parents’ early adulthood, or even mine.

At the same time, colleges and universities began concocting more low-value and worthless degree programs, in everything from communications and visual arts to various ethnic and gender-related fields. (Who in their right mind would pay for a degree in “queer studies”?)

The tide shifted dramatically about a decade ago, in the wake of the 2007-9 financial crisis. I was then meeting a lot of Millennials with liberal arts degrees who were working at restaurant jobs while paying back their student loans. (Not that there’s anything wrong with working at a restaurant, mind you. But you don’t need a college degree to do that. You shouldn’t get a college degree to do that.)

For a while the situation turned around. New college grads experienced a mini-boom in employment from 2021-4, as businesses were hoarding staff, and paying a lot of young grads unusually high starting salaries. In 2023, my friend told me that his daughter landed a corporate position at a salary of $90K, with a very ordinary 4-year degree from the University of Cincinnati, and no practical experience.

That was in 2023. Now, as you’ve likely heard, the job market for new college grads has imploded. The overall unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, which is not that high. But the unemployment rate for recent college grads  stands at 5.8 percent, with an even higher rate for young people overall.

Should they all become plumbers and HVAC technicians? Some people seem to think so. “Learn to code” was the cliché of a few years ago, leveled at anyone with a hifalutin degree who couldn’t find a job. Now “learn a trade” has become stock advice for college graduates who majored in anything but nursing, or a similar healthcare-related field. Even computer science and business school grads are having a tough time right now. It isn’t only the kids who majored in queer studies.

I get it. And yes, most major population centers could use some more HVAC technicians.

But at the end of the day, it makes no more sense for everyone to become a blue-collar tradesperson, than it does for everyone to get an MBA. Sooner or later, the law of supply and demand will kick in. There can be too many HVAC techs, if the field becomes too popular. (There can be too many nurses, too.)

What is true is this: our decades-long fascination with the 4-year college degree has finally hit the undeniable saturation point. This really happened around 2010, but many students—and their parents—were in denial. In 2025, denial is no longer possible, even for students and parents who dream of a sheepskin from a  particular university.

College enrollment is declining, and has been declining for more than a decade. At some point, the law of supply and demand will shift the other way. Young people with college degrees will become comparatively rare again. Demand for graduates in most mainstream college majors should recover.

In the meantime, the value of a college degree (for anything other than a degree in a healthcare field) will be less than it was when I graduated in the early 1990s.

In recent years, I have met many intelligent young people who are skipping college altogether. This would have been unthinkable in my youthful days. But young people today certainly have their reasons.

-ET

ChatGPT hell for job seekers and HR departments

I’m not going to say that ChatGPT and AI aren’t good for anything. I want to remain open-minded. I’m sure the bubonic plague and nuclear weapons also have their redeeming aspects. And Hitler, I’ve been told, built the Autobahn.

So let’s not deal in absolutes here. My position on most “AI”, since it became the latest thing about three years ago, is that most AI represents a solution in search of a problem.

And oftentimes, AI makes existing challenges much, much worse.

Take the job search process. That has always been a challenge for most people, to one degree or another.

But looking for a job was much easier, before ChatGPT was involved. When I graduated from university in 1991, things were relatively simple, indeed. These were the steps:

  1. Get your résumé formatted. (This could be done by you, if you had access to a PC. Otherwise, a typesetter did this for a very reasonable fee.)
  2. Send out copies of your résumé with typed cover letters.
  3. Network a little.
  4. Wait for HR managers to call you.
  5. Go on in-person interviews until you found a mutual match.

Was this a perfect process? No. Dealing with all that paper was sometimes a little cumbersome, I’ll admit. There were also some inevitable delays, while you waited on snail mail to deliver your résumé to prospective employers.

But on the flip side, HR departments were usually responsive. They almost always sent you a written response, even if it was, “Thanks, but you’re not a good match for us. We’ll keep your résumé on file.”

(Oh, and back then, HR departments actually had filing cabinets.)

Fast-forward to the present, and the age of the ChatGPT-generated, spam résumé. According to an article in ARS Technica:

“Employers are drowning in AI-generated job applications, with LinkedIn now processing 11,000 submissions per minute…

Due to AI, the traditional hiring process has become overwhelmed with automated noise. It’s the résumé equivalent of AI slop…

The flood of ChatGPT-crafted résumés and bot-submitted applications has created an arms race between job seekers and employers, with both sides deploying increasingly sophisticated AI tools in a bot-versus-bot standoff that is quickly spiraling out of control.”

Wow, it sounds like ChatGPT is really making our lives more efficient!

Never mind that ChatGPT and AI are draining resources from the environment, and creating a new sustainability crisis. The bottom line is: most of what ChatGPT does either a.) has no discernible benefit, or b.) makes existing processes (like matching jobs with job seekers) much worse.

(Mark Zuckerberg has all but ruined Facebook with his addiction to AI. Facebook advertising is now close to useless. That’s a whole other issue that I might explore in a subsequent post.)

I’m not saying that we need to go back to 1991. I love the Internet, for what it’s worth. I carry a smartphone everywhere, just like you do.

But technology isn’t beneficial just because it’s “technology”. If you believe otherwise, then I can assume that you love nuclear and biological weapons (?) They’re “technology”, after all.

Some technologies are overhyped. Some don’t deliver what they promise. Some technologies create more problems than benefits.

And so it goes with AI and ChatGPT.

If you don’t believe that, then try to get a job at Chipotle by submitting your résumé online. According to the aforementioned ARS Technica article, Chipotle is one of the companies that has had to employ protective measures because of all the ChatGPT-generated slop.

Chipotle offers fast-food jobs. Imagine what the HR departments of law firms and investment banks must be dealing with.

Maybe job seekers should go back to sending paper résumés. The future of job seeking may eventually resemble 1991, if ChatGPT continues to gum up the Internet.

-ET

Bumble and the death of the dating app

The dating app Bumble has lost over half of its value since going public in 2021. The company recently announced plans to cut 30 percent of its workforce.

Bumble is not the only dating app that is in trouble. Tinder is also hemorrhaging members. So is Match. Almost all dating apps are losing paying members, otherwise known as “men”. What gives?

Women almost always get a “free ride” on dating apps. In other words, they almost never have to pay for memberships.

This isn’t because of some feminist conspiracy. It’s because of simple laws of sexual economics. In the human world, as in the animal one, males are in supply, and females are in demand.

If you don’t believe this, and you would like an extreme example as proof, announce online that you’re going to host an orgy at your house. A hundred men will show up, and not a single woman.

This presents an economic balancing act for any dating app (or, indeed, any dating venue with a revenue model): women bring in the men, but the men bring their credit cards.

The corollary here is: alienate enough women, and the men will go away, too. Take away the women and the men have no incentive to be there. But if you drive the men away for other reasons, the outcome is the same. When men go, they take their credit cards with them.

It has long been established that dating apps don’t work for the vast majority of men. The data here comes not from the heavy-breathing corners of the so-called manosphere, but from the online dating industry itself.

Way back in 2009, a survey conducted by the dating site OkCupid revealed that women users rated 80 percent of men on the site as “unattractive” or “below average”. 

This result made the rounds in the media for a while, with examples of specific male profiles used in the survey. Even some women journalists acknowledged that the female users of OkCupid were dismissing out of hand guys who were average to moderately attractive. 

Once again, I would caution against spinning a feminist conspiracy theory explanation for this. I have a degree in economics, and I prefer the economic explanation.

In dating, as in other areas of life, most of us are just about as picky as our available choices allow us to be. In the online dating world, any attractive woman finds herself in the catbird seat; she is presented with more male profiles than she can possibly evaluate, let alone schedule dates with.

So what does she do? She swipes left on all but the most desirable guys. And in this context, “desirable” is defined by the lowest common denominators: looks, height, and income.

In recent years, men have been realizing that dating apps are the practical equivalent of a Ponzi scheme and leaving, but the numbers are still stacked against them. The male-to-female ratio on dating apps like Tinder is about 3-to-1. This means that about 75 percent of the users are male.

Which brings us back to Bumble. Bumble has been described as a “feminist dating app”. One of the core features of the app is that only women can initiate conversations.

This means that the poor average schmuck of a guy who doesn’t meet the 6’2”-plus, high-income ideal will probably never even get his turn at bat. Bumble is a dating app that allows women to pre-reject men, as if men on dating apps needed more rejection.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble, is a former employee of Tinder. Bumble’s restrictive model (only women can message first) was intended to, in Wolfe Herd’s words, “put women in control of the experience”.

But “three guys for every girl”—to reverse -paraphrase the old Jan & Dean song—surely qualifies as “being in control”. At the very least, those numbers confer a significant numerical advantage for female users of Bumble. And female users aren’t the ones most likely to pay for Bumble’s premium features, which enhance a profile’s visibility.

Which might explain why Bumble is in financial trouble, along with other dating apps. Herein lies a fundamental rule of business: never create a product that is designed to alienate your paying customer base.

-ET

Zohran Mamdani and the case for government-run brothels in New York

A wise man once said, “Try everything once, except for Russian roulette, incest, and residing in New York City.”

I live just outside Cincinnati, Ohio, about 640 miles from the Big Rotten Apple, and I don’t intend to go one mile closer.

(Note: I did live in Chicago, another chaotic big city, in the early 1990s. I lasted three months before I pulled the plug. So big-city living is definitely not for me.)

Therefore, the question of who is going to be the next Mayor of New York City falls under the category of “problems that don’t directly concern me”.

But I’m having fun watching the misguided enthusiasm and general alarm surrounding Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, who has become a parasitic presence in the Democratic Party.

(Ever notice that Democratic Socialists of America candidates never want to run as Democratic Socialists of America candidates? That’s because they know, full well, that a candidate bearing the DSA label wouldn’t be elected dog catcher.)

Fox News, et al are having a field day calling Zohran Mamdani a “Muslim socialist”. But hey, the guy is a Muslim, and he is a socialist. When someone refers to me as a 56-year-old bald man, I don’t necessarily like that, but I can’t accuse them of lying, either.

Among Mamdani’s brilliant ideas is the establishment of government-run grocery stores. That particular brain fart is literally plagiarized from the Soviet Union.

(Why not reduce taxes and crime instead, so that private-sector grocery chains will have more of an incentive to locate stores in New York City?

Why? Because that would involve common sense, a commodity in which Zohran Mamdani is sorely lacking.)

Mamdani has also gone on record supporting the legalization of prostitution. While I’m not here to cheerlead for the World’s Oldest Profession, I’ve never understood the logic of telling a woman that she is free to sleep with anyone she wants, except for the odd man who happens to hand her a wad of cash. A blanket ban on sex work defies both logic and personal autonomy.

That said, one imagines that in Zohran Mamdani’s New York, not even the most in-demand call girls would be able to save much money, once they’ve paid all their taxes.

I would also have to ask: will the legal sex workers be restricted to government-run brothels? That would make just as much sense as Mamdani’s government-run grocery idea.

-ET

AI’s self-cannibalization: the new content farm

Big companies eager to make a buck have always been willing to flood the Internet with garbage in pursuit of that goal.

Fifteen years ago, this came in the form of content mills like eHow. A handful of online publishers paid writers to churn out superficial, unhelpful content about a wide variety of topics. Content farms dominated the search results for many subjects. For a few years, it was impossible to avoid them, and they hopelessly clogged up Google’s search results. There was a financial incentive behind all this: content farm publishers wanted to earn money from ad revenue.

Then, in 2011, Google issued a new update that ranked the content farms lower. Nowadays, it is rare to find one of these sites among your Google search results. That’s a good thing, of course!

Today, however, the Internet has a new source of mass-produced garbage: generative AI.

Generative AI’s initial inputs were acquired through a barely legal, marginally piratical scraping of the Internet, carried out on a massive scale.

Generative AI still relies on scraping. (Note: it isn’t really “artificial intelligence”.) But now there’s a problem: generative AI—like the content farms of fifteen years ago—is producing so much online garbage, that it now threatens the collapse of its own business model:

“As Futurism and countless other outlets have reported over the last few years, the AI industry has continuously barreled toward the moment at which all available authentic training data — that is, information that was produced by humans and not AI — will be exhausted. Some pundits, including Elon Musk, believe we’re already there.”

It’s the tyranny of that old computer acronym: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).

But this is not 2011. In 2011, reputable tech giants like Google were generally opposed to the content farms. The tech firms are not so clear-headed where generative AI is concerned. Google, Meta, and Microsoft all seem to genuinely believe that consumers go online to consume a sea of AI-generated gobbledygook. They have bet the farm on this technology, and there is a real price for them now, if they acknowledge their mistake and attempt to backpedal.

One does not need to be a Luddite to notice that AI is gradually degrading search results for Google and other search engines. The AI collapse seems inevitable. I only hope that the tech companies, who have foolishly over-invested in shoddy, overhyped AI, don’t collapse with it.

-ET

The end of the US penny: nostalgia, but no real sense of loss

Coin collecting was one of my childhood hobbies.

I collected historical coins of all denominations: Morgan and Eisenhower silver dollars, Buffalo nickels, and Mercury dimes.

And yes, pennies, too.

I’m not an active collector anymore, but coins still interest me. This is why I note the passing of the US penny with mixed feelings. The US Mint has confirmed that it will begin phasing out the penny after 2026. Existing pennies will remain legal tender for the foreseeable future. But the heyday of the one-cent coin is clearly behind us.

Perhaps I saw this coming, even when I was collecting coins as a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That was, after all, an era of high inflation. As a kid, I always picked up a stray penny found on a sidewalk, but there was no sense of having hit the jackpot. As a kid of that era, found wealth began with the quarter.

Moreover, this isn’t the first time that US currency has been phased out or changed in my lifetime. Almost all currency has undergone design changes since I was born. Throughout my life, I’ve seen the two-dollar bill and the one-dollar coin revived, discontinued, and revived again. At present, the Kennedy half-dollar seems poised to make a genuine comeback.

But the penny? Maybe we can live without it. As a collector I hoarded wheat pennies and Indian head pennies. Few of them were worth any real money, according to the 1980 Whitman coin value guide that served as my bible.

Some casual research has shown me that historical pennies have even less relative value than they did 45 years ago. The childhood coin collector in me, that kid from 1980, will miss the penny. But the penny’s fate was sealed even then.

-ET

1980: a shave with your Egg McMuffin?

This is a promotional ad that McDonald’s ran in 1980. Breakfast customers were given a free Bic razor with the purchase of any breakfast entree.

1980 McDonald’s print ad

I don’t specifically remember this promotion, and my guess is that it didn’t last long. This is also one that you’re unlikely to see repeated in the twenty-first century. Clearly the ad appeals to one specific gender. (And in 1980, no one disputed the notion that there were only two.) But as we all know, women eat pancakes, too. So what’s going on?

My mother worked outside the home in 1980; but that was the very beginning of the Boomer-led “working woman” trend of the 1980s. The McDonald’s marketing folks probably figured that men would comprise the main market for fast-food breakfasts, presumably on their way to work.

-ET

A family-friendly version of Hooters?

The post-COVID era has been tough for all restaurant chains, but for some more than others. In February we learned that Hooter’s was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. To avoid that, the company’s corporate owners are attempting to refurbish the brand with a more-family friendly image. They are calling this, whimsically, the “re-Hooterization”.

Hooters was founded in April 1983. The business model was simple: somewhat overpriced, okay food, served by winsome young ladies in short-shorts and form-fitting tops.

The clientele in 1983 would have been mostly Boomer men, who were then entering early middle age. The early 1980s was an era of socially conservative backlash. The Moral Majority was campaigning to ban girly magazines from convenience stores—often with success. There was no internet. In that environment, the bar for titillation was set decidedly low.

I was a freshman in high school in April 1983. As a 14-year-old boy, I would have been all over the idea of going to Hooters; but there was even less titillation in my part of the world, the conservative suburbs of Cincinnati.

About 20 years later, circa 2003, I did have lunch at a Hooters with a group of [male] work colleagues. I recall the waitress doing her best to get with the program: she made a point of sitting down beside each of us as we selected an item from the limited and overpriced menu. I ordered a grilled chicken sandwich. It came out dry and rubbery, as if it had been microwaved. That was my first and last experience with Hooters as an adult.

Regular readers of this blog will know that political correctness for the sake of political correctness is not my thing. Nevertheless, even I can recognize that a business model based on young women in skimpy attire has its limits. I like attractive women as much as the next guy, but when it comes to lunch, I’m much more easily sold on the quality of the steak, and the size and savoriness of the baked potatoes.

But what about this plan to rebrand Hooters as “family friendly”? I’ve heard reports (no doubt fed to the media by the company’s corporate owners) about an increase in Hooters diners with children. Coloring books available for the kids! (Yes, really.) Is Hooters now trying to compete with Chuck E. Cheese?

Here’s the question: once you take away the mildly prurient appeal of Hooters, what does the chain really have going for it? A family-friendly version of Hooters strikes me as an oxymoron, the equivalent of a vegetarian steakhouse, or a fast food restaurant with the motto, “We take our time while preparing your meal!”

We could have a spirited debate about whether or not Hooters was ever such a great idea to begin with, or whether such a concept has a place in the twenty-first century, which is simultaneously uptight about everything, and saturated with porn.

But who is the target market of a “family-friendly” version of Hooters? And why should anyone not take their family to Texas Roadhouse or Applebees instead?

-ET