Too Many Graduates Flood White-Collar Job Market
Two million new players a year. A fixed set of chairs. You don’t need an economics degree to finish that math. In fact, that’s rather the point.
Quartz ran a piece last week that said the quiet part in plain English: the labor market doesn’t want what millions of college graduates just spent four years and tens of thousands of dollars acquiring.
Ron Hetrick, principal economist at the labor data firm Lightcast and a former BLS economist, called it “elite overproduction.” The term comes from the complexity scientist Peter Turchin. It describes a society that mints more credentialed workers than its economy can employ. The Niskanen Center put it even better: it’s a game of musical chairs where players keep getting added and nobody ever removes a chair.
Except nobody’s adding chairs either. Look at the numbers.
American colleges award about 2.1 million bachelor’s degrees a year, and the pipeline is still growing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks more than 800 occupations. Just 178 of them typically require a bachelor’s degree to get in. And most openings in those 178 aren’t new jobs. They’re replacement seats: someone retired, someone quit, a fresh graduate gets to compete for the vacancy against people with years of experience.
Two million new players a year. A fixed set of chairs. You don’t need an economics degree to finish that math. In fact, that’s rather the point.
Here’s where the music stops:
A year after graduation, 52% of degree holders are working jobs that don’t require a degree. Ten years later, 45% still are.
Read that second number again. This isn’t a rough first year. For nearly half of graduates, the detour is permanent.
The defenders will point to the college wage premium: graduates still out-earn high-school-only workers by around 75%. True. But that premium is an average of the winners and the 45%, and average wages for college graduates have been falling for the better part of a decade. Averages hide bodies.
And the racket has a second layer. A Harvard Business School study found employers demanding degrees for jobs that never needed them. For production supervisor roles, 67% of postings required a bachelor’s while only 16% of the people already doing the job had one. So the degree is simultaneously required for jobs that don’t need it and worthless for the jobs it was supposed to unlock. You must buy a ticket to a game with no open chairs.
So why do kids keep lining up? René Girard had the answer: mimetic desire. Monkey see, monkey do. Seventeen-year-olds go to college because everyone they know goes to college, and their parents ask “where are you applying?” instead of a question that matters. When you play a game for a prize you care nothing about, winning cannot bring satisfaction. Losing is worse: you’re 22, in debt, and holding a ticket to nowhere.
The alternative isn’t to win the game. It’s to stop playing it.
The economy Turchin describes has a shortage on the other side of the ledger: people who can do things. Not people certified as generally intelligent. People with capabilities and a track record you can inspect.
That’s exactly what The Preparation builds. Doug Casey and I wrote it as a four-year alternative to college: sixteen three-month cycles, each anchored in a real-world skill. Medic. Welder. Pilot. Sailor. Entrepreneur. Investor. Forty intentional hours a week, 480 hours minimum per cycle. Real academics alongside the hands-on work. And a weekly public post about what you actually did, so the accountability is built in and the record is there for anyone to inspect.
Run the math one more time. The total cost of all sixteen cycles is about one year at a prestigious university. At the end there’s no diploma. There’s something better: proof of work. A young man who is competent, confident, and dangerous, with a documented body of work instead of a ticket stub.
A degree tells an employer you sat where two million others sat. Proof of work shows him what you can do.
If you’re a parent, stop asking where he’s applying. Ask what kind of man he wants to become. If you’re the young man, don’t sign the loan on autopilot. College still works for the right person, in the right field, at the right price, at the right time. That’s a narrow gate, not a default. Get The Preparation and pick your first cycle.
The music is slowing. You can hear it in every one of those statistics.
Let the other two million fight over the chairs. Build your own.
Make it count.
Matt