More than 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. (HT to Tyler Cowen)
5 thoughts on “It Costs Two Cents to Make a Penny, and Other Links”
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So why don’t we do away with pennies?
The statistics you gave give a whole new meaning to the concept of “underemployment.”
Only government can lose money while making money.
Sounds like a lot of people are over-qualified for what they are doing.
I’ve know graduate students who worked as waiters and bartenders. The pay per hour was so great they could hardly afford to quit and take an entry level job in their chosen profession when they graduated.
In the article, some of the under-employed people with graduate degrees likely had pursued programs with little market value; or had pursued doctorates hoping to work in academia. For instance, I doubt if the average English literature PhD grad from a mid-level state university can really expect to become a (tenured) professor of English literature. The percent of tenure-track positions is declining as a percentage of the teaching faculty so many undoubtedly found work that paid better than non-tenure teaching positions.