Saturday, December 17, 2011

Skill Imbalance in the Labor Market

There’s a similar excess of many postgraduate skills. Take law, which flourished in a society that had easy access to credit. Now, with the economy tepid, law schools are churning out many more graduates than the market wants. Roughly 30 percent of those passing the bar exam aren’t even working in the profession, according to a survey by the National Association for Law Placement. Another EMSI study indicates that last year, in New York State alone, the difference between the number of students graduating from law school and the number of jobs waiting for them was a whopping 7,000.

6 comments:

Stagflationary Mark said...

It would seem we're going to have many head fry cooks with the ability to sue.

I can just feel the prosperity being generated as I type this, lol. Sigh.

CP said...

I was reading that every year we graduate about 1500 poetry MFAs versus a total of ~1000 teaching positions for them. (So probably 50-100 spots available annually.)

Meanwhile, only about 1000 undergraduate petroleum engineers.

But 70,000 people just sat for the level 1 CFA exam!

Stagflationary Mark said...

CP,

When I graduated with a double major in 1987, the head of the physics department made a special appeal to me to sit with the physics students during graduation (there were SO few).

Some things never change.

Stagflationary Mark said...

You might find this interesting.

Be sure to check out the picture of the Chinese job fair (in the last link within the post).

CP said...

Chinese job fair picture was great.

eahilf said...

Who needs work? Nothing to worry about -- soon we'll all be twittering ourselves to prosperity. Or is that tweeting?

So some Saudi prince -- nice work if you can get it -- invested $300m in twittering (or tweeting, as you prefer). Which per the news story I saw got him 3%. Which means in some minds twittering is worth approx $10b. Ponder that.