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Update |Professor Andrew Sum, the original source for Romney’s claim, says the candidate and the news media have “misrepresented” his findings, and that fact-check site Politifact has “ignored” his corrections to their misleading report. Details here.
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In last night’s presidential debate, Mitt Romney made a claim that was specific, shocking, and false. “Fifty percent of college graduates this year,” he said, “can’t find work.”
There are a few ways of interpreting this statement, but none of them add up.
A study published this summer found that for college graduates under the age of 24, the unemployment rate for the twelve months ending in March of this year was 9.4%. More recent data for college grads aged 21-25 put the number at 6.8%.
So where did Romney’s 50% figure come from? An Associated Press article about a study of “underemployment” among college grads. This is going to take a little unpacking, so bear with me.
For the purposes of this AP story, a person was defined as “underemployed” if they were working in a job that required less education or fewer skills than they possess, were working part-time other than by choice, were working outside their field of expertise, or were working for less money than their similarly situated peers.
Even in good times, underemployment is common, and it’s particularly common among young college graduates — a job that doesn’t require a college degree may be a stepping-stone to one in the same field that does, for instance, or an internship or a part-time gig may get your foot in the door.
Among all employed young college graduates in 2007, before the current recession began, more than a third — 34.7% — were considered underemployed. In fact 26.8% of all working college grads, regardless of age, were underemployed that year, up from 25.2% in 2000. Underemployment is hardly ideal, in other words, but it’s not an acute crisis, it’s a long-term reality of our economy.
So what happened to underemployment rates in the current recession?
They went up, as you’d expect. In 2010, the most recent year for which data have been published, the underemployment rate for employed college grads under 25 was 39.1%. Unemployment for the same cohort stood at about 10%, which means the total for unemployment and underemployment combined was about 45%. According to the AP, that figure has risen to a bit over 53% in the last two years.
But there’s something very strange about the AP’s numbers. Take a look at this, from the AP story:
“About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed. … Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.”
According to that passage, which has been repeated in a Politifact article on the Romney claim, underemployment among recent college grads stands at about 25% of the total group, as does unemployment. And from what I can see that doesn’t fit with the published data at all.
According to official government statistics, the unemployment rate for all Americans aged 20-24 currently stands at 13.9%, and hasn’t crossed the 15% threshold at any time in the last year. Unemployment among Americans aged 16-24 who have college degrees is, as you’d expect, considerably lower.
Unless I’m missing something huge, then, the government’s figures don’t back up the AP’s claim of 25% unemployment among recent college grads. Not even close.
So what’s the reality? As far as I can make out, among recent college graduates something like seven to ten percent — not fifty percent — “can’t find work.” A little less than half of the rest are “underemployed,” which means they’re doing jobs which aren’t a particularly good fit for their preferences and their degree. Most of those would be in a similar predicament if the economy was booming, but a significant minority, maybe ten or twenty percent of the total, have been dumped in that category by the downturn.
So there you go.
A CUNY administrator’s threat to dismantle the Queensborough Community College English department is making waves across academic media this morning.
The story, which I’ve been covering all weekend, involves a dispute over whether QCC will adopt a reduced contact-hour standard for composition classes demanded by CUNY central. When the department last week refused to cut students’ class time (and professors’ compensation) by 25%, vice president Karen Steele announced that all departmental job searches will be suspended, all adjuncts will be let go, and all full-time faculty — including tenured professors — will face the possibility of job loss. Students at Queensborough will have to go elsewhere for their composition classes.
It’s completely egregious, and the CUNY faculty union PSC has been fighting back. This morning, Inside Higher Ed has an article and a blogpost up, the Chronicle of Higher Education is on the case, Academe’s blog has weighed in, and other news outlets have stories in progress as well. (The blogs Le Hub, Adventures in (Post) Gradland, Clarissa’s Blog, and Juan Monroy have also posted on the topic, if you’re keeping score at home.)
The one big piece of news to emerge in the last few hours is a Sunday afternoon email from Queensborough president Diane Call which attempted to walk back Steele’s original message to the English department.
Where Steele had described the college’s plans to slash faculty as a done deal — job searches were to be terminated “immediately,” she wrote, and the rest of the cuts were described using phrases like “we can’t” and “we will,” with no conditionals — Call now characterizes the threats as “potential consequences,” “possible outcomes,” and “a worst case scenario … we are prepared to work mightily to avoid.”
Call even opened the door to the prospect of a resolution that did not involve capitulation by QCC’s English department to the administration’s initial proposal, saying that she hoped to achieve “a constructive resolution” to the crisis “through continued communication and collaboration with our faculty.”
As I reported on Saturday the QCC English department is scheduled to meet again the day after tomorrow, and they have no intention of reversing the position they took last week.
This one is going to stay interesting for a while.
Yesterday I reported that the English department at Queensborough Community College had voted to reject an administration-initiated restructuring of their composition program, and that the college’s Vice President for Academic Affairs had in response informed them that the department will be largely dismantled next fall.
According to the letter, which I have since posted on this site, CUNY intends to eliminate the composition program at QCC, dismiss all Queensborough English department adjuncts, and immediately cancel all job searches in the department. The administration has threatened to terminate full-time faculty left idle as a result of the downsizing, a move that by my estimate could lead to the firing of as many as nineteen of the department’s twenty-six full-timers. Some 175 composition sections per semester would be pushed off campus by the move, threatening local students’ ability to advance in their studies and overburdening resources at surrounding colleges.
That’s the situation as I understood it yesterday evening. I have since received further information about the crisis that confirms all of the above information and allows me to provide a fuller accounting of the events of last week.
The Queensborough dispute arose, as I noted yesterday, out of the Pathways initiative, a CUNY-wide administrative attempt to systematize and centralize course offerings throughout the system. Faculty throughout CUNY have argued that Pathways is insufficiently responsive to local campus conditions and students’ needs, but the administration has continued to push forward with the plan on an aggressive timetable.
At Queensborough’s English department the primary practical issue with Pathways was its reduction of weekly course hours for composition classes from four to three. This change would cut into students’ class time, require heavier faculty courseloads and — not incidentally — dramatically reduce faculty compensation for teaching composition, a particularly writing (and grading) intensive class.
The shift from the department’s existing four-hour composition courses to new Pathways-compliant three-hour offerings required a departmental vote, and as it became clear that faculty were disinclined to approve the change, administrators made it known that a failure to approve the Pathways plan would result in harsh consequences.
Faculty were alarmed by these threats. They delayed the vote by a week, and asked that an administrator appear at their next meeting to state CUNY’s case in person. Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs Karen Steele represented the administration at Wednesday’s meeting, and according to the faculty member I spoke with, made the threat to the department’s offerings explicit prior to the vote.
When the vote was eventually held — conducted by secret ballot as a result of faculty fears of individual retaliation — the department rejected the administration proposal by a margin of 14 to 6, with one abstention.
In an email the following afternoon, Vice President Steele carried out the administration’s earlier threats. As of fall 2013, she said, all QCC composition courses will be eliminated, with students forced to enroll at other CUNY campuses to meet those requirements. Because composition makes up the great majority of the QCC English department’s course offerings, moreover, all of the department’s faculty searches are to be “immediately” cancelled, all of its adjuncts are to be terminated, and all current full-time appointments, including those of tenured faculty, are to be reviewed on the basis of “ability to pay and Fall ’13 enrollment in department courses.”
By my estimate, QCC’s plan will have the effect of eliminating all part-time faculty and approximately 19 out of the department’s current 26 full-time faculty positions, while shifting nearly two hundred composition sections a semester to other CUNY campuses.
The current situation, in short — and it should be remembered that Steele has presented this as a done deal — represents an effective dismantling of QCC’s English department. The Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s faculty union, has declared its intention to file a labor grievance in response, and is threatening a federal lawsuit. Faculty have expressed concern that the move could threaten Queensborough’s accreditation.
There’s a reason I was initially skeptical about the accuracy of the early reports I received, and a reason that others have been incredulous — this is a stunningly crude act of retaliation against a department for exercising its legitimate prerogatives in college governance.
Another meeting has been scheduled for this Wednesday. Faculty are adamant that they will not reverse their decision, and confident that they have the vote strength to hold firm.
That is not to say they aren’t worried. They’re scared to death. But they believe that this is a fight that they can and must win.
I didn’t write about Attica on the just-passed anniversary, though I thought about it a lot.
Tom Wicker’s A Time to Die was a formative book for me when I read it, early in college. I haven’t read it since, and shouldn’t talk much about it until I read it again, but what’s stuck with me in the intervening years is Wicker’s dismay. Dismay at conditions in the prison. Dismay at the refusal of prison officials and politicians to engage with prisoners’ legitimate complaints. Dismay at the unnecessary, brutal violence of the raid that ended the uprising, a raid in which police caused the deaths of nine hostages and murdered any number of unresisting prisoners. Dismay at the methodical torture of rioters after control of the prison was restored.
This book was an artifact of a liberal’s crisis of conscience, of a reasonable person’s attempt to grapple with the unreason of institutions he’d previously reflexively trusted.
I just learned this morning that Kurt Vonnegut — another good liberal appalled by the casual brutality of liberal institutions — reviewed A Time to Die in Wicker’s home paper, the New York Times. It’s no more than a competent review, but it does close with a line that resonates:
“We should not be so quick to pass out firearms to the honest yeomanry.”
Today is the 49th anniversary of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, in which four black girls were killed by white supremacists who planted dynamite at the steps of their church.
The bombing is one of the best known incidents in the history of the American civil rights movement. There are a few things about it, however, that most folks don’t know, but should.
First, the girls who were killed that day weren’t small children. They were adolescents — three were fourteen years old, and the fourth, Denise McNair, was eleven. They were kids, but they weren’t the little kids of popular memory. Their lives were taken from them as they were on the verge of becoming young women.
Second, they weren’t the only black people killed in Birmingham that day. As tempers flared throughout the city a white police officer shot and killed 16-year-old Johnny Robinson. Robinson, who was shot in the back, had earlier thrown rocks at a car draped with a Confederate flag. Later that day, Virgil Ware, thirteen, was riding on the handlebars of his brother’s bike when he was shot by Larry Joe Sims, a white sixteen-year-old returning from an anti-integration rally.
The teen who killed Virgil Ware was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to two years probation. The officer who killed Johnny Robinson was never charged with a crime.
There is a mythology to our collective memory of the civil rights movement, a mythology in which the righteousness of the integrationist cause is sometimes misrepresented as innocence. Teenagers become — as in the title of Spike Lee’s magnificent documentary on the church bombing — “little girls.” A teenager driven by anger to throw rocks at racists disappears entirely.
We should remember Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley — and Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware, too. And we should do them the honor of remembering them as they were.
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