Where have all the entry-level professional jobs gone?
Various economic and political forces are steering some young people away from studying for degrees in disciplines such as science, law and medicine, while some new graduates face a shrinking pool of entry-level jobs. Kevin Leicht, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studies issues surrounding economic inequality, prosperity and the effects of public policies on the middle class. Leicht spoke with News Bureau education editor Sharita Forrest. Young professionals used to perform the back-office activities that did not involve direct client interaction. In the legal profession, these were tasks such as researching a problem or writing a document. These less-visible jobs were where young practitioners were trained. Much of this work is being outsourced now  or can be  because its far cheaper for a big law firm to hold an online meeting with lawyers in India and have them write a legal document overnight while the partners in the U.S. are sleeping than to pay young lawyers in the firm to write it. Its great for the Indian lawyers because theyre getting work they wouldnt otherwise get. But if these back-office jobs no longer exist here, there is no ready way for young practitioners to enter the system. This is occurring in many other fields as well, including medicine, pharmacy, engineering, accounting and management consulting. Its a serious problem for young practitioners. For all its problems, higher education in the U.S. has done a pretty good job of diversification. The graduates from medical schools and law schools look a lot more like the changing demographics of the country. While former President Trump brought attacks on experts to a head, they were occurring for quite a while before that. Im not sure exactly when this started, but it seems to coincide with the rightward turn in the Republican party in the late 1990s. For example, when the Clinton administration balanced the federal budget, Republicans suddenly said deficits didnt matter anymore because the balanced budget was achieved by the other party. The arguments over the Affordable Care Act were another example. Other developed nations have some form of publicly subsidized health care that produces better outcomes than the U.S. system. Yet, there is opposition to it in the U.S. because people fear socialized medicine and the government possibly deciding when to turn off grandmas ventilator. These arguments conveniently ignored the fact that about a third of the American population had no coherent access to health care prior to the ACA. One of the problems with denigrating professionals is that those were now producing are part of a globalized labor market. If they are treated badly in one venue, they can just move to a different one. For quite a while, the U.S. had a wonderful situation where people who wanted to be in these professions came here. In many professional domains, theres almost a winner-take-all labor market, where the top 10% are doing really well and everyone else isnt. To get millennials more interested in these professions and more profitably use their skills, we must make professional training cheaper. In almost all countries with subsidized medicine, medical education is almost completely free, so people dont graduate from medical school hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. However, because graduates in the U.S. do, they gravitate toward the highest-paying specialties or geographic regions, when these professions are desperately needed in rural communities in central Illinois, for example. Subscribe to our newsletter! Upgrade your mind, an email at a time. The perception that graduates of professional schools are chasing money is not altogether false, but they are doing it for a reason  they have huge educational debts to pay off. If that changed, it might change some misperceptions and mistrust of professionals as well. Related