I guess the biggest joke about this whole college thing (next to being out of work for an extended period of time) is that I don’t even have a degree to frame. At the City University of New York, from where I graduated, the average time I have to wait for them to actually print out my degree is 18 months, so I should start shopping for a picture frame sometime around December 2009 or January 2010. Maybe by the time they print it out I’ll be able to zip over to the school to pick it up in my flying car and or get my robot maid to pick it up for me.

In the meantime I do have a copy of my transcript which indicates that I have in fact graduated. I have that attached via kitchen magnet to my refrigerator. I probably would have made copies of it to show employers if any of the college-degree requiring jobs I’d applied to called back for an interview.

That Bryan Caplan book sounds fascinating, especially coming from a tenured professor.

While my personal evidence is anecdotal, it’s at least somewhat comforting to know that there are statistics out there revealing that millions of Americans are in the same situation as myself…and even worse. According to what I’ve read, it appears that the problems recent college graduates are experiencing in the job market are partially due to an over saturation of workers with college degrees. Some of the jobs requiring a college education have been outsourced to other countries.

Personally, I think the problem is there weren’t that many of them to begin with. I think most jobs require things like certification, licenses, occupation-specific training, previous job or industry experience and of course, personal connections rather than a four-year degree. This is not to speak ill of occupations that do rely heavily on academic credentials, I’m just saying that such jobs are in the minority and were probably never that plentiful to begin with.

Then you have industries like the media, which traditionally only required a high school diploma. I think some industries just require a college education so they can shrink the pool of prospective employees. As any LA resident such as yourself knows, media is one of those few industries where many people are dying to get into, especially if you want to be in front of the camera or have your byline in the newspaper and especially if you wish to work in a large media market.

I do believe that college does work many people. But it doesn’t work for everybody, and the big problem is that everybody is either heavily encouraged to pursue a college education or have been shoved into a one-size-fits-all curriculum in grade school that focuses on preparing them for college, not real life. When I first entered high school in 1993, when the NYC Board of Education was a testament to corruption and inefficiency, the wood shop, metal shop and auto shop had been discontinued at my school.

Students who wanted to enter a vocational program had to transfer to another high school. While this sounds like no big deal, there were only two high schools at the time for a county with a population of 2 million, and the seats for these vocational programs often filled quickly with some students having to be on a waiting list while floundering in a rigorous academic setting that basically prepped you for college as your only option after high school.

The other problem with the vocational option was that the two high schools in my county (Queens) were schools with high rates of gang violence. Both high schools in which these vocational programs were located had metal detectors and my school did not, and the only time these schools were mentioned in the papers was when someone had been attacked or if a gang war had erupted there (Remember, this was the 90s, when there more gangs in New York and the Bloods, Crips and MS were not as prominent in NYC as they are today).

So if you didn’t want to get robbed or slashed, your only option would be to apply to a high school vocational program in another county like the Bronx (which makes Queens appear tame in comparison), Manhattan or Brooklyn. So if you didn’t want a let’s-get-ready-for-college curriculum, you had to travel pretty far or venture into unfriendly neighborhoods. Trust me, Giuliani may have been cleaning up the streets in the 90s, but he wasn’t doing a damn thing to clean up the schools.

Fortunately, with Mike Bloomberg as Mayor, the Board of Ed was dismantled and a new Department of Education has taken its place and non-academic vocational programs have expanded over the years, giving kids more options for their future. But I digress.

As for my dreams of becoming a full-time journalist, I’m not too sure about following that pipe dream. I was a part-time journalist for several years in small newspapers, and even at that level the competition is pretty fierce. So maybe that chapter of my life is behind me, and that I should expand my career possibilities as a professional writer to fields beyond journalism. I have lots of good memories of stories I’d covered, people I worked with, people I interviewed. I was a great journalist, and still am.

The U.S. news industry is shrinking, and on the major TV newscasts, entertainment is often passed off as current events which I think is a big part of the reason why viewership and readership are ironically shrinking in the Information Age. Traditionally, news networks were never expected to make money. In fact, media corporations usually expected their news divisions to lose money (they would make up for that threefold in their entertainment divisions) because they were treated as they should be, as a private sector public service as opposed to just another capitalistic venture.

I’ve found that today’s publishers have little to no background in journalism and the bulk of their professional experience is in making profits in other industries as executives or entrepreneurs. So they treat it like any other business and do what they can to make the news not only profitable but lucrative as well. In doing so, reporters are forced to do more with less resources and to dumb down much of the content to ensure that the content can be consumed by as many people as possible. I’ve spent way to much of my past as a reporter covering superficial bullshit that indirectly affects a handful of people while stories that affect millions don’t receive the coverage they deserve.

Speaking of dumbing down, I once worked at one newspaper whose editorial policy demanded that each page have at least three photos, reasoning that readers “sometimes get turned off by too many words.” I remember the first time one of my stories was significantly shaved down to accommodate a photo that was abstractly related to the story. When the editor-in-chief explained the editorial policy I yelled, “What is this, a newspaper or a fucking coloring book?”

Geez…come to think of it, maybe I should stay out the news biz (it seems to get worse as time passes) and leave it to the professionals. And by professionals I mean smoking hot sexy lady anchors that are so drop-dead gorgeous it makes you wonder if journalism experience was an issue at all to get their job. I just wasn’t born to be an on-air news personality…right ethnicity, wrong gender.

Sorry to hear about your difficult time. Hopefully the economy turns around soon and you can follow your dreams of becoming a journalist. I know you will be a great one.