UMW Regional GeogBlog

My students, I want to introduce you Sarah, James, Jack, and Tra. They and people like them will be your competitors in the job market when you graduate.

James negotiating the price of glass beads at Guangdong's clothing accessories wholesale market

Sarah and James are both around 27 years old and live in Guangzhou, a megacity in the heart of China’s manufacturing heartland, the Pearl River Delta. They both graduated from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies where, among other things, they learned to speak and write fluent English. They also adopted English names, in part to make it easier for them to communicate with foreigners. Jack is in his early thirties, he is a college graduate and he works for a public relations company in Bangkok. Tra lives in Phnom Penh; he is also a college graduate and works for an international shipping company.

James began his career as a free-lance translator, accompanying foreign buyers when they came to Guangzhou to shop for clothing, jewelry, electric motorcycles, and other products of this area’s remarkably productive and diverse manufacturing sector. He found himself becoming more interested in the business side of his activities, and today he works as a buyer, guide, and all-round facilitator for companies ranging from retailers of ethnic jewelry in Manchester, England, to semi-precious stone dealers in Hungary.

Fluent in his home dialect, Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, and able to conduct a rudimentary conversation in Japanese, James decided after graduation that he needed to improve his language skills.  When I last saw him in December 2009, he was taking night classes to learn Spanish.

I met and became friends with James during my first visit to Guangzhou in 2008; he served as my translator, guide, and very patient teacher on topics ranging from Chinese history to Chinese dinner-table etiquette. I tagged along with him to Guangzhou’s huge wholesale markets, where I first came to appreciate the vast scale of China’s manufacturing and export sectors. He also took me for a walk around the campus of his alma mater, and told me tales of his college days, only a few years ago. He showed me the classrooms that, in the weeks preceding final exams, were still full at 2 am every night, as students like James and Sarah studied there.

Workers in Sarah's family's sofa and recliner factory in Foshan City, Guangdong Province.

Sarah’s family owns a furniture factory in “Furniture City,” a part of Foshan City not far from Guangzhou. James took me to meet her; we found her hard at work in a massive (100 000 square meter, or a million square feet) sofa showroom, where her family’s business, along with hundreds of other manufacturers, displays its products. She was busy talking to two buyers from Azerbaijan, in Foshan City to finalize a deal on a shipment of recliners. She later drove me the family’s factory, where up to a hundred migrant workers toil six days a week cutting, hammering, sewing, and gluing. This factory is part of the reason that China’s furniture exports rose nearly fivefold from 1999 – 2004, and have continued to increase since then. During the same period, employment in the U.S. furniture manufacturing industry plummeted by 25 percent.

So, my students, if you were thinking of a career as an executive in a furniture manufacturing business, forget it. Sarah just took your job. (I had an e-mail from Sarah a few weeks ago. She is doing graduate work in Spain; like James, she feels that in her line of business she needs to become fluent in another language.)

Jack, in Bangkok, is a few years older than James and Sarah, and he is worried. He started his career writing for television, but he found the market for Thai scripts is limited, and so he decided to use his writing skills in another field, public relations. Today he writes press releases and other public statements for foreign corporations operating in Thailand. When I last saw him in 2009, Jack was concerned that his career wasn’t progressing as much as it should. So he made sure that he was in the office late, often until midnight, and back again at 7 am. He also decided that he needed to brush up his (already very good) English, and was taking night and weekend classes at a local language institute. Over dinner in Bangkok, he had numerous questions for me on graduate study abroad. A higher degree in public relations at a foreign English-language university, he had decided, was a necessary next step in his career. But, now in his early thirties, he was worried that time was getting short.

Tra at his family's home in Takeo Province, Cambodia.

Tra is a Cambodian in his late twenties (I have written about him elsewhere.) He grew up on his parents’ small farm a few hours bus ride from Phnom Penh.  The family home still has no running water, no electricity, no toilet, and the nearest clinic is a 10 km bike ride away.  Thanks to the support of a relative living in Australia, Tra managed to complete a degree at a university in Phnom Penh. He worked full time cooking and serving in a restaurant while he was a student, and lived on an open balcony outside a relative’s apartment. Today he has a 5½ day a week office job with a shipping company, where he earns a salary of $170 a month, close to the average for all Cambodians.

Like James, Sarah, and Jack, Tra decided that his college degree was only a start; to succeed in life, he would need to study further. So he is now attending night classes studying French at the local Alliance Française.

Why do these young people have in common? First of all, they work really hard in their jobs, just as they did in college. (I saw James taking calls from buyers at 11 pm on a Friday night, and calling local suppliers afterwards; Sarah had to excuse herself from a dinner with me to attend to business; when I was in Phnom Penh a month or so ago; Tra had to cancel our Sunday meeting because he had to go in to work – with no overtime pay.) Second, they have all realized that purpose of education is to learn how to learn and to acquire useful skills, and not just to get a degree. That’s why they’re all still studying.   Third, they all speak several languages fluently, but all feel that their language skills are inadequate. Fourth, three of the four earn less today than the U.S. minimum wage.  Finally, all four of my young Asian friends work in jobs or even sectors of the economy that didn’t exist in their countries a few decades ago.  And there are millions of other young people like them their countries like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and dozens of other countries in the developing world.

When my grandfather opened his small convenience store in Johannesburg in the 1920s, his competitors were other small convenience stores in his neighborhood. When my father completed his engineering degree in South Africa in the early 1950s, he had to compete with job applicants from the region where he lived.  His contemporaries in the U.S. probably had to compete in the job market with other recent graduates statewide. When I was finishing up my graduate studies at Penn State and looking for my first job in 1988, most of my competitors were from the U.S., and a handful were foreigners who were prepared to move to the U.S. to work.

But when you, my students, graduate in the second decade of the 21^st century, you will be entering a job market far different from anything than older generations could ever have imagined. You will be competing with people from all over the world: people younger and perhaps even more skilled, educated, and motivated than Tra, Jack, Sarah, and James.  And they won’t have to come here to take your job. Your job will go to where they are.

Twenty years ago, the kinds of jobs that were leaving the U.S. and moving to cheaper locations were mainly in low- and semi-skilled parts of the manufacturing sector; textiles, clothing, furniture, and the like.  The high-paying manufacturing jobs requiring special skills stayed here.  But those days are over. Today, China is a world leader in the manufacture of high-speed trains and wind turbines for generating clean electricity. Three years from now, an industrial development outside Chengdu will produce 80 million laptop computers a year, about a third of the world’s supply. In 2010 it produced none. So the skilled manufacturing jobs are leaving too.

That has left the U.S. economy relying largely on the service sector: financial services, education, medicine, law, and the like. But those can move too. Indian accountants already process U.S. tax returns, Indian lawyers draw up contracts for American clients, Thai surgeons operate on Americans in the country’s expanding “medical tourism” sector, even the grading of college student papers is now being outsourced to a company in Bangalore.

The bottom line, my students, is that you will be entering a job market far more challenging than that facing any generation that preceded you. It won’t be easy, and I don’t see any way you can avoid it. You can, however, do your best to prepare for it. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Recognize that just being an American isn’t enough. Our society has long assumed that we’re better at most things than most other people are, and that we are blessed with resources, markets, and ingenuity which put us ahead of the rest of the world.  Even if this was true in the past, it’s not true any longer. In almost all fields of endeavor, we are either now or will soon be competing with others who are just as good as or better than we are.  In this environment, national pride doesn’t help. Humility and a willingness to learn from others do.
2. Study hard, and study smart. If you think that you are in college to get a degree, and that the degree will automatically get you a good job, forget it. Although a degree may help you get your foot in the door, it won’t guarantee you a job. Employers won’t hire you because you have a degree, they will hire you because you have the skills and the ingenuity they are looking for. Employers in the kind of job you aspire to almost certainly want to hire literate, lucid, numerate, and globally informed people who can solve new and different kinds of problems. So don’t just about grades, think about skills.  Make sure you acquire good writing and mathematical skills, with at least a basic understanding of science, and fluency in a second language. Make the most of your years in college to learn, and to learn how to learn. My four Asian friends aren’t studying foreign languages to earn degrees or high grades, they are studying them because they are know they need them.
3. Learn about the world. Those young people who are your competitors in China and India and Brazil almost certainly know more about your country, your culture, and your language than you do about theirs.  That puts them at an advantage over you in the global marketplace. If you want to compete successfully with them, you need to know about their countries, you need to speak their languages, and you need to get to know them. (And you most certainly have to be fluent in the International System of Measurement, or SI  – based on the ‘metric system’ – since it is used in every country in the world except the U.S and Burma.) One of the best ways to make use of your time in college to learn about the world is to study abroad, preferably for at least a semester or a full year. Take geography, international relations, anthropology, or any other courses that help you learn about the world.  And consider joining the Peace Corps for a couple of years after you graduate. Remember that you can’t think outside of the box until you know that you are in a box, and what its dimensions are. If you are an American, the U.S. is that box. Unless and until you know something about how other people in other places live and view the world, you won’t be able to compete with them.
4. Be prepared to move. The U.S. owes a lot of its success to the efforts of people who left their homes, families, and all that was familiar to them in search of better opportunities elsewhere. You may need to be prepared to do the same thing, and consider looking for employment abroad.  This isn’t easy, and it gets more difficult as you get older. But it may be your best shot at a good job in your chosen field.
5. Recognize that you may not be as well off as your parents or grandparents. There’s a good chance that you will earn less, in real terms, than people in your profession earned a generation ago. The reason is simple: your competitors will be in countries where wages are lower. A good English-speaking professor at an Indian university might earn $500 a month. With a video hook-up she could teach classes anywhere in the world, and people starting off in my profession will soon be competing with her and people like her.  In these circumstances, it will be very difficult for American universities to justify a starting salary of $48,000 for an assistant professor.
6. Make sure that you are much better than your competitors. This is perhaps the obvious solution to the dilemma you face, and it is the one that to many might seem the most American of all. But it is also by far the most difficult. There are three main reasons for this. First, the proportion of young Americans with degrees is falling behind that of many other countries.  A few years ago, the U.S. led the world in the proportion of  25 – 34 year-olds with college degrees. Now we rank 12th. A 2010 report from the College Board warns that “it is expected that the educational level of the younger generation of Americans will not approach their parents’ level of education.” Second, there are more foreign graduates for you to compete with. In 2007, China alone had twice as many university graduates as the U.S. (the country that used to head the list only a few years ago.) There are now 50 million college graduates in India; many of them are very smart and their universities are very good.
   The third reason is that in many fields foreigners are better prepared than you are. (In math and science, for example, eighth grade students in Singapore, South Korea, and Japan significantly outperformed those in the U.S.)
   None of these reasons if your fault, but you still faces their consequences. So what can you do? You can start by choosing a career where you – as an American and as an individual – are most likely to be successful. (Success in life depends to large extent on how well you choose your competition.) Choose a field of study which interests you, and preferably one in which U.S. universities excel. And work at least as hard as those students that shared a study room with James and Sarah in the middle of the night in Guangzhou.
7. Update, based on Richard’s comment in response to this blog entry. “Rewrite the rules of engagement.” You don’t have to accept any of this as inevitable. Richard writes “I’d like to challenge the assumption that the economy is something that only tosses us about, that the only option is to do “whatever it takes” to meet the demands of a global labor market that expects more skills and productivity from workers at the lowest compensation level possible…[J]ust as we have now created a political and cultural environment that has shipped much of our manufacturing overseas and created labor force instability in every sector of our economy but the defense and security industries, we can rewrite the rules of engagement.  We can move toward cooperative forms of community economic development rather than further empowering corporations to run the economy on a competitive global playing field with little moral responsibility to people or places.”

I realize that I am not delivering good news here, and I am not presenting a message of hope and optimism. I am also not offering any definite answers. Today’s students are already having a hard time finding jobs, and that’s not just because of the current recession. Things are going to get worse. Even when the recession ends, most of the jobs that have disappeared from the U.S. over the past few are not going to come back. Ever.  Simply being hopeful, optimistic, and trusting in the American spirit is not going to solve this problem.

I am not writing this to discourage you, but rather to encourage you to prepare and adapt. What you need to do is take a long, hard, and realistic look at yourself, your aspirations, and your plans. Figure out where you want to go, and whether your ambitions are attainable. Then do everything in your power (including but not limited to 1 – 7 above) to get there. And keep your fingers crossed.

(Note: I encourage comments and suggestions from students, recent graduates, educators, any anyone else who has ideas or suggestions on the important problem I have highlighted here.)