There was an uptick in the unemployment rate last week, which sent stock prices tumbling. Well, maybe I don’t have that exactly right. I may have it backward — there might have been a down-tick in the unemployment rate last week, which sent stock prices soaring. In any case, it was one or the other; an uptick led to a tumble, or a down-tick led to soaring. I can check the details later. The point is, those of us in the journalism business who closely track economic trends have come to realize that the United States faces a labor shortage, one more severe than any in memory.
How severe? I did a little research; specifically, I came across a newspaper clipping a friend had sent me. The clip was from the Los Angeles Times, the hometown paper of the city where, many years ago, I attended college. As often happens with the L.A. Times, you have to read several hundred words into the story before you know what it’s about. (Like I should talk.) But once you get to the gist, it’s a shocker: “In the super-tight job market of today’s expanding economy, even firms on the cutting edges of technology cannot sign up enough computer science or electrical engineering or business majors to meet their needs.” So desperate has the situation become, says the story, that employers have begun to contemplate the possibility of hiring liberal arts majors.
The paper even quotes the career counselor from my own liberal arts college. “Our kids are trainable,” she says. “They have the soft skills, the transferable skills.”
Perhaps you have to be of a certain age to understand the stunning force of this news. Perhaps, to be precise, you have to have been a liberal arts major in the 1970s, emerging from college into a labor market limp from exhaustion, cobwebby from disuse, stupefied from the accumulated incompetence of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. The L.A. Times, in physical size, had always been a big newspaper, plump with advertising, but by the late seventies even it had slimmed down from the lack of “Help Wanted” ads. Each morning it landed with a little airy plop on the doorstep of our student housing, from which one of my roommates or I would retrieve it. We would carry it to the breakfast table, sweep aside the crumpled cans of Falstaff, and turn with mounting dread to the classifieds.
This was in the spring. We were seniors about to be loosed upon the world, and none of us had the prospect of a job. Our dread was two-pronged as we scanned the job listings — first, that we might never find a way to earn a living; and second, that we might find a job. As it turned out, only the first worry was realistic. We were majors in the most liberal of the liberal arts: one in music, another in art history, a third in the visual arts (a fancy word for “movies”), and one in something called “the philosophy of religion.” And morning after morning the Times classifieds failed to yield up even one suitable advertisement. A minimally acceptable listing would have read:
PHILOSOPHY SPECIALIST — pref. w/expertise in epistemological implications of Anselm’s ontological proofs. Hours 1-5 pm. Generous sal./benefits. No refs. nec. No exp. nec. Pool privileges. Employer assumes payment of all student loans. BYO bong. Applicant does not have to wear shoes.
Not finding this, we sometimes grew desperate. We would get all dressed up in T-shirts and shorts and visit our college’s job placement officer. As I remember her, she was a cheerful woman, which was perfectly understandable: As a career counselor at a liberal arts college in 1978, she had a steady paycheck and nothing to do. She did once rouse herself long enough to subject me to a battery of “employment tests.”
For two hours, in a cubicle, I typed, I spelled, I placed words in alphabetical order, I analyzed charts and graphs, upticks and down-ticks. When I was done she called me into her office. Nowadays, under similar circumstances, a career counselor would tell the student how “trainable” he was, and how marvelously “transferable” his skills were.
But the 1970s were a sterner time. “You must understand,” my career counselor said, glancing through the papers, “you have no marketable skills whatsoever.” Journalism beckoned.
ANDREW FERGUSON
