I spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about this exact question. I have an answer: the labor market was weird for about 3o years.
30 years ago—actually 50 years for the timeline to your question—the US dominated as an industrial powerhouse. Most of the world lay ravished by World War 2 and some of the residual fighting.The US built up industrial capacity to an unprecedented level during the war. And cheap labor was all over the world, but we couldn't get to it.China closed. Vietnam closed. You couldn't trust India not confiscate your property. There were shipping problems. International trade was a lot more expensive and risky than it is today. Even if businessmen could get to the cheap labor they couldn't cheaply get the stuff back the States or to Europe where the consumers lived.
The US had a decently educated blue-collar workforce and white-collar workers who could squeeze productivity out of the manufacturing process. Even today, only Japan has more efficient manufacturing practices.
We decided to export the manufacture of cheap stuff to East Asia.
But we still manufacture stuff in the US. See this great article inThe Atlantic:Making It in America.We don't manufacture widgets anymore, we manufacture the machines that manufacture the widgets. We send those over to the China and exploit those labor arbitrage (cheap) opportunities. To work in a factory today requires some serious skills.You can't just go from high school to the factory. You go to a community college to learn physics, chemistry, calculus, programming: the whole intro-to-engineering curriculum. And those manufacturing jobs pay enough to compensate for the extra training.
So why do so many college graduates struggle? Most have no marketable skills.College graduates struggle at very different rates. English majors and anthropology majors and psychology majors and sociology majors can't get by.Engineering majors and statistics majors and computer science majors and finance majors kill it.* They hold skill sets the market demands. Businesses don't need someone who markets themselves as a "people-person" or an "effective communicator." They want to see hard skills.Soft-skills get you promoted; hard skills get you a job.
In the 1970s college became accessible to a lot more people. That was a good thing. Employers needed people who had the soft skills colleges nurture, and those same business saw graduates as trainable. A college degree signaled soft-skills and train-ability. An engineering degree was icing on the cake. And a weird thing happened: hard skills were devalued. It didn't matter if you were a whole lot smarter than the guy who majored in poetry. Without that degree you didn't stand a chance. A bunch of kids today grew up with parents and adults telling them that college is the key to success. To those adults it was. Why should the parents know any better?But parents didn't foresee the drastic and rapid changes in the labor market.
The crash of '08 meant that companies needed to get efficient fast, or fail. They couldn't afford to bring on a whole bunch of generalists and train them. They needed people who could make them a profit as soon as they could.Look at law students. Most entered law school in 2006 when law firms couldn't hire enough people. They graduated in 2009 in the midst of a hiring freeze that never really ended. There was one exception: patent lawyers. You can't just go to law school and come out a patent lawyer. You need an engineering or science degree (or the equivalent in college credits) or else the USPTO won't let you sit for the patent bar. We see a shortage of patent lawyers but a glut of attorneys. This trickled down to entry level hiring.
Employers are demanding skill sets.If you have those skill sets you're set. If you don't you're going to have a problem.And honestly, isn't that what we would expect?
*On the whole. Outliers exist so I don't want to hear about someone's cousin who can't find a job with their two PhDs in awesomeness. The data says I'm right.