Olufemi Nicol, whose saga Elie Mystal recounts in Abovethelaw.com, could be the clear sign of the Black Swan throwing Generations Y and X into upheaval. In this situation, that Black Swan is extreme over-education. As Nassim Taleb describes Black Swan in his best-seller by that title, it's an unexpected development which has unexpected profound impacts.
Nicol graduated from law school in 1994. He later began to matriculate for his MBA. Optimistic like most who travel the road of over-education, Nicol probably never anticipated he would bounce up against joblessness. That he did when his law firm DLA Piper laid off 80 lawyers in February 2009. Now, the Illinois Administrator has filed a complaint against him for failing to repay student loans for his MBA.
Some say Nicol is the poster child for the debt from excessive higher education. I disagree. More to the point, he is the poster child for that excessive higher education per se. The guy started out with a Bachelor's degree. Then he went on to a law degree. As if that wasn't enough, he then went for a graduate business degree.
That excessive higher education might start right at plans to obtain that entry-level undergraduate degree. As the National Association of Colleges and Employers reports, by graduation, only one-fourth of the Class of 2010 had jobs. There's more. As if that wasn't a wake-up call about the marketability of higher education, 28% of that Class of 2010 are going straight to master's programs. That's up form 23% from before the recent downturn.
The current solution to joblessness is more education. And this isn't only in the U.S. Globally in developed economies, graduates in most fields are having difficulty finding work. Will Generations Y and X, at least the highly educated members of it, be the first totally unemployable ones around the world?
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