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But high-minded theories of education are not much use to young people thinking about bread and butter. Inside the colleges, anxious students have often become prematurely professionalized and disturbingly competitive. At New York's Columbia University, for example, one-third of the freshmen have enrolled in pre-med courses. "As Americans, we really prize a degree, but I'm not sure we prize an education," muses Georgetown Dean Royden B. Davis, S.J.
Job seekers caught in the degree-holders' crunch react variously to their condition. Some, at least at first, are indignant. Alicia Kaye, office manager for a Los Angeles employment agency, reports that liberal-arts majors who are told of openings in insurance or secretarial work often retort: "Why should I take a $600-a-month job when I can collect unemployment benefits?" Others rethink their ambitions: Jackie Smith, a Boston College marketing major who is "shocked and amazed" not to find a job in business, has been a professional boxer for six years and is keeping in shape—just in case. There are graduates who grow frustrated and bitter, and there are those who accept what is available with good humor and hope for better times. Paul Creasey, 25, a U.C.L.A. history B.A., had hoped to become a management trainee but instead mans a spray hose for a commercial pesticide company. "It's not exactly what I had in mind," says he, "but any port in a storm."
Then there are people who are downright cheery about underemployment. Robin McElheny, a 1975 magna cum laude Radcliffe graduate who describes her undergraduate education as "worthless," works as a housecleaner in Boston and hopes to become a quiltmaker. "I enjoy cleaning houses," she says, "and I meet a lot of people doing it." For some, such as a Wellesley graduate working as a groom at a prep school's stables, there is even a certain blue-collar chic in low level jobs.
It is arguable that having upper-class youths work as plumbers' assistants contributes in some small way to a healthy lowering of class and economic barriers. Further, young people who have to wait to find work learn patience and open-mindedness. For one thing, the reflexive antipathy many students once felt toward the corporate world has vanished as they learn where the jobs are. Harvard Sociologist David Riesman thinks that underemployed graduates benefit from the enforced delay in making career choices. "Doing a lower-level job is not so bad," says he, "so long as it's well-paying enough to support a young person, and his record collection, in comfortable style."
What is bad, however, is to have a college graduate stuck in a lower-level job too long. Society is ill served by the dissatisfaction he feels as the job that once seemed a temporary expedient begins to look like a career. And there is an insidious ripple effect to the underemployment of the well-educated. When Ph.D.s take jobs away from B.A.s, the B.A.s find positions—in retail sales, for example—that used to go to high school graduates.