October 05, 2014
Kevin Carey had a good piece in Upshot on the college programs training people as “medical assistant.” The point of the piece is that the market for people with this training is saturated, so that most of the people coming out of these programs are not able to find full-time work. It notes that almost a third of the students who graduated the program in one school ended up defaulting on their loans.
The blame here clearly rests with schools that are deceptive about the job prospects of graduates. This is especially the case with the for-profit colleges that thrive off government loans and then leave students and taxpayers with the bill.
However the part that many may find disturbing is that the ostensible pot of gold here is the median annual wage currently earned by medical assistants is just $29,100. While Carey’s point is that most new grads can’t hope to earn anything like this sum, earning $29,100 hardly seems like hitting the jackpot. If this is based on a full-time full-year job it comes to roughly $14.50 an hour. If the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth over the last 45 years it would be around $17 an hour.
Carey is right that the government should crack down on colleges that rip off both students and taxpayers, but it speaks volumes about the current state of the labor market that a job paying $14.50 an hour is something that young people would aspire to get.
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