Category Archives: Uncategorized

when every step is a competition

The numbers of jobs and college slots per capita have remained relatively stable over time, but the number of people who compete for each position has dramatically increased because markets for admissions and employment have grown (from local to national or global) and have become far more efficient. Nowadays, you can search online for jobs anywhere and click to apply.

Thus, for example:

As shown in the graph above (from Birinci, See & Wee for the St. Louis Fed), an unemployed person submitted a mode of 0 or 1 job applications per month in 1979-1980 (during a severe recession). In the 2010s, even though the unemployment rate was lower, the modal number of applications per job-seeker was more than 10 per month. Nowadays, about 2% of job applications result in an interview.
In 1995, 10% of college freshmen had applied for admission to seven or more institutions. By 2017, 36% had done so (source).
From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, the percentage of college graduates who had completed an internship rose from 10% to over 80%, probably because an internship now seems necessary to get a job (Scott Alexander, citing NACE.)

Alexander offers this pair of fictional portraits to illustrate this trend:

Brenda Boomer applied to a local business she liked at age 18. She got hired, worked her way up from the bottom, and by age 35 she was a regional manager making $50,000 per year.

Martha Millennial lost her adolescence to endless lessons in Mandarin, water polo, and competitive debate, all intended to pad her college resume; her only break was the three months she spent building houses in Rwanda to establish her social justice credentials. She eventually got accepted to Penn and earned a 4.2 in her college classes, despite having to complete several of them remotely from the Google campus where she was doing a simultaneous internship. After graduation, she applied to twenty-eight grad schools but was rejected from all of them, so she instead got two half-time jobs, one as a waitress and one at a startup that pitched itself as “Uber for humidifiers”. The humidifier startup failed, reducing her equity to $0, but she had only been in it for networking anyway, and by attending industry conferences every weekend she had collected the right contacts to get a warm introduction to the vice-president of their biggest competitor, “Uber for dehumidifiers”. She joined the dehumidifier startup, rose to associate manager, bumped up against a local ceiling (“we don’t promote from inside”), and successfully got herself poached by an air purifier startup, where at age 35 she was a regional manager making $50,001 per year.

With her “service” experience in Rwanda and her Penn degree, Martha sounds upper-middle-class. But I think we could envision a pair of working-class examples that illustrated the same trend. A low-SES Martha would apply for admission to a charter school, a slot in a summer jobs program, and an apprenticeship, not to an Ivy League university.

One might think that everything is fine for Martha. The actual odds of landing in any given social position have remained similar. With the unemployment rate at 4.4%, most people are still finding jobs. And US workers recently reported the highest mean levels of job satisfaction since they were first asked this survey question in 1987 (Conference Board 2023).

But I think the stress is very real. As a teacher and advisor of college students, I observe constant angst. Each application now generates many rejections, often with little or no feedback. Each position seems to require a different strategy, and each failure suggests that the student’s strategy must have been flawed.

Searching for educational opportunities and jobs is a substantial time commitment, a cost that may not be captured in standard economic indicators.

Finally, I think people reasonably draw negative inferences about the economy and the society from their experiences as applicants. Brenda Boomer and Martha Millennial ended up in similar jobs. But Martha competed unsuccessfully for many more opportunities than Brenda did. Almost inevitably, Martha will perceive a world of scarcity, in which desirable opportunities are out of her reach.

I wouldn’t try to persuade Martha that everything has worked out OK. She’s bound to ask, “Compared to what?” She has experienced constant comparisons to other people, some of whom have beaten her out for almost everything she has wanted to do. It’s reasonable for her to perceive a worse world than Brenda did, even if we hold all the other changes constant.

Sean Duffy’s flip-flop and the essence of constitutional government

Leave a reply

ProPublica’s Jake Pearson has uncovered a contradiction involving Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Duffy has “been one of the most vociferous defenders of President Donald Trump’s expansive use of executive authority, withholding billions of dollars in federal funding to states.” However, “in an assertive, thoroughly researched 2015 legal brief, Duffy, then a Republican representative from Wisconsin,” argued that the power of the purse belonged exclusively to Congress, which may not even choose to delegate its power to the Executive.

I am deeply critical of the actual policy choices of the Trump Administration, in transportation and in other areas. Also, Duffy’s 180-degree turn on the Constitution makes me suspicious. Pearson quotes me:

Peter Levine, a civics expert at Tufts University, said that while it could be that Duffy’s views on presidential power have evolved over time, his apparent flip-flopping on something as fundamental as the meaning of the Constitution raises the prospect that Duffy may “just be playing a game for power.”

“The Constitution is a promise to continue to apply the same rules and norms over time to everybody,” he added. “When political actors completely ignore that, and just go after their own thing, I don’t think the Constitution can actually function.”

On one hand, we should tolerate changes in opinion. When a political leader adopts a new position, I don’t generally complain about “flip-flopping.” We want leaders to listen, deliberate, and learn. One of many ways in which our culture works against deliberation is by denouncing individuals for being inconsistent over time. Stubborn consistency is the hobgoblin of closed minds.

In fact, it can be an ad hominem fallacy to say, “You must be wrong because you previously held the opposite view.” In general, we should debate a position and the reasons for it, not the consistency of the speaker over time.

On the other hand, a constitution–in the broadest sense–is a pact to apply the same rules to everyone. Although constitutions vary, constitutionalism itself is the principle of limiting everyone’s power in the same way. To make a constitutional argument (as Duffy did explicitly in his 2015 amicus brief) is to say, “This rule should apply to me as well as my opponents.” When a person who wields power suddenly changes his mind about constitutional principles in ways that benefit himself, it certainly looks like a betrayal of constitutionalism. And any constitution is just a piece of paper unless most of the key players respect the principle of consistency–and unless voters demand that of them.

demystifying graduate education in the USA

Leave a reply

On Sunday, I met with about 65 students at An-Najah National University in Nablus, the West Bank. For about two hours (until our time ran out), they asked me questions about how to pursue graduate education in North America or Europe. Our conversation helped me see that our system must seem mysterious and may be misleading. Here are some points that I found myself making which might be worth sharing with others. …

Generally, you should apply to a graduate program and seek financial aid, which can mean free tuition plus a stipend for a teaching or research assistantship. You should aim not to pay for a graduate degree in the social sciences, humanities, or natural sciences. An admission offer without a financial package is probably not desirable.

You could apply for scholarships in your field that can be used at any institution, but those are extremely competitive. You are much more likely to get support from the university where you enroll, and you should apply for admission even if you know that you couldn’t afford the tuition. You should expect a conversation/negotiation about financial aid.

If you aspire to a PhD, you should apply to a PhD program and receive an MA along the way. In general, you should not seek an MA in your field before applying for a PhD.

You should view MA programs with some skepticism unless they offer substantial financial aid. Professional masters degrees, such as MBAs and MPHs, may make more sense economically, since they can make you more competitive for desirable jobs. But even those require a careful cost/benefit analysis.

Yes, you can wait until after you have graduated with a BA to apply for graduate school. In fact, many programs prefer candidates who have several years of work experience. (This may be less true in the liberal arts than in fields like public policy and law.)

A lengthy graduate program is not worth the years of your life unless you think that you would enjoy those years. But graduate school can be a good experience if the topic interests you, the financial package is manageable, and you would like to live in the community where the university is located. If you pursue a graduate degree just for the outcome, the program should be brief and/or clearly profitable, which may be the case for an MD or a PhD in engineering.

Speaking of “where the university is located,” the USA is a big and diverse country. For anyone, pursuing graduate school will be a different experience if that means living in New York City versus a small Southern college town. For a Palestinian, the difference may be even more important (which is not to say that NYC would obviously be better).

To differentiate yourself from other applicants with equally good grades and scores, you need some depth of knowledge and experience on a particular topic. Your experience may be academic (for instance, a research project), or applied, or both. If you’re at an early stage and you don’t have this kind of depth, a first step is to find a mentor in your own university or community. By the way, you will need references, and mentors can provide letters.

Your application essay should reflect your personality and the admissions criteria of the specific program to which you are applying. That said, if you need a generic template for an essay, consider addressing these three questions: 1) What have you done so far in this field? 2) What do you want to learn in graduate school? 3) What do you want to do with what you’ve learned?

If you want to collaborate remotely with an American academic, don’t email and say you want to do research. Send an email that demonstrates specific understanding of the recipient’s own research and propose new research that would contribute to that person’s agenda.

We also talked a bit about visas and the climate for Palestinians in the USA, but I have focused this blog post on admissions and financial aid because I feel better informed about those issues, and my thoughts might apply to people from other countries.

Americans’ pride in democracy, by generation

Leave a reply

As a trustee of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, I’m proud of our new partnership with Gallup called the Democracy for All Project, which released the first results of a national survey yesterday. That study shows broad support for democratic values and cultural diversity.

The survey finds that commitment to democracy rises with age and is lowest among adults under 30:

I show the percentages who agree that democracy is the best form of government. Among youth, another 35% are neutral and 12% disagree. The lower level of support among younger people is an important issue. I also recommend CIRCLE’s April 2025 report on that topic.

Here I’ll add a historical dimension. Although I haven’t found precisely the same question on surveys going back decades, the General Social Survey (GSS) did ask a relevant item in each decade from the 1990s through the 2010s. In a battery about which aspects of the country made people proud, one question asked about pride in democracy.

As shown in the line graph above this post, each generation has been somewhat less proud than its predecessors, but Boomers and Gen-Xers showed increasing pride as they grew older from 1996-2004 and were prouder in 2014 than they had been two decades earlier. On the other hand, Millennials lost a lot of pride in democracy between 2004 and 2014.

I am not sure how I would have answered that question at those times. I am committed to democracy but not necessarily “proud” of the way it functions in the USA. Nevertheless, the GSS trends show that today’s differences by age are fairly typical, and people change their views as they go through life and as history plays out.

This background might discourage us from assuming that something has recently gone wrong with civic education in K-12 schools or that the current media environment is uniquely toxic. Both civic education and media deserve attention, but not because of a unique generational gap in the present.

(The GSS data are here.)

The City, by Cavafy

Leave a reply

Constantine Cavafy wrote “The City” in 1894. This poem doesn’t speak for me or articulate feelings that I happen to hold. But it is a famous work that is difficult to render in other languages, particularly because the original is densely rhymed. I gave it a try:

You said: I will get out of here, I will leave.
Some other place will be better than here.
Here everything I write comes back as a jeer, 
And here my heart feels buried like a corpse.
Can my mind still bear what withers and warps?
Wherever I look, where I turn my eye,
I see black ruins from my life gone by.
Here, where time has dragged on without reprieve.

You will find no new places, no other coasts.
This city will follow you. You will return
To the same streets and quarters in turn.
In the same neighborhood, you will grow old.
You will turn white in this very household.
You will always arrive back at this station.
Stop hoping for any other destination.
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
Just as you ruined your life in this abode,
So you have ruined all the world’s outposts.

Last summer, I read a most of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, which is an homage to Cavafy and his city (Alexandria) and concludes with Durrell’s loose translation of this poem. However, I quit before the end because I didn’t like the characters and found the novel’s evocation of Alexandria fervent yet vague. I thought this remark by a character (not the narrator) rang too true: “Justine and her city are alike in that they both have a strong flavour without having any real character” (p. 125).

See also: “Complaint,” by Hannah Arendt, which begins “Oh, the days they pass by uselessly …”; and Istanbul melancholy. (Pamuk loves Cavafy’s “The City.”)