A Startling Number Of Millennials Are Overqualified For Their Jobs

A college degree used to be a near guarantee you’d be able to secure a good-paying job that made use of your education.

No longer.

The after effects of the recession and mounting student loan debt, in addition to longer-term changes in the labor market, have forced many of today’s graduates to take the first decent offer they receive — even if they’re overqualified for the position.

Some 35% of millennials with a bachelor’s degree say their first full-time job didn’t require a college degree, according to an exclusive survey of 548 millennials in the U.S. The survey also revealed that salary, along with career advancement, proved to be millennials’ biggest job motivators.

Unfortunately, the number of millennials working in jobs they’re overqualified for isn’t that surprising, considering the U.S.’s growing underemployment problem. According to a 2013 study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, the number of college graduates entering the workforce will be more than double the jobs available that require at least a bachelor’s degree. That means there just aren’t enough high-paying jobs for the number of qualified job seekers out there. 

Additionally, with student debt growing faster than any other type, many graduates choose paying the bills over holding out for a more prestigious job offer. 

“These students are graduating with more student debt on average than any previous generation,” Brooks Holtom, associate professor of management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told Business Insider. “While there is abundant talk of work-life balance concerns for this generation, the hard realities of debt and low expectations for salary growth emphasize the importance of starting with the best pay possible at the first job.”

Millennials find jobs where they can, even if it means starting their career in a job below their education level. And while plans to relieve student debt are a step in the right direction, there aren’t any long-term solutions for underemployment currently on the horizon, says Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

He expects the job market will continue to narrow, placing increasing pressure on job-seeking young people. 

SEE ALSO: Exclusive Survey Shows How Hard It Is For Millennials To Find Good Jobs

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Education

A Startling Number Of Millennials Are Overqualified For Their Jobs

America's REAL Most Expensive Colleges

Every year, college costs are rapidly rising higher and higher, with many schools now charging more than $ 60,000 for one year’s education.

A list recently released by the Department of Education charts the highest tuition in the country. Unfortunately, the tuition numbers used in the rankings are two years old, and fail to show the full cost of attending college.

We’ve compiled a list of the colleges that are charging the most for tuition, required fees, and room and board for the 2014-15 academic year. These numbers are solely what you would pay directly to the school, so you’re still going to have to cover books, travel, and beer, as well as a health care plan.

Click through to see what the most expensive colleges in America are charging their students, and see how they compared to last year’s list. For schools that didn’t offer a flat total on their website, we added up the fees that a typical first year student would incur.

Jill Comoletti contributed research to this article.

#20 Bard College at Simon’s Rock

Total Cost: $ 61,490

Tuition and Fees: $ 48,292

Room and Board: $ 13,198

Department of Education Rank: 13

2013 BI Rank: 9

#19 Wesleyan University

Total Cost: $ 61,498

Tuition and Fees: $ 48,272

Room and Board: $ 13,226

Department of Education Rank: 5

2013 BI Rank: 6

#18 Fordham University

Total Cost: $ 61,588

Tuition and Fees: $ 45,623

Room and Board: $ 15,965

Department of Education Rank: N/A

2013 BI Rank: 13

See the rest of the story at Business Insider
Education

America's REAL Most Expensive Colleges

Susan Sontag Lectures On Literary Pornography (1964)

Just above, in what seems to be the second in a series of five lectures Susan Sontag delivered at the 92nd St. Y in 1964, hear the novelist, filmmaker, and literary critic discuss what she calls “classical pornography”—which is not, in her definition, porn from ancient Greece. Instead, she means the phrase as “kind of a joke,” referring primarily to literary porn of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, such as Rochester’s lusty poetry, de Sade’s outrageous scenarios, or Voltaire’s Candide, as well as later works like The Story of O. As Sontag puts it, her use of “classical” means “those things which have our interest as a part of culture, as opposed to sociology or journalism… something to do with art, as opposed to strictly commercial or sleazy product” (a class she sums up with the now-very-dated reference to “42nd Street”).

Sontag was 31 at the time of this recording, and the collection of essays on which she made her name as a critic, Against Interpretation, would not be published for two more years, though the essay “Notes on Camp” had already made a stir. The thoughts she develops in the lecture above would come to form her essay “The Pornographic Imagination,” a spirited and erudite defense of “classical” pornography as a kind of liberating aesthetic that engages the same extreme impulses and desires as certain kinds of religious experience. It was, of course, a very provocative position to take in the mid-sixties, and Sontag, as usual throughout her career, found herself assailed by moralists and praised by radicals.

In the above lecture, Sontag defines pornography as “works of art which embody, reflect, react to or against the idea that lascivious or lustful thoughts or acts are inherently immoral.” She moves from this definition to her larger point that pornography fills an important role, that of “shock.” “Every important human experience in life and literature,” she tells us, “involves shock.” Sontag’s complicated defense of literary pornography concludes with the idea that “violence, sexuality, absurdity and extreme states of human experience can be a corrective for the pervasive psychological and moral narrowness of American life.”

Sontag remains ambivalent about whether and what kind of pornography can accomplish this effect, and even at this early stage, we see a side of Sontag Adam Kirsch calls “an enforcer of literary and cultural hierarchies.” For all of the fine distinctions she makes between high and low forms of pornography, her distrust of more demotic, less “classical” forms, as well as of the “quality or fitness of the human subject,” give her pause. While she aims for what she called, after William James “a wider scale of experience,” Sontag, at the end of the essay that developed after this lecture, pondered with anxious irony: “If so many are teetering on the verge of murder, dehumanization, sexual deformity and despair, and we were to act on that thought, then censorship much more radical than the indignant foes of pornography ever envisage seems in order.”

Related Content:

The Filmmaking of Susan Sontag & Her 50 Favorite Films (1977)

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967-8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary)

Free Online Literature Courses

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Susan Sontag Lectures On Literary Pornography (1964) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Susan Sontag Lectures On Literary Pornography (1964)

The 10 Most Expensive State Schools

Two prominent Pennsylvania colleges are the most expensive public universities in the country, according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Education Monday.

The University of Pittsburgh ranked as the most-expensive four-year public institution for in-state students, while Penn State came in as the second most expensive. One more Pennsylvania school, The Pennsylvania College of Technology, joined Pitt and Penn State in the top ten, and four more Pennsylvania schools were ranked No. 11-14.

The list was made up of the top 34 most expensive in-state public universities, 15 of which were Penn State campuses.

The national average in-state tuition was $ 7,407.

Ken Service, a Pitt spokesman, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the reason the Pennsylvania schools were ranked so high was because the state provides much less than others for higher education. He cited numbers that have Pennsylvania as 47th out of the 50 states for higher education spending per capita.

“Pitt now receives lower levels of support than at any time since it was made a public university in the mid-1960s,” he said.

Here are the top 10 most expensive public universities ranked by in-state tuition:

1. University of Pittsburgh: $ 16,590


2. Penn State University: $ 16,444


3. University of New Hampshire: $ 16,422


4. Colorado School of Mines: $ 15,654


5. University of Vermont: $ 15,284


6. St. Marys College of Maryland: $ 14,773


7. New Jersey Institute of Technology: $ 14,740


8. University of Illinois: $ 14,522


9. The College of New Jersey: $ 14,378


10. Pennsylvania College of Technology: $ 14,370

Check out the complete list here >>

SEE ALSO: 10 Of The Best Small Cities For Education

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Education

The 10 Most Expensive State Schools

Watch 1970s Animations of Songs by Joni Mitchell, Jim Croce & The Kinks, Aired on The Sonny & Cher Show

The Sonny and Cher Show aired in the years right before I was born. Not only do I have no memory of it, of course, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an entire episode, either in re-runs or on the internet. Nevertheless, I immediately recognized the style of the show’s animator, English artist John David Wilson, when I encountered these music videos Wilson made for the singing comedy duo’s variety hour. Though a much less famous name, Wilson’s work seems to have animated the 70s in the way that R. Crumb’s illustrated the 60s. The opening sequences to iconic productions Grease and The Carol Burnett Show are Wilson’s, as are animations for Laugh In and cheesy Saturday morning kids’ show The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show (best known now, perhaps, because of Hudson brother progeny Kate Hudson). Though Wilson’s career stretches back to the 50s—with work on Mr. Magoo, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp—and into the 90s, with FernGully: The Last Rainforest, he seems to belong to the decade of “I Got You Babe” more so than any other.

Drawn “in a simplistic, funky-looking style” and with goofy sound effects added (probably by the Sonny and Cher producers), Wilson’s animated films for Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (top), Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” (above), and The Kinks “Demon Alcohol” (below, sung by Wayne Carpenter) enhance songs already rich with narrative. This, the blog Media Funhouse points out, was by design: “Wilson was wise to concentrate on the ‘story songs’ of the time, in order to create repeating characters and have the viewer ‘connect’ with the piece in a very short span of time.” In most cases, Sonny and Cher’s vocals were dubbed over the original tracks, but in many of the animations that surfaced on VHS in the eighties and now appear on Youtube, the original songs have been restored, as in the two above. If you grew up with the show, you’ve surely seen at least a couple of these early music videos, a form Wilson is widely credited with pioneering. Beginning in the second season, Wilson’s company, Fine Arts Films, produced a total of fourteen animated shorts for the show.

The story-songs above of environmental degradation, tough street characters, and the depths of addiction seem so very characteristic of the period, though Wilson certainly animated more lighthearted pop fare, such as Melanie’s “Brand New Key” (sung here by Cher). For more of Wilson’s animated music videos, see Dangerous Minds or Media Funhouse, and for the full range of Wilson’s long career in animation, check out the website of the production company he founded, Fine Arts Films.

via Dangerous Minds

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Watch Joni Mitchell Perform “Both Sides Now” on the First Episode of The Johnny Cash Show (1969)

Watch the Funky, Oscar-Winning Animated Film Featuring the Music of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass (1966)

A Short History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Satirist Robert Crumb

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Watch 1970s Animations of Songs by Joni Mitchell, Jim Croce & The Kinks, Aired on The Sonny & Cher Show is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post Watch 1970s Animations of Songs by Joni Mitchell, Jim Croce & The Kinks, Aired on The Sonny & Cher Show appeared first on Open Culture.

Open Culture

Watch 1970s Animations of Songs by Joni Mitchell, Jim Croce & The Kinks, Aired on The Sonny & Cher Show

Does Wim Wenders, one of my favorite directors, make perfect films? Hardly — and therein, at least for me, lies the appeal. Perfection strikes me as a singularly uninteresting goal for art, and Wenders has made some of the most interesting pieces of motion picture art going for the past thirty years: Wings of Desire; Paris, Texas; Notebook on Cities and Clothes; Tokyo-Ga. Perhaps, it occurs to me, he has achieved his own kind of very specific, inimitable perfection. But if you seek to imitate it nevertheless, have a look at “Wim Wenders’ Rules of Cinema Perfection” above. In this video (actually a kind of spot for Stella Artois, a brand with which the auteur has worked before), we see humorously revealed several of Wenders’ best filmmaking practices: “You need a good title from the beginning,” “Continuity is clearly overrated,” “Try to welcome and incorporate” the unexpected, and “If you like football, don’t shoot during the world championship.”

If you’ve done your reading on Wenders, you can probably tell that the clip draws from a published list of the director’s “50 Golden Rules of Filmmaking.” Other helpful recommendations include “Before you say ‘cut,’ wait five more seconds,” “A ‘beautiful image’ can very well be the worst thing that can happen to a scene,” and “There are no rules.” Will following these if-n0t-rules-then-guidelines turn you into the next Wim Wenders? Unlikely. Will drinking Stella Artois do it? Certainly not. But it could hurt none of us, whatever our creative endeavor of choice, to emulate his willingness on display here to learn from his mistakes (based on his list, I’d say he’s taken his share of hard knocks hiring couples, adapting novels, and working with animals); to share his wisdom; and (maybe most importantly of all) to learn not to take ourselves too seriously. Sure, his detractors tend to accuse him of pretentiousness, but we true fans (who pay close attention even to his commercial acting gigs) know the truth.

via No Film School

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Wim Wenders Reveals His Rules of Cinema Perfection is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Wim Wenders Reveals His Rules of Cinema Perfection

Coudal’s Kubrick Collection: An Online Treasure Trove of Kubrick Ephemera

Last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art wrapped up a brilliant, exhaustive exhibition about Stanley Kubrick. It was a veritable cornucopia of Kubrick memorabilia, ranging from grainy black and white photographs he took for Look magazine as a youth, to a creepy plastic Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the blood soaked dresses of those hollow-eyed twins in The Shining. The exhibit was a massive success. It’s hard to imagine any other director, with the possible exception of Alfred Hitchcock, who would not only get an exhibit in a major art museum but also be able to pack the hall week after week.

Part of his allure, no doubt, is Kubrick’s carefully-honed public persona – a reclusive genius who controlled every element of his movies, from the font on the opening titles to the design of the poster. His movies, especially his later ones, are dense, deeply-layered works of such complexity that they continue to unpack themselves after multiple viewings. Heck, there’s an entire documentary, Room 237, that presents nine starkly different interpretations of The Shining.

Kubrick’s movies seem designed to appeal to a certain breed of obsessive film geek. So if you count yourself a member of this tribe (as I do) and you didn’t happen to catch LACMA’s exhibit, you’re in luck. The Chicago design firm Coudal Partners has created a whole online treasure trove of Kubrick ephemera. We’ve culled a few cool things from their site.

Above is a cheesy, behind-the-scenes movie for 2001. The 20-minute promo sets up the movie as if it were an episode of The Outer Limits. “It is the year 2001, you’re on your way to a space station for business,” intones the narrator. “This is but one example of what life would be like in 2001.” What follows is a series of interviews with the scientists, experts, and craftsmen involved in creating Kubrick’s vision of the future with only fleeting footage of the filmmaker himself at around the 18-minute marker. Though it does give you a lot more information on the nuts and bolts of the astronauts’ spacesuits, the short movie, one can’t help but think, is setting up the audience for disappointment. It does little to help viewers understand that the first half of 2001 is about the struggles of ape men on the plains of Africa and does even less to address the psychedelic freakout of the movie’s last reel.

Also found in Coudal’s collection is a site that has compiled all the fonts that Kubrick, a noted typography enthusiast, used in his movies. We’ve posted a couple. He liked Futura and Gothic a lot, apparently. The title card for The Shining was designed by Saul Bass.

And on this site, some genius has created sweaters, ski masks, and doormats from that odd, geometric carpet pattern from The Shining. Pre-orders have sadly closed, but hopefully they’ll start selling them again. I want the cardigan.

And then there’s this behind-the-scenes shot of the director and Sue Lyon on the set of Lolita accompanied by a quote from Kubrick about the actress.

“From the first, she was interesting to watch—even in the way she walked in for her interview, casually sat down, walked out. She was cool and non-giggly. She was enigmatic without being dull. She could keep people guessing about how much Lolita knew about life.”

And speaking of photos, here’s a few pictures Kubrick took of the New York subway system back in 1946 for Look magazine. Compare these photos to his earliest movies like Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss. Both his early flicks and these pictures have the same gritty immediacy.

There is much, much more there at the Coudal Partners to keep any film nerd and Kubrick maven occupied. Check it out.

Related Content:

Fear and Desire: Stanley Kubrick’s First and Least-Seen Feature Film (1953)

Stanley Kubrick’s Daughter Shares Photos of Herself Growing Up on Her Father’s Film Sets

Stanley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Created)

675 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

Coudal’s Kubrick Collection: An Online Treasure Trove of Kubrick Ephemera is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Open Culture

Coudal’s Kubrick Collection: An Online Treasure Trove of Kubrick Ephemera