SOCIAL RESEARCH AND SOCIAL REALITY
Blumberg, Paul & Wright, James & Hamilton, Richard
Unless quantitative social research is tempered with common sense, it may obscure rather than illuminate social reality, which accounts for its oftdeserved reputation for sheer irrelevance....
...When we report on white male bluecollar workers with some years of college education, we are not talking about salaried white-collar workers, we are not talking about college graduates (our article emphasizes that the "overwhelming majority"—in this case, about 85 percent—do not have a college degree), nor are we talking about French, German, or Italian students...
...expostulation will be of little help...
...The well-known study by Harold Sheppard and Neil Herrick, Where Have All the Robots Gone...
...But these too are matters that can only be resolved by investigation and research on the subject...
...According to the report, "The nation's depressed job market---especially the gap that has developed between the number of college graduates and the number of available jobs that usually go to college graduates --appears to be a major cause of the depression experienced by many young people...
...Surely that is relevant to his claim...
...But here they overlook the fact that the job crisis for 416 university graduates has already become an explosive issue in contemporary European student movements, especially in France, Italy, and West Germany...
...This finding of a negligible correlation we would also take as being consonant with our results...
...Paper presented at the 83rd annual convention of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, August 1975...
...The study revealed that significant numbers of young people were experiencing serious "disillusionment and depression," central to which was their economic plight once they are out of college...
...Since most of the "increase in educational opportunity" for the bluecollar ranks comes after that, a review of evidence from the 1970s seems to us entirely appropriate...
...We do report some evidence to suggest that many of the people in question aspire to higher things, but there is nothing in the evidence to suggest that they consider their present jobs somehow "beneath" them...
...q Notes 'The original study, based on the NORC surveys, is R. Hamilton and J. Wright, "College-Educated Blue Collar Workers," read at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in New York, August 1976...
...2) with the average amount of education attained by all workers in his occupation as shown in the census...
...SOURCE: Robert P. Quinn and Martha S. Baldi de Ma nd i lovitch, Education and Job Satisfaction: A Questionable Payoff...
...While on the subject of ignored literature, we would like to digress a moment and ask why Blumberg has not made any reference at all to the definitive review by Robert Quinn et al., Job Satisfaction: Is There a Trend?5 Why does he "conceal" the following conclusion from that study...
...What we have said, first of all, relates not to "people" in general but to college-educated blue-collar workers specifically...
...But we find nothing distinctive about the job outlooks of these 34: 82.3 percent of them said they were "very" or "somewhat" satisfied with their work, vs...
...To them, this finding suggested that people who have more education than their jobs require (e.g., collegeeducated manual workers) are just as content as the rest of us, and thus all the recent discussion about the alienated labor of college graduates working at menial jobs, with all its potential for personal disillusionment and political radicalization, simply has no basis in actual fact...
...The second half of the Quinn-Baldi de Mandilovitch report attempts to assess the relationship between relative levels of education and job satisfaction, "relative" in this instance being relative to the amount of education one's job requires...
...We stand by every one of these conclusions, for a very simple reason—Blumberg's comment on our article has not touched our arguments or evidence at any essential point...
...Our critic suggests he has an argument here: as opposed to mere appearances that surface in sample surveys, he knows the contrary reality...
...5 Other measures of overeducation devised by Quinn and his associates that Wright and Hamilton might have used: compare a worker's educational attainment (I) with the amount of education required for his job as estimated by the General Educational Development codes of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles...
...This formulation suggests, first, that our case is merely "an argument," i.e., no more than a logical case, whereas the case is based, as we 420 have already emphasized, on detailed evidence from several different sources...
...What the Blumberg and Murtha article spells out is a set of theoretical possibilities, of potential reactions...
...A graduate in philosophy who ends up selling shoes at Macy's has indeed, by the census definition, obtained a "white-collar" position...
...Graduates might come to blame the universities, the corporations, the government, or even themselves...
...Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, Survey of Working Conditions: Final Report on Univariate and Bivariate Tables (Wash., D.C.: U.S...
...of the 16, five found a positive association (satisfaction increased with education), three found a negative association, and "eight reported the relationship to be either nonexistent or equivocal...
...Since the two studies have these different foci and use different measures (for both dependent and independent variables), it is impossible, without further research, to determine the reasons for the differences in conclusion...
...What Blumberg has to say about these materials sounds entirely plausible to us...
...Printing Office, 1971), pp...
...We reported a number of findings showing, first of all, generally high levels of work satisfaction and, second, that "college-educated workers" (defined specifically as blue-collar workers with at least one or more years of college education) were essentially no different in outlook from manual workers having only a high-school education or less...
...Another work cited by Blumberg to refute our conclusions is Ivar Berg's Education and Jobs...
...BLUMBERG CLAIMS that we have "essentially" said that "people who spend eight hours a day working at jobs that are beneath both their aspirations and their abilities are perfectly happy about it...
...We have, of course, said nothing of the sort...
...We are obviously quite well aware of the number of blue-collar college graduates in the surveys...
...That is, as they say, almost a parody, but more serious instances of outright liking for blue-collar work also appear in the literature, for example, in L. L. LeMaster's participant observation study, Blue Collar Aristocrats (University of Wisconsin Press, 1975...
...3 With university enrollment soaring, the employment outlook for French graduates has continued to deteriorate through the I 970s, leading to widescale joblessness...
...We stand by the claims and the evidence presented there and elsewhere...
...The job outlooks of college graduates in low-level clerical and sales jobs certainly deserve research attention, but that was not the topic of our article...
...The fact is—to take but one manifestation of the problem—that today a higher proportion of college graduates than ever before are compelled to accept low-level clerical and sales jobs, as the number of graduates continues to exceed the number of desirable white-collar professional and managerial jobs...
...Let us review briefly Blumberg's case...
...In all, Quinn and Baldi de Mandilovitch construct four measures of "relative education...
...This seems to us to be about the most dubious of his claims...
...e.g., privatized despair, individualized solutions...
...The fourth measure shows a moderate 423 positive correlation of .21, again in the expected direction...
...6James Wright, "In Search of a New Working Class, " paper presented at the annual meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society, New York City, March 19, 1977...
...For example, each respondent in the survey was asked how much formal education he had attained and also how much formal education he thought was necessary to do his job...
...That is to say, they too are irrelevant to our arguments and evidence...
...5 Education and Job Satisfaction: A Questionable Payoff (National Institute of Education, 1977), p.v...
...And yet he accuses us of running roughshod over the available evidence in order to score polemical points...
...It is very hard to quarrel with such a formulation, except to note that it is virtually devoid of meaningful content...
...If there were no other evidence on this point, we could cite the young man mentioned in the initial Blumberg and Murtha article, the son of a successful New Jersey businessman who decided to become a truck driver...
...And we did link this potential to the notion of a vanguard, although they did not specifically use that word...
...But, as the Michigan survey makes apparent, even those who are very satisfied with their work often report some dissatisfaction with one or more aspects of it...
...This was the case for all levels of education...
...Job Dissatisfaction in the '70's (Free Press, 1972), contains the following passage: "Surprisingly enough, almost identical percentage [sic] of workers among the following three groups expressed dissatisfaction with their jobs: those with an elementary school education or less, those with a seventh to twelfth grade education, and those who had progressed beyond high school" (p...
...That certainly seems consistent with our findings...
...One obvious possibility is that there is very little relationship between education (absolute or relative) and job satisfaction among blue-collar workers (as we report) but that a strong relationship appears elsewhere in the social structure (as they report...
...However, it is not a matter of "seeming" at all...
...Assuming he means these points to apply to the people studied in our article, the implication is that manual work is a source of despair, misfortune, and evil to any collegeeducated person unlucky enough to be caught doing it...
...We also reject this unwarranted and unsubstantiated interpretation...
...on the contrary, we think (and the evidence supports) that many people, even some with one or more years of college, can have a genuine liking for some bluecollar jobs...
...In the original article, however, only one study ("a counterintuitive study undertaken by Sandia Laboratories") is cited in support of this claim, and in the companion essay by O'Toole we find the following quotation: ". . . educational credentials show little correlation with job success or satisfaction...
...As reported in the article, these results obtain not just in the Michigan employment survey, but in the NORC General Social Surveys as well...
...These, however, are clearly billed in their article as lesser likelihoods, their chances being lower than "the most potentially explosive" option...
...Politically, they might turn left or right or, perhaps even more likely, we said, end up "in a kind of privatized despair that has much psychological but little social and political effect...
...In a personal communication, Robert Quinn, the codirector of the University of Michigan study, said of Wright and Hamilton's overall method and their technique of combining manual workers who have a little college with manual workers who have graduated from college, that lumping the two 417 groups together and calling them college educated is totally misleading...
...One of the four is correlated with job satisfaction at .00—i.e., shows no relationship to job satisfaction at all...
...The formulation also suggests that our "argument" (and by implication, our evidence) is somehow inconsistent with a large body of countervailing evidence amassed by others...
...the findings from both surveys point quite clearly to the same conclusion...
...Browsing around in the University of Michigan's well-known Quality of Employment Survey, a comprehensive study of job satisfaction, Wright and Hamilton chanced upon one unusual statistic: manual workers who had been to college seemed to have about as high levels of job satisfaction (46 percent "very satisfied") as manual workers who had not been to college (47 percent "very satisfied...
...But then again, since those materials deal with not-yetemployed students and we deal with employed blue-collar workers, that too is an irrelevancy...
...Berg's sixth chapter, "Educational Achievements and Job-related Attitudes," review several relevant studies of white-collar workers...
...Contrary to Blumberg's assertion that only the graduates are "clearly overtrained," three-quarters of the bluecollar workers with at least some college education said that a high-school degree or less would be sufficient...
...In the evidence reported in that book, however, the difference in job satisfaction between blue-collar workers with a high-school degree and those with one or more years of college was less than one percentage point, quite consistent with our findings...
...Later studies, including others at the University of Michigan, consistently show that workers who have more education than their jobs demand are far more likely than others to suffer from a number of conditions associated with job strain and poor mental health, including overall job dissatisfaction, low job involvement, dissatisfaction with pay, with general working conditions, with the challenge of the job, with co-worker relations, other job-related tensions, low self-esteem, depression, and dissatisfaction with life in general.: Wright and Hamilton dismiss the thesis that underemployed college graduates may become radicalized by their employment experience...
...In discussing the likely reactions of the overeducated, Blumberg draws heavily on overly dramatic phraseologies such as "privatized despair" or "the capacity of Americans to individualize even the most collective misfortunes and social evils...
...Some time ago, we made use of the item from the employment survey, to which he now calls our attention, which asks, "what level of formal education do you feel is needed by a person in your job...
...But in the University of Michigan study of some 1,500 persons, on which Wright and Hamilton base their conclusions and which they bill as "the largest, most detailed survey on attitudes about work ever undertaken," there were exactly 11 blue-collar college graduates...
...Remarkably, Wright and Hamilton ignore the most reknowned work on the subject, Education and Jobs: the Great Training Robbery, in which Ivar Berg, surveying the major studies, found that workers who are educationally overqualified for their jobs tend, in fact, to be less satisfied than others...
...The most persuasive case for this placement of lower white-collar workers [in the working class] has been made by Hamilton.* Not only do Wright and Hamilton ignore the burgeoning literature on the underutilization of college graduates, they do not even give passing mention to the employment problems of advanced degree holders—the career disaster awaiting the intellectual reserve army of Ph.D.s in the 1980s (see, e.g., Allan Cartter's excellent Ph.D.'s and the Academic Labor Market...
...A FURTHER POINT to note in this connection is that the original Blumberg and Murtha article is written so as to "cover" virtually any imaginable reaction...
...In passing, it may be noted that Berg finds a stronger relationship between skill level (measured by the training requirement) and job satisfaction...
...On this point, we might mention that Blumberg "ignores" the evidence on the topic contained in Richard Hamilton, Restraining Myths, SageHalstead-Wiley, 1975...
...Two of the others show weak correlations in the expected direction...
...The authors identify 16 previous studies that "dealt directly with the relationship...
...second, they neglected the relevant social and political events of our time...
...Department of Labor, Manpower Research Monograph #10, 1974...
...Blumberg's "final note" about the fate of college graduates in white-collar employment constitutes another irrelevant digression since we are talking about college dropouts employed in blue-collar occupations...
...As our previous research attests, we think there are many important questions to be raised about lower white-collar workers...
...It is nice of Blumberg to acknowledge that we have dealt extensively with the white-collar ranks in other publications...
...What is "slender" is Blumberg's caricature of our findings, which drops all reference to the three NORC studies we used and refers to "one unusual statistic" when the article makes clear there is a whole series of "unusual statistics" that require explanation...
...Blumberg feels that we have "simply misread" our own data, since very few of the "collegeeducated" manual workers are graduates...
...Raymond Boudon, "Sources of Student Protest in France," in Philip G. Altbach and Robert S. Laufer, eds., The New Pilgrims: Youth Protest in Transition (New York: McKay, 1972), p. 300...
...5 The authors also reanalyze data from nine national surveys bearing on the same issue...
...But this does not make those findings any less real...
...We have not ignored Berg's work, in fact we hold it in high esteem, it being one of the relatively few analyses of "overeducation" that pay attention to available evidence on the topic...
...4 As indicated, they also reported generally high levels of job satisfaction...
...Our Dissent article reviews a number of measures of work satisfaction, each showing the same result...
...These comments, to be sure, are no more than guesses on our part based on the research we have done so far...
...Although 34 cases can hardly be definitive, these results do not suggest that the difference between college dropouts and collegegraduated manual workers is nearly as important as Blumberg claims...
...Although these studies, as we say, do not directly bear on our immediate concern, they do bear on Blumberg's depiction of "everything we know...
...Such inconsistencies as there are between our work and the work of others is almost invariably an inconsistency between their assertions and our data or, in some cases, between their assertions and their own data...
...These results are reported and discussed in our forthcoming article, "Education and Job Attitudes...
...Blumberg faults us for "ignoring" this indicator from the survey, but here again, there is a limit to how much one fits into a five-page summary piece...
...At the same time, it is an outrage to suggest that the focus on one segment is an effort to "conceal" what is going on in another...
...It is hard to see this as a misreading, since it is a point we dwell on throughout our article...
...Berg also summarizes the results from Arthur Kornhauser's Mental Health of the Industrial Worker (Wiley, 1965): "The overall results do not confirm the expectations that better educated men in routine jobs exhibit poorer mental health than do those with less education" (p...
...What Blumberg takes to be a telling criticism of our article is nothing more than a totally accurate restatement of our own points.3 422 We sharply disagree with Blumberg's claim that the only blue-collar workers who are "clearly overtrained" are the graduates...
...What they are saying is that the overeducated may revolt or they may not, they may blame themselves or they may blame the educational structure or they may blame the corporations or they may blame the system as a whole, they may seek collective political solutions or they may not—all depending on undefined circumstances...
...His opinion seems to be that this evidence can be safely ignored just because its implications are "extremely bizarre," which is just another way of saying that evidence can be ignored whenever it is convenient to do so, a rather spurious intellectual standard at best...
...As Wright and Hamilton themselves grant, 85 percent of the manual workers in this country who have been to college have not graduated, and of the great mass who attended junior college, only a tiny proportion have earned even a two-year degree...
...This is what the respondents themselves have reported, and if what they have reported "seems" unlikely, then Blumberg or anyone else can check it out...
...If the "most potentially explosive force" is not realized, various other things might happen...
...The fact is, virtually all previous evidence on the relationship between education and job satisfaction among blue-collar workers shows the same pattern as that reported in our article...
...Choosing to concentrate mainly on manual workers with a little college attendance, Wright and Hamilton quickly dismiss the career problems of college graduates with the remark that 90 percent of graduates get white-collar jobs and most eventually find adequate opportunities for advancement...
...As to our ideas about the relative probabilities, they are stated quite clearly in the third to last paragraph of our article...
...The extension of our results to "people" in general is entirely unwarranted and unjustifiable...
...3The title under which our piece is run, "Blue Collars, Cap and Gown," is highly misleading on these points, as "caps and gowns" are usually associated with graduation, which very few of our college-educated workers have experienced...
...We have checked the subject out with the six NORC surveys conducted between 1972 and 1977...
...Nor do they mention the enormous oversupply of persons seeking to enter law, schoolteaching, the academy, and other professions...
...Renewed French student strikes and demonstrations in 1976 were even more obviously tied to the dismal job prospects for university graduates than were the events of 1968...
...And in this social issue lies the potential for social change...
...And finally, we do not say that these people are "perfectly happy" with their jobs...
...We did quote them, entirely accurately, as saying that the aspiration-opportunity disparity constituted the "most potentially explosive force for radicalizing educated labor...
...We report on the white male blue-collar workers in the employment survey (some 533 cases, of which 104 report some or more college education), whereas the Quinn and Baldi de Mandilovitch table is based on the entire sample (using all 1,480 cases...
...It appeals to me because it is so masculine...
...We are prepared to believe the results of the interviews with psychiatrists, etc., conducted by the New York Times...
...In a perceptive essay on the roots of the 1968 French student revolt, sociologist Raymond Boudon notes that, in a survey of university students taken by the French Institute of Public Opinion shortly after the May-June events, 56 percent of the students interviewed said that the most important reason for the revolt was the "anxiety about the [low] probability of finding a job related to one's studies...
...110...
...5 Using this measure to examine the job satisfaction of all white- and blue-collar workers in the Michigan study, we see that workers who have more education than their jobs require are in fact far more likely to be dissatisfied than workers whose education just fits their job requirements or workers whose jobs require more education than they have attained (see the Table...
...We have considered the arguments and evidence of these and many other authors at some length in our as yet unpublished work in this area) As Blumberg must surely realize, one cannot touch on all details of these "contradictory" arguments in a brief five-page summary of a much larger work...
...On this slender foundation, Wright and Hamilton constructed their case...
...Finally, investigating the psychological characteristics of educationally overqualified workers in the same Michigan study used by Wright and Hamilton, Quinn found that such workers were far more likely than others to suffer from low self-esteem and periods of depression ("Overeducation and Jobs . . . ," p. 6...
...82.4 percent of those with one to three years of college...
...See also Richard Hamilton, Class and Politics in the United States (New York: Wiley, 1972...
...We indicated that this college-educated segment was a growing part of the blue-collar ranks, and we offered the further observation that predictions about their presumed radicalism, made by many writers, do not have a firm basis in fact...
...This too is simply false...
...The authors reached this absurd conclusion for three reasons: first, they ignored all the evidence that contradicts their thesis...
...see note I...
...none of this material is mentioned by Blumberg...
...THE JOB CRISIS for college graduates in the United States has not taken a political direction, but Wright and Hamilton have totally misread our article (Paul Blumberg and James M. Murtha, "College Graduates and the American Dream," Winter 1977) when they claim that we predicted the inevitable radicalization of underemployed graduates who would form the vanguard of a new working class in this country...
...In the face of all this contrary evidence, what explains Wright and Hamilton's rather unexpected finding that college-educated manual workers are a cheerful lot...
...The quotation concerning educational credentials is from the second part, p. 27...
...Of some 160,000 graduates of French universities in 1975, 100,000 were unemployed in late 1976...
...For example, Westley and Westley are quoted in our article to the effect that "the more educated the blue-collar worker, the more likely he is to be dissatisfied with his work...
...There is an obvious next step to the process, checking it out...
...Blumberg and Murtha do discuss a range of other possibilities...
...Unfortunately, much of the book is irrelevant to the concerns of our article because it does not differentiate between blue-collar and white-collar workers...
...The reference to "cap and gown" is not ours...
...And that evidence, to emphasize, is very hard to square with any depiction of "explosive potential...
...421 BLUMBERG CLAIMS we have "totally misread" his and Murtha's article on "College Graduates and the American Dream" when we say that they have "predicted the inevitable radicalization of underemployed graduates who would form the vanguard of a new working class in this country...
...third, they misinterpreted their own data...
...Blumberg's recasting of our conclusions is an i egregious distortion of what we have said...
...U.S...
...Blumberg declares that we have "ignored all the evidence" that contradicts our thesis...
...As proof that we have "ignored" all contrary evidence, Blumberg quotes a passage from an essay by James O'Toole that "the placing of intelligent and/or highly qualified workers in dull and unchallenging jobs is a prescription for pathology...
...Off-hand, it occurs to us that most of the people we have written about would fall into their third or fourth categories, i.e., would fall somewhere between ± .07 standard deviation units of the mean job satisfaction...
...the title for the piece, to our surprise, was chosen by Dissent's editors...
...The results provided by Blumberg from the Quinn and Baldi de Mandilovitch study are also of considerable interest in their own right...
...This conclusion, in O'Toole's words, is "clear from almost every study of job dissatisfaction...
...What our article spells out is the available evidence on which of these possibilities is presently being realized among one segment of the overeducated labor force, namely, college-educated manual workers...
...This, incidentally, is another previous study that shows results entirely consistent with our own...
...We report that about one-half of them say they are "very satisfied" with their jobs, and that 80-90 percent say they are "very" or "somewhat" satisfied...
...We suggested that this crisis of underemployment might manifest itself in a wide variety of political or nonpolitical ways...
...Very few of our collegeeducated manual workers would fall into their last and most dissatisfied category of "four or more years excess education," simply because very few of our workers have four years of education past high school...
...This is not merely a semantic point, for the typical skilled or even semiskilled manual worker who dropped out of college after one or two semesters is not overeducated at all, and thus his rel .itively high level of job satisfaction is totally unrelated to his alleged educational overqualification...
...This strikes us as a much more fruitful line of endeavor than Blumberg's, i.e., denunciation of the unpalatable finding...
...q Notes 'James O'Toole, "The Reserve Army of the Underemployed, Part 1," Change (May 1975), p. 28...
...These, to be sure, are worthwhile topics for concern and research, but they are not the subject of our article...
...James O'Toole, senior author of HEW's well-known study, Work in America, writes: What is clear from almost every study of job dissatisfaction is that the placing of intelligent and ; or highly qualified workers in dull and unchallenging jobs is a prescription for pathology for the worker, the employer, and the society...
...In spite of public speculation to the contrary, there is no conclusive evidence of a widespread, dramatic decline in job satisfaction...
...If Wright and Hamilton had actually wanted to use the Michigan survey to examine the job satisfaction of educationally overqualified workers, rather than trying to make some polemical points about the new working class, they would not have lacked valid and reliable measures...
...Moreover, the greater the Average Job Satisfaction Score, by Relative Levels of Education Worker's level of education rela- Average overall Live to what a worker reports is job satisfaction needi'd for his or her job (r-scores)* Worker has four or more years of education short of that needed (Number of cases (N)-= 107) .22 Worker has two years of education short of that needed (N=I82) .17 Worker has the level of education needed (N=788) .07 Worker has two years of education in excess of that needed (N=227) -.07 Worker has four or more years of education in excess of that needed (N=17()) -.54 *Job satisfaction scores here can range from -1 to +I, with the average at zero...
...173-83...
...q 424...
...But as American universities are now turning onto the job market about a million graduates a year, it requires a special kind of social myopia to dismiss with a phrase the career crisis facing this college-educated mass...
...BLUMBERG'S PRESENTATION Of the findings of the Quinn and Baldi de Mandilovitch research is highly selective and rather misleading...
...are likely to have higher turnover rates, and lower selfesteem and "life satisfaction" scores than workers who are not underemployed...
...A graduate in English able to find a job only as a typist is, formally, a white-collar worker...
...Arne L. Kalleberg and Aage B. SOrensen, "The Measurement of the Effects of Overtraining on Job Attitudes," Sociological Methods and Research (November 1973), pp...
...The replication and follow-up of the initial findings in the Michigan survey are in "Education and Job Attitudes among Blue Collar Workers," forthcoming in Sociology of Work and Occupations...
...Wright and Hamilton's argument is curious, first, because it runs counter to everything we know about the experience of educated workers in routine jobs...
...The O'Toole work in question is a two-part essay on "The Reserve Army of the Underemployed" appearing in the May and June 1975 issues of Change...
...The answer is that they have simply misread their own data...
...2 Robert P. Quinn, "Overeducation and Jobs: Can the Great Training Robbery Be Stopped...
...NIE Papers in Education and Work: Number 5 (Wash., D.C.: National Institute of Education, 1977...
...418 If higher education in this country were still an elitist enterprise, concerned only with polishing small numbers of upper-class children, the issue might be safely ignored...
...Specifically, Berg discovered that workers who were underutilized on the job are likely to be less satisfied with their pay, less satisfied with their promotions, more critical of management...
...But nowhere in our text do we say that they claimed this, least of all as an "inevitability...
...The same table (p...
...amount of overtraining, the greater the level of job dissatisfaction...
...Perhaps Blumberg has better evidence on the job satisfactions of college-educated blue-collar workers, but if so he has surely not bothered to present any of it in his comment...
...The difference between these two provides a natural measure of overeducation as perceived by workers themselves...
...Contrasting his bold claims of near-unanimous consensus in the existing literature, five of the studies in the review showed decreasing satisfaction with increasing education, three showed the exact opposite pattern (increasing satisfaction with increasing education), and five more showed "no difference in job attitudes among workers differing in education" (p...
...Their "abilities" are also a separate analytic question, one not touched on in our presentation...
...Reanalysis of 15 national surveys conducted since 1958 indicates that there has not been any significant decrease in overall levels of job satisfaction over the last decade [p...
...Our "case," 419 as he calls it, is therefore based on systematic review of every available indicator of the key dependent variable in not one but four large, recent representative national surveys...
...To emphasize: our focus on one segment of the larger totality should not be taken to imply that no other segment of that totality is worthy of investigation...
...4 Michelle Patterson, "Governmental Policy and Equality in Higher Education: the Junior Collegization of the French University," Social Problems (December 1976), pp...
...But relative to Blumberg's "case" against us, this evidence involves the same problem we have noted all along, Blumberg's unwillingness to recognize the focus of our study...
...126) also shows that the best-educated blue-collar workers tend to have these highly skilled jobs and that these workers are highly satisfied with their jobs...
...And given that there does not appear to be any significant difference in outlook between the two groups, it is hard to see how combining them is "totally misleading...
...Trucking," he said, "is a dirty, hard, rough job, and that is just the reason I like it...
...Also, we have not said that the jobs of collegeeducated blue-collar workers are "beneath their aspirations and their abilities...
...The only "college-educated" manual workers who are clearly overtrained are those who are college graduates...
...This fourth measure, and only it, is the one that Blumberg presents in his text...
...The comments on France, Italy, and West Germany, as indicated above, address questions that are extraneous to our purposes and presentation...
...But by using the catch-all term "white collar," they conceal what is happening to graduates within the white-collar ranks...
...And we cautioned, "Never underestimate the capacity of Americans to individualize even the most collective misfortunes and social evils...
...The University of Rome, built for 40,000, now has 135,000 students and is often called a huge "parking lot" where Italy stores its unwanted and unneeded members...
...Our Dissent piece contains references to a book by Richard Freeman, two of James O'Toole's works, a book by William and Margaret Westley, an article by Levitan and Taggart, and the Bowles and Gintis work, all of which, in one way or another, "contradict" our claims...
...405, 408-409...
...p. 21...
...4 In Italy, virtually all observers agreed that a major cause of the student strikes, demonstrations, sitins, bombings and burnings that paralyzed Italian universities for months in 1977 was the grim employment outlook for the growing number of graduates...
...It and the other findings discussed above also contradict Blumberg's naive claim about "everything we know...
...the relationship between education and job satisfaction in their ranks is obviously one of them...
...Blumberg says that our "argument is curious ," it "runs counter to everything we know about the experience of educated workers in routine jobs...
...There is no reasonable standard by which this can accurately be called a "slender foundation...
...Govt...
...But what is the basis for this contrary and putatively "higher" knowledge...
...215-38...
...In 1976 the New York Times conducted interviews in 14 cities across the country with dozens of psychiatrists, mental health counsellors, and others who treat the emotional problems of young people...
...Further, the chapter devoted specifically to "The Blue Collar Worker: A Special Case" is based almost entirely on survey data gathered in 1947...
...even combining six surveys, there are only 34 white male blue-collar workers who reported four years of college or more...
...Phrases such as "browsing around' and "chanced upon one unusual statistic" do not accurately describe what we have done...
...But whether this is a cause for complacency, as Wright and Hamilton suggest, is another matter entirely...
...refutation by empirical evidence, it may be noted, is the fate of many "commonsensical" notions...
...The first half of their report discusses the relationship between absolute levels of education and job satisfaction...
...First, he has given an inaccurate portrayal of our procedures...
...All of the observed relationships were modest at best, the correlations never exceeding .12" (p.v...
...Thus, these findings are also generally consistent with our results...
...And he does not, at any point, deal directly with the evidence we present...
...We grant that the findings run counter to "common sense" in that they are counterintuitive and rather unexpected, given the various claims that Blumberg and others have made about the likely consequences of "overeducation...
...Unfortunately, the recent article by James Wright and Richard Hamilton ("Blue Collars, Cap and Gown," Spring 1978) is a model of how social researchers, using the tools of the trade, can create their own strange little world separate from the one most of us inhabit...
...118, our emphasis...
...All this material, of course, is entirely consistent with the findings reported in our article...
...the coefficients are .14 in both cases...
...That is the reason we said nothing about them...
...Blumberg's persistent digressions to these points, in short, are simply not relevant to the substance of our presentation...
...For another 35 percent, the key reason was the "unresponsiveness of the university to the needs of a modern society...
...Higher numerical scores indicate higher levels of job satisfaction, Statistically, there is less than one chance in a thousand that these results occurred by chance...
...If the notion of a vanguard is inappropriate here, which we doubt, we would, nevertheless, be willing to withdraw it...
...If so, then the QuinnBaldi de Mandilovitch finding is entirely consistent with the finding we report, namely, that there is no distinctiveness in the job outlooks of blue-collar workers with one or more years of college education...
...LeMasters, himself of working-class origin, spent five years of partcipant observation among a group of skilled blue-collar workers and reports, "I never heard a single man say that he hated his work—or even disliked it . . . as a group the men seemed to enjoy their work...
...I am grateful to Professor Dean Savage for this reference...
...Thus, the typical "collegeeducated" worker Wright and Hamilton studied is a college dropout after a couple of semesters at a junior college or at a low-level four-year college...
...But the implications of this argument are extremely bizarre, for Wright and Hamilton are essentially saying that people who spend eight hours a day working at jobs that are beneath both their aspirations and their abilities are perfectly happy about it...
...In fact, we emphasize that much of the existing speculation on "overeducation" is restricted, without justification, to the case of college graduates, that the situation of college dropouts is a parallel and perhaps even more serious problem, and that our article is in part a corrective to this needless restriction...
...A final note...
...3) with the amount of education attained by all those in the worker's immediate work group...
...Blumberg's comment does not speak to this point, save for an opening reference to "common sense...
...Yet, in a table on p. 126 of Berg's work, the reader will find a correlation of -.07 between education and job dissatisfaction among blue-collar workers...
...Blumberg attempts to cast further doubt on the findings with a rhetorical formulation of a key result: "manual workers who had been to college seemed to have about as high levels of job satisfaction" (our italics) as those who had not...
...Thus, Wright has argued elsewhere, . . . there no longer seems to be any good reason, other than convention, to consider that lower clerical and sales workers . . . are in any realistic sense "middle class...
...What is especially amusing about their sanguine celebration of college graduates in lower whitecollar jobs is that in their other writings, both Wright and Hamilton insist that lower white-collar workers are simply part of the working class and should be treated theoretically as such...
...They might redefine their goals, turning away from career toward family or other personal, extra-vocational fulfillment...
...The source for this passage is the 1969 Michigan work survey, the precursor to the 1972-73 survey on which our article was partly based...
...q 0ur article in the spring 1978 issue of Dissent reported some results from our research on the relationship between education and job satisfaction among white male manual workers...
...Their article purports to examine "college-educated" manual workers, but the vast majority of the workers in their sample are not college-educated at all, in the usual sense of having completed a college education and earned a degree...
...Instead, they spoke of the "intersection where personal troubles become social issues...
Vol. 25 • September 1978 • No. 4
