The effects of globalization are already moving up the wage scale, though, and that trend will likely continue. As Alan Blinder of Princeton University trenchantly noted in 2006, “Many people blithely assume that the critical labor-market distinction is, and will remain, between highly educated (or highly skilled) people and less-educated (or less-skilled) people -- doctors versus call-center operators, for example.” Instead, the crucial distinction is between those tasks that are easily digitized (and thus subject to substantial competition from workers abroad) and those that are not.
As with most prediction, we tend to begin from the past. If economists like Orzag and Blinder are correct (and I'm pretty convinced they are), the rules of the past are not going to be good predictors in this case. Orzag goes on in the piece to name three serious challenges facing college-age Americans.
- "a college degree by itself will be less likely to guarantee a high wage"
- the evidence is that there is declining state support for public higher education which drives higher tuition
- college graduates are entering a labor market with a "higher-than-usual unemployment rate"
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