Want a janitor's job? Get a degree.

Janitorial work is increasingly becoming the domain of the college degreed - and if you apply, you'd better have a degree in a technical field.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that as many as one out of three college graduates today are in jobs that previously or historically have been filled by people with lesser educations or none. The U.S. now has 115,000 janitors with college degrees, along with 83,000 bartenders, 80,000 heavy-duty truck drivers, and 323,000 waiters and waitresses.

Employers, because they realize that many college graduates aren’t really educated, now routinely quiz job seekers on what they majored in and what courses they took, a practice virtually unknown a generation ago. Good luck if you majored in gender studies, communications, art history, pop culture, or (really) the history of dancing in Montana in the 1850s.

The problem is that high school grads - as many as three-fourths! -are increasingly unprepared for even the ever-lowering standards of undergraduate work. Most college graduates are similarly unprepared for "the real world" and so half of college grads are unemployed or underemployed, a figure no doubt amplified by the very bad economy.

So anyone attending college today needs to understand some crucial things that will form the new normal for some time to come and why they should directly determine what you major in:

1. It will matter to employers what you studied, even if the job has not historically required a degree.
Work habits and self discipline are the key virtues employers seek. A graduate with an accounting degree might not find an accounting job, but rare is the student who can successfully complete the degree without both those virtues. So with the job market being an employer's market, hiring managers for non-technical jobs will likely use the technical difficulty of an earned degree as an indicator of whether you are a good prospect.

Absolutely any degree whatsoever that ends with the word "studies" is utterly useless for demonstrating focus and self discipline.

2. The "degree required" bar has been greatly lowered and will stay there for many years.
Is a college degree really needed for janitorial work? Of course not. But as more and more new janitorial hires possess a bachelor degree, it will become normative for their employers to expect. Even after the economy improves - which it won't do quickly even if Romney wins in November and won't do at all if Obama wins - it will be a long time before actual degree-required jobs are plentiful enough to return the mass ranks of janitorial hires to high school education only.

This being so, you must face a crucial question with all the compassion of a Swiss banker; "Is college worth the price?"

3. No matter your dream of employment, computational competency, clarity of expression and computer literacy will be dominant virtues of value to employers.
Forget the crap that colleges like to tell you about "finding out who you are" there. You can spend a lot less than four years doing that and get paid for it to boot. You are going to college to learn skill sets that will enable you to make a living. No matter what courses you take, when you graduate you must be:

• literate, able to understand and communicate clearly in English, especially in writing,
• numerate, able to perform arithmetic calculations accurately and reasonably quickly. This ties directly into being literate because in the working world very few occupations use mathematics in its pure form. The rest of us have to solve calculations described as word problems. For that matter, we have to be able to put the word problem together first.
• computer competent. This does not mean gaming. Technology is part of almost every job now.

If you cannot do these things to a seriously competent level, you will justly be thought of as literally stupid, regardless of your natural IQ. And what will be the employment prospects for you then?

So remember the famous admonition by The Duke and study the hard stuff:

Update: Linked by Glenn Reynolds, who remarks, "Hey, if Obama gets another term, we’ll probably have PhD’s pushing brooms... ." Actually, 5,100 working janitors are known to have Ph.D.s now!

Update, 7/26: Well, this is not good news for young adults: "Why Kids Today Have It Worse Than Their Parents" The comments left below the piece are telling:

Our company has been searching to find a decent graphic/web designer who can actually spell (so interacting with clients won’t embarrass us) and learn coding but these colleges spit kids out with $200k degrees in art and a useless portfolio that doesn’t translate to the business world.

We’re a growing company, constantly hiring. We’ve found millennials are complete idiots. We try to hire older workers when we can. Millennials want to set their own hours, work from a literal to-do list that never needs to be completed. They can’t hit a deadline or fathom independent action. Utterly incapable of coming up with a strategy or a plan to complete a task that isn’t spelled out — plus you need to hold their hand or they’ll wait for more instructions while fiddling on facebook or SMS.

But there's this, too:

I think it is harder because in addition to the tough job market, many of the them have debt from student loans. Also, it is harder if they want to start a small business, because there is more red tape than ever before. I have a 30 something daughter who wants to do daycare in her home to bring in a little extra income, but has abandoned the idea because of all the hoops she has to jump through and the expense. I could list everything she has to do to comply, but it would take too long. Some of the requirements seem to be written just to give work to compliance officers.

Well, duh. Once upon a time, this country had "government by the people, for the people." Now we have government by the political class for the benefit of the political class.