Advice to Graduates and College Applicants

Recent grads are in debt an average of $35,000 and will not see job prospects in any of the economy they know about.  Of course there is plenty of work, but they are Sesame-street programmed to be driven to 'tech" or some other false economy Finance Investment Real Estate (FIRE) work.  No wonder the fascination with zombies and vampyres, that is the economy we have.  They were taken for a ride, given unbankruptable debts so they would join the volunteer draft to fight in capitalist all-volunteer wars.

“You’re like, ‘I’ll do anything and apply for everything, but usually it’s an electronic filing and you’re spending all your time on it and never hear back. So far, I have applied for around 30 jobs, if not more, and have heard back on two of them. I didn’t get either job because I don’t have enough experience. These are entry-level jobs, but experienced people are taking them.”

There is plenty of work for the self-employed, and if someone is a recent graduate, they ought to consider agriculture.  And if considering college, should skip it for now, unless they want a humanities degree, the only real reason to go to college anyway.  (All three of my children have humanities degrees: comparative religion, Latin and history.  None has any student loan debt, all are gainfully employed in high paying jobs.  Anyone who treats college as voc-tech is wasting his life.  Take a year off and learn to export food at the small business level:

 Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced a new report showing tremendous demand for recent college graduates with a degree in agricultural programs with an estimated 57,900 high-skilled job openings annually in the food, agriculture, renewable natural resources, and environment fields in the United States. According to an employment outlook report released today by USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and Purdue University, there is an average of 35,400 new U.S. graduates with a bachelor's degree or higher in agriculture related fields, 22,500 short of the jobs available annually.
"There is incredible opportunity for highly-skilled jobs in agriculture," said Secretary Vilsack. 

Exporting food is growing, especially in the specialty foods.

 Look Out for the Small Guy. Small
innovators are rising to the challenge,
with the development of high-quality and
distinct products that have small-scale
appeal, yet big trend potential. This trend
bodes well for U.S. suppliers with high
quality, specialty products ready for export!

There is no place in the United States that teaches how to export food at the small business level, except for me.

While the processed food category includes a diverse array of prepared and packaged products, all of them benefit from a common trend: rapid growth in global demand. Euromonitor, a market research firm, estimates that the retail value of packaged food (a proxy category for high-value food products) will increase by $316 billion over the next five years to $2.6 trillion. One challenge for U.S. exporters is to translate this expansion in food retail into export opportunities. Another challenge is steep competition from other principal suppliers. 

If you want to compete on your own and carve out your own thing, I teach exactly that, with UCBerkeley being an all day boot camp, where once oriented, the course never ends because you join a cohort of my past students from around the world pursuing small business world trade in food and beverage.

Check it out:

http://extension.berkeley.edu/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do?method=load&courseId=3381416

Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.

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