Are colleges preparing students for the automated future of work? - The Washington Post
President Trump’s rhetoric about the decline of the working class blames trade, immigration and the outsourcing of American jobs overseas for the decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector. But the bigger culprit is rarely acknowledged by politicians or the media: automation. Nearly 9 in 10 jobs that have disappeared since 2000 were lost to automation, according to a study by Ball State University. As Barack Obama said in his presidential farewell speech in Chicago earlier this year, the next wave of economic dislocations “will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.” And that includes many jobs that today require a college diploma. While robots driving trucks or operating machines on a factory floor make for attention-grabbing headlines, nearly half of American jobs are at risk of being taken over by computers within the next two decades, an often-cited report from Oxford University predicted in 2014. On that list were occupation
Explore this link on the map →