Germany’s Migrant Bright Spot | Ho w Biz Majors Get Numbers All Wrong

From Deutsche Bahn to Mercedes, Baden-Württemberg is fueling its economy through migrant labor, and killing support for the far-right.

Atiq Ur-Rahman did everything he was asked to do when he arrived in Germany as a refugee from Pakistan in 2015. He learned German and got a job working in a restaurant. But what he believes also helped him was that he was lucky enough to be assigned to the state of Baden-Württemberg.

Amanda Aminah Masire connects farms with tech and government aid. She’s taking horticulture-in-a-box continental.

Mookodi Modimoosi Seisa had long dreamed of expanding into irrigated horticulture on his 40-acre farm near Shoshong, Botswana. His dreams rapidly became reality when, in 2018, he engaged the services of Amanda Aminah Masire’s firm, Greenhouse Technologies. Masire helped him write the business plan that secured an $18,000 government grant, and she supplied the equipment and know-how to make it happen. Barely a year later, Seisa has sold crops of spinach, rapeseed, tomatoes, beetroot and green pepper to local supermarkets. Were it not for unforeseen water shortages that decimated his cabbage crop, he would have broken even already.

Humanities students aren’t the ones who most need to adjust their expectations about postgrad life.

Increasingly, higher education in the United States looks like a bubble. As more and more students enter universities and subsequently the job market, the value of an undergraduate degree decreases — leading to a wide gap between expected earnings and cold, hard reality. To put that in numbers, the average undergrad student expects that they’ll be making $57,964 just one year into their career. But the national median salary for recent grads is $47,000.

It’s conventional to joke about English majors, debate the value of “useless” majors and lambaste those in the humanities for being delusional about the value of their degrees. But in fact, it’s not those studying Marcel Proust who are most unprepared for what happens after graduation. It's business majors who have the largest gulf between their expected and eventual earnings.