Must be even tougher for high school only grads.
I am a high school only grad and retired now. I did ok but always regretted not going to college, envied those who did and blamed no one but myself.
Good luck to all these kids, I'm sure the competition is fierce.
Since college has devolved into a 4-year rolling drunken party, it is not surprising that employers are not willing to pay so much for people who have college experience.
Colleges are turning out a worse and worse product, every year. These days, you couldn't flunk out if you tried.
Meaningless statistic. Maybe in the last 10 years a lot more kids have gone to college, but in soft majors. So instead of taking a job as a checkout clerk at Walmart right out of high school, these kids are getting 4 years of training and now they have a job as an administrative assistant somewhere. So they make more money than they would have 10 years ago.
BUT, there are now thousands of more graduates, all in soft fields which pay a lot less than what the typical graduate from a science/math/engineering college would make.
By using the MEDIAN income, adding a lot of NEW people at the bottom of the scale PULLS DOWN THE MEDIAN INCOME.
In fact, the media does this all the time. When we had 6.2% unemployment, the median income was HIGHER, because the median income only counts full-time employment.
Now we have 4.7% unemployment, but a lot of those workers got jobs that paid below previous "MEDIAN". They are much better off than they were unemployed, but now they show up as full-time workers, and they pull down the MEDIAN income.
And the way it's worded, you think people are having their wages go down, but NO SINGLE PERSON has their wage go down based on this statistic. The person who graduates today into a MEDIAN income of say 20 bucks an hour isn't the SAME person who graduated in 2001 with a MEDIAN income of 21 bucks.
It's the same trick they use with the minimum wage, when they say people on minimum wage have had their earnings decrease over the last 7 years. But in fact, almost nobody earning minimum wage today was also earning it 7 years ago. It is true that a person taking a minimum wage job today makes less than a person who took a minimum wage job in 1996, but they are different people. Anybody still making minimum wage after 7-10 years must be a really bad worker, but almost nobody is in that situation.
BTW, the same is true of the "living below poverty level". A good portion of those living below poverty in a given year are people who simply don't have a job for that year, but in the next year they get a job. So the democrats scream about how the number of "poor" went up, but in fact it's mostly because the unemployment rated spiked, which temporarily put people below the poverty level (note the poverty level does NOT count any government service like unemployment insurance or Katrina payouts).
And because some rich people stop working (and therefore earning money that gets counted), there are a lot of people who were in the top 1% one year, who are in the poverty group the next year. They also drive up the "uninsured" numbers, even though they can easily self-insure and therefore don't bother to buy insurance.
It's ok. CEO and executive compensation is way up.
It's the 'gray ceiling' at work.
Get any sort of a handle at all on the big problems and the little ones will vanish of their own volition.
Of course, my employer was the U.S. Army and everything I needed to know, they taught me before turning me loose.
There is no mention here about how 12-25 million illegal aliens diluting this labor pool is depressing wages at most levels except the top layers.
I'm in this group, except I have the advantage of having a masters degree. I entered the workforce in '99, and I'm just now starting to pull ahead. So I guess I can vouch for some of the article.