Posted on 04/23/2012 3:37:01 AM PDT by tobyhill
The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.
An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor's degrees.
Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.
While there's strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor's degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
God forbid they have to start at entry level even with a piece of paper. Sheesh everyone wants 60K a year today when they are worth about 30K a year with Bachelor’s and zero experience. 30K is what they should be paid for a first job.
Who wrote this garbage? Midlevel jobs...such as bank tellers? The average bank teller in this area makes barely over minimum wage!
Depends, an entry level Engineering job should pay at least 50K to start. Liberal arts majors should work for anything they can get.
Your link has nothing to do with Google.
It is an AP site and an AP article. I have seen you post like this before. Why?
Depends, an entry level Engineering job should pay at least 50K to start. Liberal arts majors should work for anything they can get.
I can agree with that. But 50 thousand would be considered an “entry level” job for Engineers until they prove themselves a few years and ultimately make 100K. The point is that this story seems to say that everyone should begin at the “high” wage right away or at least the graduates think that way.
Wellllll...................
They voted for it, didn’t they?
Reality. Engineers finish and get real-paying jobs. Anything less than an engineer....get sub-pay. You could get the same sub-pay with a community college degree (two-year associates degree). The sooner that people come to realize that colleges have created all of these worthless and bogus degrees....the better off we’d all be.
If republicans were smart they would target this group. Go to the universities in flyover country where 50,000 plus middle America kids pack those football games in the fall. Remind them that May 2012 is the fourth graduating class under obama to graduate to no jobs.
Necessity is the mother of invention...
While all these ‘college graduates’ lament not finding jobs, America has always been the place to ‘make money.’ Really, isn't that what we're discussing?
Whenever there has been a hard-pressed downturn in the economy, fantastic things have come forward from obscure Americans. Some with degrees, some without, and some from high-school dropouts.
Do we have the appropriate economic climate and culture for that today?
What these young people are lamenting is the same thing we've heard for decades regarding degrees. This really is not anything new. Education can only get you so far and as these kids are learning, it cannot even get you in the door when you must compete with experienced folks out of work too.
Can America's young people ‘dream big’ or is there so many roadblocks and disincentives that the American dream is over?
"I don't even know what I'm looking for," says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
"Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day."
My daughter landed her "dream job" about a year and a half ago, and her starting salary was at about the 85th percentile for personal income in the US. In fact, she began the job a few months before she actually received her master's degree. She definitely knew what she was looking for, and homed in on it like a heat-seeking missile. If she had told potential employers she didn't know what she was looking for, I imagine most would have concluded she was completely nuts. Don't colleges have counseling centers any more? For $50k in annual college tuition, that's not an unreasonable expectation. It's not an employer's job to figure out what someone wants to do with his life.
Those entry level jobs mentioned are something one does during college; there is nothing wrong with aspiring to a better position after doing the four years. These recent graduates are going to hurt Obama; I watched them do it to Bush’s father in 1992 (one year after he had REAL popularity). The recent graduates from the last election are going to hurt him, too.
No Sympathy Here,They voted for Hopey Changey,now deal with it with the Rest of Us. Hey vote for Him Again so he Can Finish the Job!
“The average bank teller in this area makes barely over minimum wage!”
You’re right; in my area many of the middle-aged American women that probably did OK due to years on the job, experience, etc. have been replaced by younger diversity tokens who have little job knowledge and limited command of English. I was in one local bank branch where the manager was unintelligible...
Unfortunately, the ‘recent grads’ want obama to pay their college debt off,,,
True, they do, but if they believe that they should speak to all of the people awaiting modifications on their mortgages. The help is coming, at the speed of molasses.
The truly pitiful aspect the lack of abilityt to discharge their educational debt in bankruptcy.
Whoever sold them “ an education” under those terms is part of the problem. These students are fighting back.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/08/11/38921.htm
OK, Thanks.
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