53% of New Graduates are Jobless or Underemployed

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.

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.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade. "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.

About 1.5 million, or 53.6%, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41%, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.

Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year. Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less. In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.Useless Degrees

The USA Today talks about the "underemployed". Is that really what's going on?

Just what job does someone majoring in Political Science, English, History, Social Studies, Creative Writing, Art, etc., etc., etc., expect to get?

Arguably, graduates in those majors (and many more) should be thankful to get any job. Therefore, those who do land a job should therefore be considered fully employed, not underemployed.

In turn, this means a college education now has a negative payback for most degrees.

Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he has received financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. "There is not much out there, it seems," he said. There is nothing out there for many degrees which means that going to graduate school will do nothing but waste more money. Nurses are still in demand, but technology and engineering majors are crapshoots. If you can land a technology or engineering job it is likely to be high paying, but if not, the next step is retail sales.

Who Benefits From Student Aid?

Students get no benefit from "student aid". Rather, teachers, administrators, and corrupt for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix do.

Obama wants to throw more money at education, and that is exactly the wrong thing to do. Instead, I propose stopping student aid programs and accrediting more online schools to lower the cost of education so that degrees do not have negative payback.

Sadly, there is a trillion dollar student loan bubble, and that debt overhang will negatively impact the economy for years to come. Let's not make the problem worse. It's time to kill the inappropriately named "student aid" program.

What you say is true, oversupply always depresses wages and prices.

But this can only happen if schools drastically lower their standards for engineering studies. But I don’t put that past them. Could happen.

YES WE CAN!! Si se puede!!! Yes we can!!! SI SE PUEDE!!!

How’s that “Hope and Change” thing working for you guys?

Sorry, I have very little sympathy, knowing that most of them worked, and voted, for Obama.

The President's campaign tour of college campuses touting the "non-issue" of the expiring reduced interest rate for college loans and his "saving" of that rate for them, together with his unsubstantiated claims about his own difficulty paying off college loans may make for good political theater, but it relies on the naivete and "dumbing down" these students have experienced in their schools.

Submitted here is an example of student reaction to one of his visits yesterday.

Had students been taught that the debtor is slave to the debtholder, and that the role of government is not to enslave people, but to provide a framework of laws to protect their freedom, they might not be attracted to shallow "rock star" leadership, but to someone who would tell them the truth about their Constitution's limits on power in government.

Sadly, the facts presented in the articles on this thread are not presented to these students, who, likely will not find jobs available because of the "taking" and "spending" philosophy of the redistributionist policies of the past 3+ years, and decades of government's ignoring Constitutional limits on spending, deficits, and debt.

They’re taking some risk, too.

Not least of which is that of attracting the notice of the corrupt government leeches who live to suck the life out of success.

If they're in Detroit, it won't take long.

Even an MCSE isn’t a guarantee for work. I’m a Windows/VMWare engineer with a BA in English and a graduate certificate in professional writing. If you have IT background/experience and can write, there’s a HUGE demand for you. I’m proof of that.

Congrats for being successful! I'm a retired computer systems engineer. I was a bit worried when one of my daughters majored in English, but it was her life and I supported her. She got her degree (at 21), became a writer and editor at a magazine, then after a few years became a technical writer at a huge biotech firm. Tecnical writers are much in demand. Now she's a well-paid manager with biotech technical experience. Although she's not in computers, a degree in English can pay off - you just need to be focused and work hard.

Btw I totally agree with you about having 0 sympathy for the idiots who vote for this guy and support him and then complain how they can’t get work. The college experience is a circus for conservatives I can’t tell you how many dumbass professors I had it would take me all day.

I would also like to add that just because you aren’t an engineer or doctor doesn’t mean you can’t be successful. My close friend and mentor was in a creative marketing position and by the end of his career the guy was making $350,000 a year, if you work hard and apply yourself you can go places. Kids just need an opportunity and I’m damn lucky I have one, a good one, in the tech industry, I thank God for having mercy on me and providing me with one. I feel for the conservative youth in my family and friends who are caught up in this mess, and have to struggle to get a career.

Thank you for that comment. I, too, feel sorry for those caught up in this economic mess, and I think of how different it was when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and the OldPossum got his BA, and how lucky he was to have no problem finding a job literally days thereafter.

What astounds me more than anything else is the unbelievable optimism shown by young couples currently having children. Do they know something I don’t?

In 2010 it was about the same numbers (~48%), with it split about half unemployed (~22%) and the rest underemployed. That's not good. I'd have guessed it'd be more like 1/4 of the group unemployed and 3/4 of them underemployed. 22% is a very high unemployment rate for new grads.

“A new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce released today finds unemployment for recent college graduates is 8.9 percent, compared with 22.9 percent of job-seekers with just a high school education and 31.5 percent among high school dropouts.”

These are some numbers from 2011 or 2012. I couldn’t find the original chart i was looking at, but I suspect I may have been looking at an age grouping instead of college graduates. Sorry about that. Or - it may have been how the data were presented and for what bias (”Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”)

However - in looking for this new information I did come across the headline of “84% of college grads move back in with parents”. Ouch.

The writer of the original article should have broken the percentage down. That was quite a headline to just hang out there and then not give the breakdown.

53% of New Graduates are Jobless or Underemployed

And I heard several talkers using the 53% for discussion today.

In regards to young couples having kids there should be a great cause for optimism. I really think things are going to get better, we’re going through a tough time, but I really do believe our best days are ahead of us jmo.

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