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It is officially as bad to be a recent college grad as your barista has been telling you
By EJ DicksonMay 10th, 2012, 11:00 pmComments (28)
For the past few years, recent and soon-to-be college graduates have been forced to listen to a lot of bitching and moaning about how tough it is to find steady employment in the current market. We've all heard the horror stories about the Swarthmore grad with a B.A. in art history who could only get hired as a ladies' room attendant at Arby's, and we've all read the countless op-eds about how the economy is so deep in the shitter that in ten to fifteen years, all millennials will still be unemployed and living on their parents' couches, eating instant ramen and watching Judge Joe Brown until the end of time.
You've probably assumed that these reports are a bit overblown, and that the job market for recent grads is not nearly as bad as the headlines say it is. Well, guess what, Sandy Sunshine? According to research from Rutgers University, it is. The study, which was released Thursday, says that fewer than half of those who graduated after 2009 found a full-time job within twelve months after graduation, as opposed to the 73% of college grads from the classes of 2006 to 2008. Furthermore, those who graduated after 2009 are one-third as likely to have found a full-time job as those who graduated just a few years before them. If you're about to graduate, and that doesn't make you want to dig a hole in the student rec center and never, ever come out, I don't know what will.
The study also determined that of those post-2009 grads who did end up finding full-time employment, 43% have jobs that do not require a college degree, prompting many to agree with their mothers' advice four years ago that you probably shouldn't have wasted four credits on that "Hegelian Dialectics in Buffy the Vampire Slayer" course you took sophomore year. Employed, post-2009 graduates also have an average starting salary of $27,000, $3,000 less than the average starting salary for the classes of 2006 and 2007; experts estimate that given the fragile state of the post-2009 economy, these wages are likely to stay depressed for the next ten or fifteen years.
Of course, the results of the Rutgers study aren't exactly surprising. As a (very) recent college graduate who is currently juggling about three to four different part-time jobs, researchers would only have to look at my checking account and inside my refrigerator to determine just how truly fucked my generation is. And for the record, I will not get rid of that bottle of horseradish mustard that expired in January, because it offsets the smell of the leftover lo mein from Halloween 2011. See, my critical thinking skills are being put to use; my liberal arts degree was worth something after all. (Take that, Rutgers study!)
Commentarium (28 Comments)
yea your telling me. over a decade of "go to college!" and then when I finally get that MBA, I actually think it HURTS me to put on my resume at this point. no one wants to hire anyone who has a degree that they don't have
I'd hire someone with a degree I don't have. Why else would I be hiring, if not to bring in new blood with skills and education that I lack, or which my current team lacks?
Stokely, you sound like a competent business owner or executive. What you fail to realize is that most business owners and executives are anything but competent, and will do anything to avoid having someone report to them who might one day make them look bad.
bob and True Patriot are correct. Many people are being turned down for jobs as being "overqualified" by supervisors who are threatened. Additionaly, they are turned down for other jobs as "lacking experience" because they are so "overqualified" for the entry level positions and have been unable to gain any experience. Fun!
I'm in that boat. I got an MS in Math this past December, and every place I apply to tells me that they need someone with more experience.
There are plenty of jobs in the A&D sector for recent grads in Math, including those with an Master's. Are you trying the A&D big 3?
FYI: An MS is looked at as sort of a bonus Bachelor's. It's treated differently than a PhD.
You have an MBA and you still can't differentiate between "your" and "you're?" Have you ever thought maybe accreditation wasn't enough?
As a person in college right now...the panic began to set in when my sisters and their respective spouses struggled to find jobs in their career fields years ago.
Hello, crushing student loan debt. Slowly suffocate all possibilities for my future.
The future is what you'll make of it. Please realize you've got an amazing future ahead of you.
Yeah! You can totally live off of smarmy platitudes!
You shouldn't go to college for a job. College is for an education. If you want a job, go to a trade school. Learn to weld; learn to drive a truck; auto repair; nursing. A liberal arts education is great if you want an education. It is an end in and of itself. If you are concerned about a job, get an education that will prepare you for a job.
Education in our modern society has never been an end in itself. If you have enough disposable income to do that then well... you live in a world that I do not. Not to mention all the jobs that explicitly require a great deal of education. Medicine and law are the obvious examples, and definitely not ones your average person would say are unnecessary to this same society. Many people have tried to take your suggestion but going to law school these days does not guarantee you a job either. There are plenty of "practical" paths that lead to nowhere these days.
i agree, huh. when people first started going to college in large numbers on the GI bill, a survey was taken across a wide variety of college students asking them to rank the reasons they had gone to college, and getting a job was usually towards the bottom of the list of priorities, while getting a well-rounded education was generally at the top. This has totally flipped in the last 20 years or so. I personally don't regret getting english and theatre degrees, despite my debt, because I know it will eventually pay off for me to have had a good education and to have spent four years doing exactly the things I love.
Being educated is not worth much if you can't afford to eat food. You think you can "smart" your way into a free big mac?
Have you seen Ocean's Eleven? I plan to smart my way to many things.
A large part of the problem (as I see it) is that people have the order of things mixed up. They go 1) get a degree/education at university in non-specific impractical courses and then 2) Try to figure out what to do for a living. It should be 1) Figure out what specific area of work you want to be in, then 2) Get the education required. Just don't pick something which has a shitty chance of having actual job prospects when you are ready- like law.
over the last 30 years of more people need at least a BA (in ANYTHING) to get a look at any kind of decent desk job. so i'd argue that you're better off going to college straight out of HS, get the basic degree, get employed and then specialize later. unless of course you know at age 18 exactly what you're going to do your whole life. and if your plan at age 18 is to go into finance and be a douchebag (i don't mean you) well that is easily achieved. the only guaranteed good money jobs straight outta school are: (1) technology (2) finance (3) pro sports (good luck). if you have any skill as a tradesperson then it is true you will also always be in demand. people who can fix things or are willing to work in construction are always employable. in which case you skip the schooling i mentioned.
When 85% of community college grads are getting a job in their specialty within a year of graduation it says something about training for a job.
Which college degrees have the best employment rates, those that pertain to an actual career, engineering, medicine, nursing, accounting.
If you don't regularly see ads looking for archaeologists, you might want to rethink following your heart and find a course of study that will get you through to retirement with a healthy financial base, then you can go study Sumerian Art all you want, with the seniors discount
I dunno, I majored in English and Economics and graduated in 2009, and love every minute. Then, I graduated, and a lot of my English major friends got jobs in their field, and all of my Finance and Accounting friends did, and I didn't have any Econ friends. Then, I struggled. IThen, after 2 years of struggling, I got an interesting job with a living wage and room to move up. Then, I got into grad school. I still think that if I played my cards better in college, and did more meaningful internships, I could have gotten a job in my field right out of college. But, I think there is hope for anyone who's a worker and not willing to give up. Just don't vote Republican unless you're making at least 800k, because then you're truly voting against yourself.
On the other hand, if you vote Democrat, you're voting against your children. The ruinous debt that we're running up is going to be paid by our kids. What kind of people do that kind of thing?
The cognitive dissonance is astounding; the "Buffett Rule" would bring in so little that it's almost not worth doing. Worse, we could tax all income over $250k at 100% and still we still wouldn't pay for current spending. And there are those who think we should continue down this path, if not spend more.
The "voting against yourself" nonsense was used against Reagan too. Luckily, people saw through it. Hopefully that will happen again.
STEM, kids. There's plenty of good paying work out there if you have the stomach for it. I don't fully understand how it can be totally understood that a) the job market and economy sucks for new grads and b) Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics pay great and have insatiable demand AND STILL NO (AMERICAN) STUDENTS WANT TO DO IT. It isn't magic, it's just a bunch of hard, unglamorous (but often deceptively creative and intellectually rewarding) work. That nobody wants to do. /endrant
I don't think that nobody wants to do it, I think they don't have the money/means for grad school and all that MIT or CalTech require.
...or the smarts
So go to Purdue. Go to the University of Illinois. Don't live in the Big Ten states? Go to Washington, Oregon, go to Auburn.
Intelligence pays.
Poli sci graduate who bartends for a living. People ALWAYS ask me why I'm not going to law school, and the answer is: I make great money tending bar and don't want to assume debt for a career that isn't necessarily demanding. Money talks.
You rock!
As a current law student assuming ridiculous amounts of debt with little to no future job prospects given my Poli Sci degree, I often wonder if bar-tending would have been the way to go...
I'm with the person that said STEM. Science, technology, engineering, mathematics. I don't have a single friend that graduated who isn't what I'd consider successful in their field of study 3 years after graduating. I went to a UC, which has good science/engineering programs, but still public.