The Great Recession of 2007-2009 may have officially ended in mid-2009 according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, but a deep recession remains in the nation's labor markets with very high levels of official unemployment, underemployment, and hidden unemployment. The economic burdens of the Great Recession have been very unevenly shared among U.S. workers. College educated workers (especially professionals, women, and those over 30 years old) have fared the best. The total number of college educated workers holding jobs requiring four year college degrees did not decline between 2007 immediately prior to the recession and 2010.
Young college educated workers, particularly those 25 and under, however, have not fared very well over the past three years. They have experienced rising joblessness, underemployment, and malemployment problems (i.e. working in jobs that do not require a college degree). During the January-August period of 2010, we estimate that fewer than 50 of every 100 young B.A.-holders held a job requiring a college degree.
The labor market difficulties of many young bachelor degree holders in the U.S. can best be seen in the types of jobs in which they were employed in the first eight months of the current calendar year. Of the 20 individual occupations employing the largest number of young, college graduates (25 and under), seven typically did not require any type of college degree to be employed. There were 175,000 young college graduates working as cashiers, retail clerks, and customer service representatives versus only 146,000 employed in all computer professional professions and all types of engineers combined. There were twice as many four year college graduates working as waiters, waitresses, and bartenders (80,000) as there were engineers (37,000). There were more college graduates working in office related jobs and as bank tellers than in all computer professional jobs (148,000 vs. 109,000).
The likelihood that young bachelor degree holders will end up being employed in a college labor market job is not a random event. Obtaining employment in jobs requiring college degrees has been found to be associated with the majors of new college graduates (engineering, health, business, computer science majors fare better), those who had strong reading and math skills at entry into college, those living in low unemployment states, and having paid work experience in college-related jobs prior to graduation. Having parents who are employed college graduates also appears to matter by providing referrals to appropriate jobs.
This growing problem of malemployment and joblessness among young college graduates has a number of dire economic effects on both the graduates themselves and many other young adults across the country. Those college graduates working in jobs that do not require college degrees are earning substantially less per week (30-40 percent less) than their peers who work in jobs that require college degrees. These substantially lower weekly earnings reduce the private and social economic return to college education for such individuals to close to zero. The presence of large numbers of jobless and malemployed young college graduates provides adverse signals to younger high school students contemplating whether to attend college especially among males living in lower income communities. The non-college labor market jobs obtained by these young graduates displace less educated young adults from employment, increasing joblessness among young adults with only a year or two of college or among high school graduates. This rising degree of malemployment among young college graduates, thus, has adverse consequences on the rest of society, pushing down the growth of real output and employment, wages, and earnings of the non-college educated. There is a critical need for national, state, and local political and educational policymakers and administrators to address this growing labor market problem.
Prepared by: Andrew Sum and Paul Harrington, Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University
I graduated 06, lucky to find a job in 6months requiring my degree for $12.50!
Worked for almost two years to get $15 without a matched savings and no health and they went under july 08.
Guess what been working no - three jobs at a time in and out of my degree to pay rent insurance and my $200 student loan payment for the last 2 years. I dont get a check friday bills back up like traffic. The repubs did it and they are standing there trying to echo back what happened on people that had power to do anything for 20 months. U trolls below are sick and twisted and we will be trampling each other for $100/week if you put the idiots back in. Do it and I'll pack up and move to a country that actually takes care of its citizens. This place is hardly worth another cent of my taxes.
27 and cant even get a 401k started let alone some reasonable insurance for myself all the while im being gouged for my loan.
College graduates, the line starts back there. No, way back there.
We are all in this together.
Where does the line start for $22.50 a day. The repubs want and will break you when it comes to putting yourself or your kids on the street. Line? What line the front line? Were shoulder to shoulder man. Because if we are single file thats because the slaughter house awaits.
Although it's great to provide for every student willing to work hard enough to earn a college degree, the market has yet to bear that out.
a) Saddle businesses with a host of new regulations that it more difficult for them to start or operate. It means less new businesses = less jobs
b) Hit them with taxes related to expanded healthcare. It causes them to hire as few ‘full time’ employees as possible = less jobs.
c) Create uncertainty over capital gains taxes. It causes less private equity investment = less jobs.
d) You borrow from the private sector to expand government spending, a more inefficient type of spending, which staves the more efficient private sector = less jobs.
e) You devalue the currency, making imported raw materials more expensive (oil, iron ore, etc), any gains in cheaper production costs are offset by more expensive raw material cots = less jobs.
f) You threaten business and use them as a scapegoat for your failed programs = less jobs
g) You raise the minimum wage. It is an economic truism that anytime you make things more expensive people use less of it = less jobs.
f) You threaten to raise income tax which results in less discretionary spending and less saving/ investment = less jobs.
g) You threaten penalize companies and people for being successful, they leave and take their business and money with them = less jobs.
Class warfare is great politics but bad business and if you want jobs…you want business.
Kai
I am simply stating the obvious. If you penalize wealth creation and profit seeking, you will get less of it. That element of society will leave. Perhps you feel that woudl be for the better. But history does not reflect that. In every case where class warefare has been execised against the rich, the rich left and teh business and wealth they spend went with thme and as a result the poor became pooer.
You do not create jobs by attacking those elements of society that create jobs.
Just curious, how woudl you create jobs for college graduates once you have encouraged the rich and corporations to redomicile and give me some real world examples.
Kai
“Most knowledge that is transmitted by academia is either worthless or harmful to the nation.
I’m guessing that you were either a business or engineering major if you went to school and view college as purely an ROI experience. It’s also clear that you see very little value in courses that don’t have an immediate payback in your future. I would also assume you see no value in the subjects of art and music at the primary and secondary levels. What is also clear is your misunderstanding of what education is and is not. First, education should have first and foremost the intrinsic value of developing individuals to read, think critically and question results until a satisfactory answer is found. If, as a secondary goal, education helps make someone wealthy or famous, it is the result of it’s application and not it’s origin. Somewhere in the past, too many were sold on the idea that the value of education was found in the wealth it could lead to or create. Unless we emphasis the importance and knowledge of all subjects, we under serve the student in there preparation for adult life. You can be a brilliant math or science major. However, if your skills don’t include the ability to write a cohesive document or communicate at multiple levels of the business hierarchy, all the technical skills are wasted.
The so-called professions are made up of courses that was the result of a incestous relationship betweenthe college and the education, police, fireman, social service agencies to justify advancement and unjustified salaries. The mostly useless knowledge is akin to the civil service exams of Ancient China.
the only true sciences, the natural sciences when focused have made some outstanding discoveries. These discoveries were spurred on by government contracts.