College graduates are finding it harder to break into the job market this year, reports Elisabeth Buchwald for CNN. The overall unemployment rate remains low, at less than 4 percent. But more than 12 percent of four-year graduates aged 20 to 29 years old are out of work, a big jump from last year.
Employers are hiring non-graduates for lower-level jobs, writes Peter McCoy in the New York Times. They're hiring experienced workers. But new entrants to the workforce are struggling to "launch."
Underemployment has long-term costs, writes Elizabeth Hernandez in the Denver Post. Only about half of four-year graduates get a professional job within a year of graduation, reports the Burning Glass Institute. The other half "work in jobs that don’t require a degree or make use of their collegiate-level skills."
A recent college graduate with a college-level job earns about 88 percent more than someone with only a high school diploma. An underemployed college graduate averages 25 percent more.
It's hard to catch up. "Seventy-three percent of graduates who enter the workforce underemployed remain so a decade after completing college."
If they've AI'ed and Chegged their way through school, of course they won't be able to find jobs that use the knowledge and skills they were supposed to acquire but didn't.
I found this a few years ago. It is from a listing of myths at Vassar collected long ago.
"Underemployed" college students has a long history for those students who did not develop other skills.
A shrewd undergrad would, as a freshman, determine which majors had regular programs for paid internships leading to employment offers on graduation. Anything from actuary science to biomedical engineering to ROTC might fill the bill. This information is out there, for those ambitious enough to ask.
It is not "underemployement" if someone who graduates with a non-skill enhancing degree has to do something that has economic value. There is what your degree is in and there is what you can do that others need done. In the increasingly distant past, going to college did indicate exposure to knowledge beyond your local schooling. But now we have the internet. And more and more colleges have a social justice mission, actively inhibit students engaging in open debate and that latter bleeds into them learning organize their thinking by writing since any unapproved idea argued means retribution from the faculty, administrators or fellow students.