The “Careers” of College Graduates

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/the_careers_of_college_graduat.php

May 20, 2011 03:48 PM
by Daniel Luzer

In an update, of sorts, to the recent post about the influence of the Recession on current college graduates, Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post is letting us know that it’s actually even worse. Two charts explain it:

[see article for graph]

Leaving aside the salaries (not so surprising that engineering majors make more than education or humanities majors) it’s importantly to look pretty seriously at those light green bars. That represents people who went to college and are now employed in jobs that don’t require them to have gone to college. That’s 22 percent of employed people under age 25. They’re earning less than $16,000 a year on average. That’s depressing. Those are people who have jobs. There are a lot of college graduates out there who don’t have jobs and are not included in this chart.

As Klein puts it:

The implication is clear: If you’re going to college to get a job after college, you’re better off in a major that lends itself to an obvious job after college. Engineering, say, or teaching. A humanities or communications degree turns out to be a much tougher sell.
That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t major in the humanities, of course, but it’s important to be realistic about these things as the recession continues.

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So part of the reason the unemployment rates are so much higher for people w/o college is that many of the jobs they could get are being filled by college graduates.
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