Rude Employment Reality: 1 in 2 New Graduates is Jobless or Underemployed

Rude Employment Reality: 1 in 2 New Graduates is Jobless or Underemployed

The college graduates of 2012 are in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

An unstable 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 getting lower-wage jobs – waiter or waitress, retail clerk or receptionist, bartender, for example – and that's destructing their hopes their degree would pay off despite high tuition and skyrocketing student loans.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in almost two decades.

About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years.

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 bartenders, waiters, waitresses, and food-service helpers than as chemists, physicists, engineers, and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more who worked 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 3 of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job offers by 2020 will require a four-year degree or higher to fill the position – teachers, college professors and accountants.

College graduates who majored in anthropology, art history, humanities, philosophy, and zoology were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with teaching, nursing, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.

Posted by James Fried on Tuesday April 24 2012, 3:17 AM EST. Ref: Yahoo. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, Finance. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0