I heard on the news tonight that the national unemployment rate is up over 10%, the highest unemployment rate since 1983. That’s the year I graduated from college. I think that experience has shaped my assumptions about jobs and careers ever since:– I assume that I will not be able to find a good job, or any job at all, and I assume that finding a job is in large part a matter of luck.
I’ve been wondering about the people who will graduate from college this year. How difficult will it be for them to find a job? How will the recession shape this assumptions of this year’s graduates? And I wonder how this year’s college graduates will cope with their student debt. My final year of college cost a mere $7,000 — about $15,000 in 2008 dollars — but today that college now costs something like $50,000 per year. What will it feel like to enter the job market during the current era of high unemployment, when you have perhaps $100,000 in student loans to pay off?
the percentage of unemployed varies considerably depending on how one counts who is unemployed. If we counted as they did in 1930, it would be 22% now. At least, that’s what Brad Hicks says.
I, too, often think about how my economic circumstances when young changed my life. Having been saddled with fairly significant student loan debt and having had to look hard for a job on graduation because of the economy did significantly change the direction of my life. I think I was lucky though. The recession that greeted us on graduation was not coupled with all the other current problems besetting our society — war, acknowledged environmental devastation, etc (can I really honestly just put an “etc” here?) — that will keep us from just shifting back into another period of wild and unsustainable “growth.”
kim and E — Yeah, I think it’s worse now than anyone is admitting.
The rise in college costs has outpaced the rate of inflation for decades now. No wonder so many college graduates’ main concern in looking for a job is that it pay a very high salary. (Good luck with that–but there are still plenty of overpaid 23-year-olds in fields like finance and high tech.)
I didn’t have much debt coming out of college, but I know this kind of debt burden from my grad school loans. I can’t imagine having that level of debt with nothing but a B.A. I assume that for a lot of students, another rule of the job search is “no careers requiring an advanced degree.”