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Washington Post
How the Great
Recession changed the job market forever for college grads
By Jeffrey J. Selingo
June 2
As this year’s college graduates transition from school to career, they
are entering one of the healthiest job markets in decades for those
with newly minted degrees. Compared with their counterparts from the
Class of 2010 — who left college in the depths of the Great Recession,
when the unemployment rate was 9.5 percent — this year’s graduates face
unemployment of under 4 percent.
When students graduate matters significantly to their earnings in the
formative years of their careers, according to researchers. Generally,
people who enter the job market during an economic downturn start with
lower wages than those who graduate in better times, and it takes those
who start behind a decade or more to catch up — if they ever do.
But the legacy of the Great Recession for graduates goes well beyond
that unlucky cohort who left college then. In recent weeks, two studies
on the job market for college graduates landed on my desk. In reading
them, one quickly realizes just how much the job market has shifted
since the economic downturn ended.
The first study came from the Strada Institute for the Future of Work
and from Burning Glass Technologies, a workforce analytics firm. It
analyzed the phenomenon of underemployment among college graduates —
meaning they are in jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree — and
found that 43 percent are in that predicament.
Many graduates, their parents and even college leaders minimize the
importance of the first job, knowing that many others will follow. That
mind-set could prove detrimental, according to the study. Two-thirds of
graduates who are underemployed at commencement find themselves in the
same situation five years later. Even 10 years later, the job outlook
doesn’t improve: Seventy-four percent remain underemployed.
The second report was released by Handshake, an online platform similar
to LinkedIn that is used by more than 500 colleges and connects their
students with 250,000 employers. In combing through more than 5 million
applications that students submitted over the past year, the company
found a change in the types of employers students are seeking. And it
discovered changes in the skills graduates are applying outside their
majors and what they want most out of a job.
Nonprofit and government agencies loom over campus hiring in ways they
haven’t in the past. Some 24 percent of students are applying to jobs
outside of corporate America, according to Handshake. Of that group,
some 40 percent of students are applying to nonprofits, 30 percent to
the federal government and 22 percent to local government agencies.
Even when students go the corporate route, the companies where they are
looking include a healthy mix of old brand-names where their parents
could have worked. Indeed, IBM received the most applications in the
past year from students on Handshake.
Students are also looking for jobs outside the industries normally
associated with their majors. In health care, more than 20 percent of
the open entry-level roles are aimed at graduates with technology
skills. And students are looking for more flexibility in their work.
The search terms “start-up” and “remote” were increasingly used by
students on Handshake.
“The job market is more wide open for graduates than ever before,”
Garrett Lord, co-founder and CEO of Handshake, told me. “They have
plenty of choices of industries, jobs and locations to apply their
skills.”
Both reports seem to indicate that the skill sets of graduates — rather
than their major — might matter most in hiring. Taken together, the
reports show that today’s undergraduates, along with their parents and
colleges, need to prepare differently for the job market than they did
a decade ago.
For one, there needs to be less emphasis in college — and in the
admissions process — that a major leads to a specific job. A college
graduate’s ability to do the job matters more to recruiters than the
major. The Handshake report showed that graduates are applying those
skills across a range of industries. Engineers, for instance, are
working in the fashion industry, jobs typically associated with arts
majors, and writers are employed in tech firms mostly identified with
computer science majors.
Second, liberal arts graduates don’t fare as poorly in the job market
as many students and parents assume. In the last few months, the
liberal arts have been under fire, with a handful of colleges
eliminating, or threatening to wipe out, majors such as English and
history. Those majors and others in the liberal arts still matter in
hiring. But the key for students in those majors is to get specific
hard skills (such as computer coding or comfort with data) and learn
how to translate the competencies they developed in the major, such as
writing and critical thinking, so employers can better understand the
background of applicants during the recruiting process.
Finally, colleges need to make career services part of the curriculum
from Day 1. As the Strada-Burning Glass report showed, the first job
matters more than we have long assumed. Colleges like to say they
prepare students for their fifth job, not their first. That way of
thinking needs to change. Students must acquire specific skills and
find hands-on experiences, such as internships and undergraduate
research, much earlier in their undergraduate career than past
generations of students.
This time of year is often scary for graduates who are left to navigate
the world of work after 17 years of schooling. But if students are
armed with a broad education and marketable skills, they should have
little difficulty finding gainful and fulfilling employment after
college.
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