College Grads Are Underemployed
They need new plans and strategies
Getting through college is tough. Less than half of all college students at four-year colleges finish in four years. The reality is that most students need six years to graduate. The six-year graduation rate at a public college is 67.4%, and at private colleges, it’s 77.5% But it turns out that getting through college isn’t enough.
After those kids limp across the graduation finish line and take the obligatory pictures with cap and gowns, most don’t find college-level work. They find jobs that don’t require a college degree. They’re manning the desk at Enterprise Car Rental franchise or fulfilling orders for full figured bathing suits at a Lands’ End phone call center.
Recent studies show that fifty-two percent of college grads are underemployed a year after graduation. And those numbers don’t budge much over time. Ten years later, 45 percent of college graduates are underemployed.
(If things are bad for typical young adults, the situation for young adults with autism is in the toilet. I wrote about that for my autism newsletter this week.)
In many ways, this situation is not new. Experts have shared the depressing employment statistics for college grads for many years.
For an 2017 article that I wrote for the Atlantic about parental involvement in their their college students’ lives, one expert told me that super involved parents make sure that their college graduates get college-level jobs. They hunt down positions for their kids and hound college administrations to make sure they get the right internships. College grads, who don’t have that help, end up waiting tables.
A few years later, I talked with a student who couldn’t find a good job after getting her BA in Psychology from Rutgers, so she went to a trade school to get a degree reading sonograms. She told me that she would need to get a Masters to do anything psychology related. Rather than continue her job scooping ice-cream, she decided to go to a trade school for a degree in reading sonograms, because the salaries started at $80,000. Then trade school would do job placement, when she finished the degree in a year.
Now, my older son and his friends are having the same problems finding good jobs. For various reasons, I won't discuss those particulars. Just know, this topic is personal.
It’s increasingly clear that a Bachelor’s degree does not guarantee a good job, because there aren’t enough good jobs out there. While students are employed, they resort to jobs that do not require a college degree — a degree that used up six years of time and maybe $100,000-$300,000 of their parents’ money.
There are ways to increase the odds for good employment. The latest research shows that majors matter. Engineering, computers, and math majors have the most luck. For others, internships can make a big difference.
The future doesn’t look all that bright either. AI is going to take a bite out of the STEM jobs, so being a tech person with people skills will be useful.
I’m hearing about a lot more liberal arts majors retooling after graduation, with an additional certificate from a community college or a trade school. That woman that I talked back in 2019, who went from college to trade school, is going to be a more common story. My older son might do that.
Community college could become the next grad school. That wouldn’t be terrible.
Scott Galloway’s new book, The Algebra of Wealth, should be required reading to all college-bound students. He gives some great advice about getting adequately wealthy, but his best tips are just good common sense career tips. I’ll do a whole review of this book, maybe next week, but in the meantime, I share one of his pearls of wisdom.
Galloway tells young people to not pursue their passion. They should do a job that they are good at. Over time, they will develop an expertise in that field and get rewarded for that expertise. Then they’ll find that they enjoy their job.
He gives an example of a tax accountant. Nobody dreams of becoming a tax accountant when they grow up. But the guy who chooses that profession will make a very nice living and love his life.
Want a McKenna pearl of wisdom? A nugget of knowledge from a woman who has consistently and persistently chosen employment that is high prestige and poorly rewarded? Ha, you’re going to get it anyway.
Always work. There are times when you’ll have to slow down paid employment. Maybe you’ll get derailed completely, because of caretaking responsibilities or because an employment situation changes. Work every day. If you don’t have a paid job, then do it for free - write, volunteer, learn to cook something new, read smart books, join groups with smart people, network on social media, learn a new app, create a website, sell books on the Internet. Be an information shark and never stop moving forward.
I think that the underemployed young people will eventually get on their feet as long as they keep growing and gaining new skills. They might need that extra degree, after graduation. They might need to move to another part of the country. They might to totally rethink their plans. But as long as they constantly push forward and grow, an opportunity will arise.
I always find it a bit odd when we start at the end of things that says "College should lead to a job, what's wrong with college?" but that is a bed that three generations of politicians and three generations of university leaders have made together. It feels a lot closer to the mark to talk about the actual labor markets which exist out there, and the actual costs of living that the current market economy piles on to young people with all the forms of subsidy that the young people of the 1950s and 1960s had now taken away. If there aren't very much good jobs, defined either as something you can be good at in a meaningful sense and/or as something that pays enough to live and begin to see the hazy contours of future advancement within, then that says something about our economy, about our social infrastructure, about work and workplaces, rather than college. If only a few people went to college--or even did one-year programs to read sonagrams--the economic outlook for young people wouldn't magically improve. If everybody did one-year programs that were narrowly targets at particular jobs requiring specific technical competencies, we'd find that there are only so many sonagrams that need reading, and most people would still be answering the Land's End catalog phone. We don't approach the problem from that end because as parents, as families, and as citizens, we have nothing we can do about any of that, and the people who might have ideas treat the labor market and economy as if they are a purely natural phenomenon to which one might adapt but which cannot be shaped deliberately in any fashion.