Half of recent college grads lack full-time job

They are going to have to get employable skills.

Russian Lit. just isn't going to get it in the present economy.

On the other hand, you can't really blame a kid who went to college with one reality ---- the American economy up 'til 2006 ------ got into his Russian Lit degree plan thinking he was going to get a masters in something else ---- borrowing the whole time ----- only to emerge into a completely different world four years later.

Hopefully, kids today aren't going into poly sci unless they are just really gifted or not having to borrow money to get the degree.
 
BI,

My Constitutional Law professor used to call those "Arts & Crafts" degrees. Basically degrees like political science, history, any type of literature only lead to a career if you use them to get a Ph.D. (college professor or researcher), a M.P.A. (a bureaucrat in government), or a law degree. I'm sure there are a few private sector gigs you could get with them, but they're extremely rare and have been for years.

I think universities should charge tuition based on Labor Department statistics for job demand. The lower the demand, the higher tuition should be. If you want to get an Arts & Crafts degree, knock yourself out, but it should cost about $40K per year. A degree in accounting should be very inexpensive. A degree in engineering should be damn near free.

Of course the real crunch from half of grads being out of work is going to come when their student loan deferment period ends. The student loan program (which is essentially a perpetual bailout program) is going to get slammed in the next year.
 
I returned to college in 2008 and graduated last May. I'm underemployed because I happen to live in an area absolutely saturated by teaching schools. (My degree is K-6: Education).

Sucks because everything I've read about the job market states that teaching jobs are in incredible demand - just not here. Apparently, every job posted in Knox County is getting something like 400-500 applicants. The University of Tennessee has a teaching school as well as several other smaller colleges in the area. We'd move but my daughter is 14 and I'm not leaving her. I currently work as an ISR teacher making about 1/2 of what regular classroom teachers make.

Ironically, my wife, an ESL teacher, couldn't lose her job if she tried seeing as how there are very, very few certified ESL teachers in East Tennessee.

I tutor and coach soccer so that offsets the pay gap; however, I'd love to work just one job and get home before 8 or 9 in the evening. I also wasn't too fond of missing half of Texas' college football games due to soccer coaching obligations. Oh well, that's life.
 
I've graduated since 2006 and I has lots of employable skills, 2 college degrees, yet I don't have a full time job.

Even the contract jobs I can get have been downgraded from full-time contract jobs to 1-day a week contract jobs in the last 4 years.
 
Knox- it has been pretty much the same down here over the past couple of years. We used to get about 20 applicants per teacher opening. One time last year we got over 400. The one thing that has helped is that our population is growing so new schools open and hire 40+ teachers at a time.

I take interns from a nearby university and have seen several change majors over the past few years due to the job situation.
 
81...Can you not find a job in your field or none at all? Are you willing to relocate? From reports on CNBC and business pubs there seem to be jobs available in the tech/engineering fields. What is your degree in???
 
That's coorect, Yuma. No one wants to hire you when it's so easy outsource you to India, Asia and etc. (still true today)

No, I won't relocate because I've never had the money for this.

Business degree. I think I got messed up getting MIS as my major.
 
I'll be honest. I'm not even sure how relevant classroom teaching will be over the next 10-20 years anyway. Seems like a prime field to be overtaken by technology with time.
Guess I'll go back to writing my book. Actually, I'm planning to finish it during summer break anyway.
 
Flip the whole system. Instead of us paying for college, have the college pay for us to be educated, and then collect a percentage of our future paychecks. Indentured servitude essentially. You apply to the college, the college looks at the applicants and decides who's going to be the best employee down the road. The college would then only produce students with degrees that are worthwhile and rather than having online papermills saturating the market with uselesss pieces of papers, the colleges would only spend money on people who have a chance at making that money back. No more basket weaving majors, if the college sees that a major in incan literature isn't going to make money in the real world, it doesn't teach anybody incan literature and all those people just go straight to barista work rather than getting massively in debt to end up becoming a barista anyhow.
 
Not a bad idea, but then we would have all these unemployed classical studies/Latin American literature/etc. profs. A lot of the Fr and Soph courses are pretty useless - don't think I have used Geology or Business Math for non-Business majors much since.......well, ever. So what real jobs are they qualified for? Not many.
 
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