College grads see lower pay in market
Class of 2024 may have to compromise on starting wages despite openings, experts say
Students in the Class of 2024 are walking off the graduation stage into a labor market that holds plenty of opportunities, despite a soft economy that has recently hurt the number and quality of available jobs, economists said.
Federal data showed 701,000 job openings in Texas in February, down from 821,000 at the same time last year but still up from long-term averages. Graduates
might struggle most with finding openings that suit their pay preferences, as companies are likely to take a cautious approach to hiring, said John W. Diamond, director of the Center for Public Finance at Rice University’s Baker Institute.
“Uncertainty around employment, interest rates, geopolitical risks, things like insurance — I think that’s going to weigh on the job market in terms of employers being real active and real generous,” Diamond said. “The job seekers will feel that.”
James Stillwell, who graduated Friday from the University of Houston, said that the several internships on his résumé didn’t seem to help him find a remote job with higher pay, and he landed on a position outside his areas of supply chain management and finance.
“Very bad pay in the job market right now,” Stillwell said. “With regards to inflation, the cost of living is too high.”
Graduates are in a “good but not great” spot, Diamond said. Recent layoffs in the tech sector are worrisome, and people without knowledge in artificial
intelligence might have a harder time getting jobs. The number of overall openings can also be misleading and slightly skewed toward people who don’t have college degrees, he said.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 8.4 million job openings across the country as of March 2024, and some of the industries hiring the most are in trade, transportation, utilities, and leisure and hospitality.
Many of those openings would not appeal to recent college graduates, although health care and “professional and business services” fields also contain large numbers of openings. But even the professional and business services category contains contracting jobs that graduates wouldn’t want, said Patrick Jankowski, chief economist and senior vice president for research at the Greater Houston Partnership.
A much smaller portion of the jobs are in oil and gas, which is part of a broader “mining and logging” category that has 32,000 openings. And while a UH career counselor said that students in the C.T. Bauer College of Business were largely successful in getting jobs, some majors had an easier time than others.
“There’s a lot of job opportunity,” said Sarah Ude, an accounting major and recent UH graduate. “As far as accounting goes, I think it’s fairly easy to find a job. But I have friends that are other majors that are having a lot harder time.”
Students in Texas at least benefit from a market that creates new jobs more consistently than in many other states, Jankowski said. When jobs get filled, more open.
“I would bet you a dollar to a doughnut that some of those out-of-state license plates that we see are recent college grads who have come here looking for work,” he said.
Career counselors at Prairie View A&M University and University of Houston agreed that the labor market didn’t make the job search too tough on their graduates. Some students who studied liberal arts or social sciences took more time to filter through their career options, however, since their majors have many translatable skills but usually no direct line to a particular industry, said Carolyn Davis, Prairie View’s director of the Center for Careers and Professional Development.
The effort required to find a job hasn’t changed, said Jamie Belinne, associate dean for career and industry engagement at the C.T. Bauer College of Business.
“You can’t just go to school, go home and wait for the job to magically appear,” Belinne said. “But the students who put in the work were doing very well this year.”