Graduation: Welcome to the nightmare job market
Young adults who have the misfortune of graduating this spring are entering the worst job market since the Great Depression, said Bianna Golodryga and Sarah Boxer in CNN .com. When the Class of 2020 began its senior year, “the national unemployment rate stood at a near-record low of 3.7 percent.” Fast-forward to the pandemic, and 25.7 percent of those between the ages of 20 and 24 are now jobless. Some universities are stepping in to help, such as Colby College in Maine, which has pledged to “find jobs for all 500 new graduates” by tapping alumni networks.
Many younger workers are being forced “to take jobs that pay less and don’t draw on skills related to their studies, out of necessity,” said Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic. The luckiest students are probably those going to “financial, consulting, and accounting firms,” which lock down recruits in the fall, and big corporations, which often do their hiring early. Even they, however, face the prospect of having “their first full-time job offers revoked,” said Abigail Hess in CNBC.com. That includes graduates with in-demand degrees such as statistics and economics. One Northwestern University grad who thought she had a job lined up is furiously sending out new applications and says she is now in “survival mode.” Worst off may be those who just squeaked through with contract or temporary offers: Google alone has rescinded 2,000 of those.
The cost of graduating in a recession is long-lasting, said Eduardo Porter and David Yaffe-Bellany in The New York Times. A recent study found that by 2018, young adults “who landed jobs in 2010 and 2011 had a lower employment rate than people of the same age who graduated before the recession hit.” Another study that examined recessions back to 1972 found that grads confronted with economic catastrophe at the end of college “were more likely to believe that success in life depends less on effort than on luck,” even decades later.
Historically, graduating college in the trough of a business cycle has meant a cut in earnings for a full 12 years, said Julia Carpenter and Kathryn Dill in The Wall Street Journal. Don’t hold out for your dream offer—but you should have no qualms about switching jobs when the economy improves. One of the only ways “to make up lost ground is to change jobs quickly in your 20s.” And there is one surprising bright spot: A 15-year study of 1,638 people found that even though they earned less money, “well-educated graduates who entered the workforce during an economic downturn were significantly happier with their jobs, both early in their careers and later.”