How This Here Recession Has Been Working Out For People Without Degrees
“For about 43 percent of Americans over the age of 18 [that is: the ones without college degrees], there has been no growth in the labor market since it bottomed out more than two years ago. To get a job, you’ve essentially had to hope someone else lost or left theirs.” —The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann translates some charts! Basically: Um, sucks if you didn’t go to college! The other part of the analysis is that if you have a college degree, you cannot and should not complain about the job market because essentially it’s back to pre-recession levels so go get a job! Go, go, go!
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Previously on The Billfold
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Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
- college dropout IF KANYE DID IT WHY CAN’T I sob
Yes, do your best to go and get a job. HOWEVER, having a college degree is not a shoe in, you should be doing some kind of work relevant to the field you’re looking to pursue (at least initially) during your university education before you’re out of the college gates and ready to roll. Whether that be interning, volunteering, working PT to FT, or what-have-you, that experience is going to put you just one further step ahead of the masses who spent their time just focusing on one thing. My $0.02.
But are the employed college grads working at something they need a college degree to do? The college grads may all be employed, but employed as baristas for all we know or, judging by the first comment from that article, as laborers for small construction companies even though they’re liberal arts majors. It’s good to have a job, don’t get me wrong, but if studying psychology for four years only lets you paint houses then this isn’t exactly the best news ever.
@Deb of last year@twitter
Even in the best economy, just having a four year degree in psychology would leave you qualified to paint houses.
Hella, @thecoffeestain — raw employment numbers don’t reflect the number of people who are working less than they want to be, or far outside their fields (biology majors making coffee). What this might reflect that’s newsworthier than anything else is how important class signifiers are to gaining employment, especially in a service/knowledge economy.
@Miranda Everitt@facebook: I completely agree with both you and @Deb of last year@twitter. The only thing I was trying to say was that if you are able to get yourself an “in” through either free labor or volunteering with an organization or working part time in a position directly related to your career choice you have a far better chance of landing a job in that career path than if you just do nothing or something unrelated. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that those kinds of opportunities are hard to find, much less get, but my point was to slightly clarify Logan’s: Yes, the recession is effectively over, but it has irrevocably changed the game which means that we need to be flexible and change with it. Absolutely the socio-economic gap plays a role in who has a better shot at achieving this, but that doesn’t change the game.