More Troubling Stats about Shape of Job Market for College Grads

May 20, 2010 by  
Filed under College Newswire

Job news is bad all over, but most discouraging for this year’s college grads.  Business Week is reporting both statistical and anecdotal snippets in a report on the job market this week.  At commencement, only 33% of Harvard’s Class of 2010 had job offers, many of them at positions with low levels of responsibility and wages. Unemployment among people under 25 years old was 19.6 percent in April, the highest level since the Labor Department began tracking the data in 1948. And scariest of all is the story of Matt Grant:

“Ten months after graduating from Ohio State University with a civil-engineering degree and three internships, Matt Grant finally has a job — as a banquet waiter at a Clarion Inn near Akron, Ohio.”

Even teaching jobs, often a last resort for grads, are getting impossible to find.  Check out this New York Times piece about the market for teaching jobs.

“In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County (NY)  advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California. The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions — the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.” (emphasis mine)

“…in Pelham (NY), a well-regarded district where teaching salaries range from $50,000 to $134,000, high school administrators and teachers have spent recent weeks winnowing applicants’ résumés. Candidates with grade point averages below 3.0 were eliminated (3.3 in some departments).” (emphasis mine)

If your child is entering college in the next 5 years, your family must be well-prepared for the Age of Job Scarcity.  The rosy assumptions of the past must be put aside.  Your family needs a plan to get your child to a college where he/she can successfully achieve a robust grade point average (over 3.3), build the skills to be successful in the work world, and develop the maturity and personal fortitude to handle the challenges they will confront.

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