<p>"Erin Crites is making lattes and iced coffees.</p>
<p>"And Anna Holcombe is buying and selling gold.</p>
<p>"These three Chicago women share more than just scraping by with low-paying jobs: They all have master's degrees and are unable to find work in their specialty areas."</p>
<p>"There's even a name for their situation. They are referred to as mal-employed, a term coined in the '70s for college graduates who could not find jobs that require a degree. Instead, they settle for low-skilled jobs.</p>
<p>"Even in rosier economic times, people with college degrees sometimes can't find jobs in their fields. But their numbers and the trend show no sign of easing during the slow and bumpy recovery from the recession.</p>
<p>"Nationwide, about 1.94 million graduates under age 30 were mal-employed between September and January, according data compiled by Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University."</p>
<hr>
<p>The only little ray of sunshine in the story is that none of the people mentioned seemed to have a tremendous burden of loans. Although some of them are going BACK to school, which must be expensive is all you have been is a barista.</p>
<p>This isn’t really new. I graduated from architecture school in 1982 to mass layoffs. I worked for six months as a librarian at a university. Eventually I found a job in my field. My problem was that I was looking in an area where my Columbia connections were of no help, but I’d spent 3 years on the opposite coast from my boyfriend and I’d had enough of it.</p>
<p>Back in the 1990’s IBM was laying off 10,000-20,000 people. One academic job had 100 people with postdoc experiences applying. It was horrific. Thank God, some professions were expanding, like the Wall Street and Tech industry. Then came the tech bubble of 2000…The story never ends…</p>
<p>“This isn’t really new.” why heck, back in the day when it was really tough you shoulda seen what i had to do…
what’s the point of trying to trivialize a problem that most of us know exists and will be around for quite some time to come. a lot of jobs and types of work are gone, and won’t be coming back. read comments to the article. they show how deep our “mal employment” goes</p>
<p>Maybe the job search sites, or someone else, should create a system that tells prospective grads the number of jobs that they would qualify for w/a degree in X.</p>
<p>Look at the fields they’re getting the degrees in. Public Administration, , communications, public relations, ensemble based physical theater…I don’t mean to bash majors and concentrations, but these aren’t exactly the most marketable degrees.</p>
<p>It’s tough out there–and the people in these articles are in fields where it can be especially tough to gain a foothold…with degrees in public administration, communications, public relations and advertising, and theater, and law degrees from a non-top law school. [cross posted with yakyu spirits]</p>
<p>I wish the economy would hurry up and perk up, because if college grads are taking these jobs, then college kids and high school kids are frozen out of jobs. It’s a trickle down bad effect.</p>
<p>My daughter is a college senior. She and her two roommates all have found jobs – and in all instances, the jobs are in the career fields that they wanted.</p>
<p>From their experience, I think it helps to:</p>
<ol>
<li>Have a high GPA or relevant work/internship experience (or maybe both).</li>
<li>Use your school’s on-campus recruiting resources. The companies that recruit at your school want to hire people from your school.</li>
<li>Know when you need to start looking. In some career fields, this may be a year in advance; in others, it’s much closer to your starting date.</li>
<li>Broaden your horizons. If you define your field of interest or the geographic areas in which you’re willing to live too narrowly, you decrease your chances.</li>
<li>Have a saleable major. My daughter is an economics major, and her roommates’ majors are even more career-oriented than that.</li>
<li>Apply to lots and lots of jobs. In this economy, your success rate is likely to be less than 1 in 10, even with top credentials.</li>
</ol>
<p>My heart goes out to these kids. I can not understand how some politicians, like Obama, are talking about the need for more college grads, and the Dream act.</p>
<p>“My heart goes out to these kids. I can not understand how some politicians, like Obama, are talking about the need for more college grads, and the Dream act.”</p>
<p>It’s because it is a mantra they keep repeating over and over. If people in this country were just more educated, all problems would be solved. The answer to everything is more college degrees for all. Which certainly seems insane, when you see highly capable college graduates graduating with low expectations for job prospects…and the politicians are shouting out to allow illegal aliens to become citizens, if only they would just be willing to go to college (at the taxpayers expense, of course). Because…we desperately need more college graduates to compete for jobs that aren’t there? To compete for already overcrowded, overburdened public university slots, funded by nearly bankrupt states? It is an bizarre disconnect with the reality of the job market.</p>
<p>“2. Use your school’s on-campus recruiting resources. The companies that recruit at your school want to hire people from your school.” </p>
<p>My husband (an IT manager at a government agency) held a information/recruiting session at a local university today and one student showed up. Weird.</p>
<p>I have been working part-time since graduation in December 2010. Some pay periods I’ll average about 34-36 hours in a week and other pay periods I’m closer to 27 average. Being able to live at home right now has allowed me to put some money into the bank, but right now I am not able to really sustain myself…</p>
<p>I will be going full-time in the next couple of weeks. I have stayed under the 40/week so far because this job was supposed to be temporary. About a month ago, I was offered a full-time position and I had been waiting on other opportunities that did not materialize. </p>
<p>I was/am lucky. I have worked for this same company since high school graduation. You want to talk about moving my way up-- that’s exactly what I have done. I started out at the very bottom in the company and was promoted within 8 months although I was only working over college breaks. I was promoted again at graduation and will be promoted again here shortly. I was told last night that we would need to get my benefits set up here shortly. </p>
<p>Is this a position that I will remain in for the rest of my career? Of course not. I’m already planning my next move and frankly they know that. And understand that. My boss has tried to help me for the last 4 years to advance my career and he knows that I am looking for something else. I expect I’ll spend a year or two in my current/new position and then potentially move on…</p>
<p>I took a six-month paid (but not much) internship with a federal agency, in a field pretty much totally different from my major (journalism)… but using many of the same skills that major taught me. That internship turned into a career-track job with that agency and a pending graduate program.</p>
<p>I’d be very, very careful about calling public relations and communications degrees “unmarketable.” The media industry might be struggling, but there is still a huge need for people who can develop and execute compelling products that communicate and build relationships between organizations and customers/stakeholders.</p>
<p>Actually D1, who graduated in 2008, just as the market began to fall apart, struggled for about a year to find something permanent and full time. She relocated to an area that has a strong alumni connection and things started to fall into place. She’s been at her current job for just over a year now, and for several months has had people contacting her for prospective jobs. The students who graduated from the Newhouse school at Syracuse are really not having any problems getting respectable jobs in PR. My daughter has honed in on the health care aspect of PR and there will always be a need for people in this area as health care will never go away and there will always be health care crises and issues to cope with.</p>
<p>Communications is certainly not the slacker degree it was 30 years ago when I was in college–at the time we called it ‘the idiot’s Journalism’. It’s ALL together now. If you can write, you need to have a certain amount of Web savvy too. Art design helps in that regard. Radio/TV knowhow also. And if this degree/major is in conjunct with a technical/scientific second major, theoretically that should make the student even more marketable. Employers like to think you can do a lot of stuff.</p>
<p>BUT…learning how to write well & quickly is job #1 in my book.</p>
<p>[My husband (an IT manager at a government agency) held a information/recruiting
session at a local university today and one student showed up. Weird]</p>
<p>futurecollegemom: Can you share with us which agency is recuiting and at which local university. </p>
<p>Isn’t it sort of late for on campus recruiting? If it is one of the top state school, could it be that most graduates in it already have jobs line up?</p>
<p>I still see a lot of recruiting at my son’s college. There’s a lot of demand for specific skills and I think that employers thought that hiring would be easy and some are finding that not to be the case.</p>
<p>I don’t know the statistics, but a lot of hired college grads later get laid off because of the “last hired/first fired” rule. It’s sad to see some students and ask how it is going at “X” and have them say they were let go. My nephew (finance/accounting) had no problem getting a job after college, but 4 years later, laid off iwth 50 others, it’s been 8 months now.
Sometimes it’s just luck and determination with majors. My friends daughter majored in Communication, saw an ad from a cable/TV company, right before her graduation, applied with no experience in the field and got it in. She know, 5 years later, is traveling, helping film the Olympics and Tour de France and has learned a lot on the job. Friends of hers in the same initial boat, are working at Macy’s selling makeup.</p>