Employment rates for college graduates remain higher than they do for those who only finished high school, as does the earnings advantage, according to the report, titled “From Hard Times to Better Times: College Majors, Unemployment, and Earnings.”
“A promising find is that recent college graduates’ wage advantage has remained high in the post-recession economy, especially for STEM majors,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the center and lead author of the report.
The report notes how unemployment rates for recent college graduates with a bachelor’s degree aged 22 to 26 fell from a high of 7.9 percent in 2009-2010 to 7.5 percent in 2011-2012.
“The college population most adversely affected by the Great Recession has been recent graduates with Bachelor’s degrees between the ages of 22 and 26, whose unemployment rate stands at 7.5 percent—only slightly lower than the 7.7 percent unemployment rate for all full-time, full-year workers aged 22 to 54,” the report states. “Yet there are encouraging signs even for these recent college graduates.”
According to the report, those encouraging signs include:
• Education majors, who experienced unemployment rates as high as 5.7 percent among recent graduates in 2010-2011, have seen their unemployment rates fall to 5.1 percent.
