Young Job Seekers Hit Hard by Economy

Unemployment Rate for Recent College Graduates Quadrupled from Two Years Ago

(CBS)  The campus coffee shop has allowed Elise Manbert to help work her way through college at UCLA.

The only problem? She graduated five months ago.

"Both my parents had jobs when they left college and so I kind of always expected that was going to be the same situation for me," Manbert said.

What she didn't plan on was hitting one of the worst job markets for college graduates in a generation. Now, even as the economy begins to recover, job creation is lagging, reports CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy.

"A couple of my friends have unpaid internships, a couple are working at just part-time, a lot of them are in coffee shops," Manbert said.

Two years ago, the unemployment rate for 20 to 24 year olds with bachelor's degrees was just 2.2 percent. Now it is more than four times that at 9.3 percent.

Kathy Sims heads UCLA's Career Center and says this is the worst job market she has seen in her 32-year career. Next year could be worse.

"The class of 2010 will not just be competing with itself," Sims said. "It'll be competing with some of the class of 2008 and many of the class of 2009."

Compounding the problem is the huge amount of debt students have after they graduate. The average undergraduate credit card balance is $3,000 dollars, and the 60 percent of college graduates who borrowed money to get through school each owe an average of $23,000.

Kyle Voigt graduated a year ago hoping to get a job in advertising. He moved back in with his dad and has yet to find a job. Starting in November, he'll have to start paying back about $20,000 worth of student loans.

Voigt is considering joining the Navy. Meanwhile, Peace Corps, Americorps, and Teach for America received record numbers of applications.

Elise Manbert is still optimistic.

"I just feel like my personal luck has to improve," she said.

And that she can finally graduate to a full-time job.

[BigESShi]

It is so so extremly hard to get jobs and even just to land an interview is like pulling teeth. Even for people with experience like me that is college educated, graduate school educated has around 5 yrs of experience and still after about a year from being laid off can't find much of anything. At least though I do have so kind of income and I think people have to feel very lucky to even find a simple part time job like a coffee shop job, Mcdonalds but yet even thoughs are hard to get because so many people are looking to take whatever they can for the time being. Right now I think the economy is so hard that it really doesn't matter what you're degree is you come out with in college except fot the healthcare people will be looking for a position for at least a year or more to find a position or even just to get an interview.

[JollyRoger919]

I am 24 years old and I just graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Criminal Justice and Criminology. I was hoping after I graduated that I would get a job with a government agency fighting crime. Instead I find myself living at home with my dad, sleeping in the same bedroom as I did when I was a kid, and working at a truck rental lot 30 hours a week making less than $10 an hour. I have worked at this job part time just to make a few bucks while in school but I was hoping to be out of it by the time I graduated. I have considered the police as a possible job but all local police departments around Phoenix are currently on a hiring freeze (no surprise). I have sent my resume to the FBI, the ATF, and the Department of Justice Anti Trust Division and have yet to hear back from any of them. I even tried looking for jobs outside of my desired field. At an ASU career fair I talked to a recruiter for a company that sells technology products to small businesses. She liked my resume and said I would make a great candidate. Even though it wasn't the kind of job I was looking for I went ahead with the application process, got interviewed, and never heard back from them. Now I am considering the military as an option so I made an appointment with an Air Force recruiter this week. It used to be that as long as you had a college degree, you could enter any career field you wanted to as long as it was the right major. Now its just not simple anymore. A friend of mine is 25 and he lost his job over a year ago and has been unemployed since. He too was forced to move back in with his parents.

Nonsense. The American economy shifted from W-2 employment with full benefits under the two Bushes and Clinton to a self employed structure. Sonny Bush said he encouraged "small business" (i.e. self employment) and "home ownership" (the housing bubble). So, the new graduate has to open up a kosher pizzeria in order to survive; not look for "positions" in the wanted ads.

[sjc_1]

The problem is who will buy at the pizza shop when there is no value added business. Lots of strip malls, but few factories. When you turn iron ore into cars and sand into computer chips you have value added. When you make pizza you are only serving those that add value.

[spaceatoms]

Its just about time a story like this appeared out of the bailouts, but the bottom line is that you had to have money to make an opportuinity out of the bailouts, thus the kids didn't get a chance like Bill Gates in the 70's. As a person almost 50, I have to hand it over to the kids as I can't function intellectually as well as my 20's and 30's. Even Einstein had all his great ideas as a youth. In the end the selfish boomers will bring this country to a halt with their greed as losing companies and still losing like AIG are investments havens instead of capitalistic companies.

[michaellevine]

Good article.
These days, job seekers need all the help they can get to rise above the crowd and get noticed first by prospective employers.
Toward this end, I thought I?d share with you a new, free tool I?ve created and launched to help job seekers: www.preverify.com
PreVerify is a free tool with which job seekers can conduct their own accurate and professional employment verifications. Following the quick and simple registration process, simply send your PreVerify request to your former and current employers to complete online at a time that is convenient for them to do so. No more interruptive phone calls, just an employment verification that can be used over and over again, forever.
Rather than crowd this email with a bunch of words, attached are two recent articles that talk about PreVerify:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/08/prweb2645354.htm
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/preverify-com-preverifying-employment-histories
Please feel free to View My PreVerify Profile: http://www.preverify.com/profile/michael-levine/1

[curse914]

Take note that college grads do not count on toward the total unemployed since they were never on the roles to begin with. Just more Reagan years monkeying with the unemployment numbers.

[BeckieBest]

For those of you who are still waiting for the "trickle" in Bush/GOP trickle down economics to reach you, keep waiting.

The rest of us know urine when we smell it.

Huge tax cuts to the rich that created record deficits as far as the eye can see and total deregulation of Wall Street that allowed them to wreck the economy is what got us here.

[Orlandojon]

All age groups have been slammed by the Obama economy. No need to focus on any particular age group.

[curse914]

A comment like this should be followed up with a "solution" or idea, otherwise we can all write you off as partisan hack.

[garyl615]

Elsie Manbert:

Welcome to Capitalism 101 in the U.S.A today.....corporate outsourcing...banking...wall street....CEO bonuses etc...

[pubsrtoast]

Don't forget h1b1 and L1 visas. I have seen first hand US companies getting rid of their US born workers while hanging on to their foreign born workforce.

[garyl615]

Elsie Manbert:

Welcome to Capitalism 101 in the U.S.A today.....corporate outsourcing...banking...wall street....CEO bonuses etc...

[tincupman]

Hi Bud, where have you been? your internet service job has just been offshored to India, the last time I checked.

[kontz]

THE LEGAL TERM IS FRAUD. THIS SOCIETY HAS TAKEN YEARS FROM YOUR LIFE, CAUSED YOU TO BECOME INDEBTED WITH STUDENT LOANS AND NOW SAYS, "SORRY WE HAVE NO JOBS FOR YOU." YES, YOUNG PEOPLE YOU HAVE BEEN DEFRAUDED!!

[wyodutch]

What do you expect when America's manufacturing base has been relocated to Mexico and red china?
.
You think we'll all have jobs providing internet service and selling burgers to each other?

[nextgenman09]

Now, even as the economy begins to recover, job creation is lagging
------

What a hoot. A bunch of "dumber than a bag of hammers" economist - the same one who, BTW didn't see the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression coming our way, all of a sudden just "decide and declare" that the economy is getting better, and now we have even dumber "journalists" going along with it.

Hilarious are the small brained.

[tmittelstaed]

"...Kahn studied the impact of the recession in the 1980s and found that seniors who graduated then were still feeling the impact 20 years later. Today's seniors are "going to be earning much less than their counterparts who graduated in better times and they'll be in lower level occupations," she said." ..."

There's a reason for this that has nothing to do with a "golden year" It is because grads who enter the workforce in a recession have such a hard time getting a job that once they do get one, they choose job security over higher compensation from that point on.

Let me tell you a little secret. The higher the risk, the higher the reward. Yes, if you take high risks you definitely get knocked down a lot more. So what - you just pick yourself up and take another high risk. If you do this repeatedly you eventually will win.

Every employer knows when they are hiring that if they are looking for someone for a risky position, that they have to pay more. For example if I'm hiring a salesman to sell shoes, I know I don't need a risk-taker, so I don't need to offer a lot of money. But if I'm hiring a salesman to sell yachts that cost 10 million each, I'm going to have to offer a huge amount of money because any intelligent person knows that being able to make quota for something that expensive is extremely risky - and you have a very high chance of not doing it if you take such a job, and getting fired.

Compensation is almost invariably based on the job candidate's willingness to accept risk that they won't perform. People who are afraid of the job-seeking process, who are afraid of taking a job outside of their comfort level, who are afraid they won't recover from the financial loss of not having a job, those people seek out jobs that have a low risk that they won't be able to do them - because those candidates want to get a job that they know that as long as they do the job right, they will not likley be fired. And those types of jobs generally are the sort that are not that hard to do well, so a lot of different people can do them, and so there's a lot of competition.
However, people who aren't fazed by any of that stuff, who can get 50 rejections a day and still swagger around thinking that they are the greatest thing since sliced bread, those people are the ones who seek out jobs that have a high level of risk - that is, jobs that are hard to do, hard to succeed at, in risky environments where unknown side-effects can shaft you, because those candidates want to get a job that is a challenge, that they get an ego charge out of doing. It's extremely ego-boosting to do well at a job that 90% of the people walking around couldn't do, much less do well. And because most people can't do those jobs, there's little competition for them so employers have to pay and pay and pay in order to get people for them.

Unfortunately, professor Lisa Kahn's analysis is typical of your average academic - and being a tenured professor is the ultimate low-risk job - who has never worked for a corporation and doesn't understand the relationship between personality and compensation, who wants to believe that every employee is just like every other, and that people can be moved from company to company like pegs in a board. That's also typical of a woman's POV since the whole concept of equal-pay for equal-work fundamentally assumes that employees are just pegs in a board. Don't fall for that sort of rubbish.

[maiingan]

My comments about that are based on knowledge of Social Darwinism and job discrimination. You make some good points, but don't know the "whys" inside that study. You are a Social Darwinist.

[curse914]

There is one thing you neglected, those "high risk" jobs have to exist. If your inference is that we have way too few risk takers in this new generation of job seekers, you would have to back it up with some sort of data.

"After the last recession ended in late 2001, much of the job growth during the recovery was in lower-paying service sector fields, while many high-paying jobs were outsourced overseas. It wasn't until 2005 that higher-paying industries began to grow faster than lower-paying industries such as retail trade, hospitality and agriculture, according to data from the policy institute.

If that situation repeats itself in current recession, many college graduates could end up taking lower-paying jobs that typically go to less-qualified workers.

"As the economic restructuring takes place, there's no question some people will be taking pay cuts and pretty substantial pay cuts. And that includes those with more education," said Gus Faucher, the director of macroeconomics at Moody's Economy.com in West Chester, Pa. "This is going to be the biggest downturn since the Great Depression and it a lot of people are going to take a big hit."

History and common sense suggest pay cuts are the norm in recessionary periods.

From 1981 to 1983, while the economy reeled and recovered from a 17-month recession that lasted from July 1981 to November 1982, some 3.4 million full-time workers with at least three years in their current positions lost their jobs.

Nearly 1.6 million were rehired during that same period, but 51 percent of these workers wound up making less money. In fact, a whopping 34 percent reported earnings that were at least 20 percent less than their previous job."

[][][][][][]

Even if we switched to an Alternate Energy or "Green" Economy, it would eventually result in another bubble. We do not have a sustainable economic model. Our blind faith in our current infinite growth based economy will be our undoing.

[sjc_1]

"We do not have a sustainable economic model"

I agree, that is why I would not recommend trying to go back to business as usual. It will just crash again and at that time we would not be able to recover....game over.

[bluesmagoo]

Change they can really believe in! With the growth of big government anf the huge deficits incurred in just nine months, the likelihood of a job market growing is slim to none. Maybe now they will realize that elections have consequences and voting in an unknown because it is the cool thing to do isn't always a good idea.

[curse914]

Get real. For Obama to slow down the infinite growth Capitalist Death Train we have been riding for the last 30 years he would have to propose a new Alternate Energy or Green Tech economy.

You would be kicking and screaming no matter the outcome, because you have no ideas of your own.

[justsane-2009]

huh. i'm an over 50 adult who graduated 7 years ago with the intent of pursuing a second career in teaching. in spite of graduating at the top of my class, having excellent reviews from advisers, supervisors, co-workers, parents, and everyone else that you can imagine, i still have been unable to secure permanent employment.

i live in an area that has long been attractive to job-seekers, and by the time i received my teaching certificate, the state was over-saturated with teacher candidates. as the economy worsens, schools go through budget reductions and staff layoffs. as a teacher who is always the last one hired, i am also the first one let go. i don't know if i will ever have anything that resembles job security.

[tmittelstaed]

Apply to school districts out in the boonies. Yes you will probably have to sell your house and move. It's a shame that nobody told you when you went into your teaching program that historically young teachers always have to put in a few years teaching out in the sticks after they graduate.

[maiingan]

Been there, done that - and still there, not yet being allowed to start my chosen career or even do one job requiring my B.A. On May 20, 2009, ABC-TV did a story called "Got Work?" which I'll interpret as revealing how employers give grads a "golden year" to get started and if they don't welcome us into the workforce as grads during this span, they think we're trash and give us a bad time for the rest of our lives. Here's an excerpt:
"Yale University School of Management professor Lisa Kahn said recent college graduates will suffer the long-term effects of this recession much more than their counterparts who graduated in boom times.
Departing seniors are "suffering from the recession like everyone else is, but the effects are going to stay with (them) for much longer," Kahn said.
Kahn studied the impact of the recession in the 1980s and found that seniors who graduated then were still feeling the impact 20 years later. Today's seniors are "going to be earning much less than their counterparts who graduated in better times and they'll be in lower level occupations," she said."
Today's grads ought to have to compete with yesteryears' grads who are still fighting to get started. But instead, after a year or so we're just "throwaway adults." With all the promotion the government talks about the value of college educations, they need to back it up with a commitment to full employment of these educations in the persons of the people who possess them. They cannot honestly keep shoving naive teens into college while they let adult graduates step off a cliff into occupational oblivion.