The economy has wreaked havoc on those of us with recent college grads. One friend, whose son was fortuante enough to get a job in his professional field (accounting), reports that he is the only one among his set of four best friends to do so. And that's not untypical of the job situation for the past year.
Many of those children--emerging adults, frustrated at not being able to convert their college degrees into good-paying jobs--are living home. That's creating a whole nother set of tensions. For those parents looking for a break in that bleak picture--we love our kids but we don't necessarily love having them live at home anymore--there's some hopeful news on the job front. Not necessarily the dip down to 8.5 per cent unemployment (though that's welcome), but the signs that show where the job growth is.
In a December jobs report, workers with bachelor’s degrees or other post-secondary educations were the ones who hit the sweet spot: about 1.1 million bachelor’s degree recipients found work. Meanwhile, the number of workers with high school diplomas or less who were employed fell by half a million. More surprisingly, the least-skilled workers also added jobs over the last year. The number of high school dropouts who had jobs rose by 126,000.
According to Catherine Rampell, who runs the online Economix site for the New York Times, the numbers support MIT economist David Autor‘s argument that the work force is hollowing out, producing very low-skill service jobs that generally cannot be done by machines or workers abroad (like food services) and higher-skilled jobs that require greater schooling (like medical jobs).