While more new graduates are holding part-time jobs and jobs not requiring a degree, it remains true that those with degrees are faring substantially better than those without.
The government snapshot of the job market in December found that 7.7% of those over age 25 who had only a high school diploma were unemployed, but only 3.3% of those with four-year college or graduate degrees were unemployed.Going beyond the "grads do better" generality, Wessel cites work by British economists to the effect that:
The wages of both American and British workers with post-graduate degrees have been increasing faster than wages of those with only four-year degrees.This finding underscores what we've maintained at COTTonLINE for some years now. Degrees are used by lazy employers to separate the cream from the milk, the wheat from the chaff, in short the winners from the losers. As baccalaureate degrees become common, it increasingly is the graduate degree that causes an applicant to stand out from the background clutter.
Crucially, Wessel cites Fed economists who observe that:
Those who major in engineering, math, computers and other technical fields as well as those in growing parts of the economy such as health and education tend to do better. Those who major in leisure and hospitality, communications, liberal arts, social sciences and business are more likely to be underemployed after they graduate.I am more sanguine about the employment prospects of business majors than they are, but the general thrust of their argument is valid.
