What many people with college degrees have been hearing anecdotally from their peers has now been reflected in official statistics: it’s gotten harder to get a job, even with an education.
According jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in November, Americans aged 25-plus with at least a bachelor’s degree comprised at least 25% of unemployed workers in September. The number has hovered close to that mark since.
Workers with at least a bachelor’s degree in September faced an unemployment rate of 2.8%, up from about 2.3% a year earlier. By contrast, jobless rates for workers with less education barely moved.
So, does this mean that it’s time to spend the college fund on other plans? Here’s what the data — and the experts — have to say.
College grads taking hits
If you have a bachelor’s degree, take several deep breaths until your pulse returns to normal. Though the headline numbers are shocking, your career prospects are still better off with a four-year college degree than without one.
The unemployment rate for people with bachelor’s degrees may have hit 2.8% in September, but compare that with other 25-year-olds with some college education but no degree or an associate degree (3.4%) and those with just a high school diploma (4.2%). Among the cohort that never graduated high school, the jobless rate was 6.8%.
New four-year college grads are getting hit especially hard, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which reported in August that young graduates between ages 23 and 27 were experiencing a 4.59% unemployment rate (1).
Several leaders in business and education reform have advocated moving away from the four-year liberal arts education model.
Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir recently announced the Meritocacy Fellowship aiming “to cultivate exceptional talent, increasingly overlooked, regardless of background” (2). The fellowship is for those who want to “skip the debt” and go straight to “building”.
Eduardo J. Padron, the former president of Miami Dade College and a key figure in the education reform space, has long advocated for accessible and affordable programs that offer practical experience as engines of economic mobility.
So while parents and young adults become more aware of the costs and benefits of higher education, they may consider cost-conscious alternatives that focus on job-specific skills. Education will never be useless, but it may shift to meet the demands of the market.
Will Kenton is a personal finance writer with a Master's degree in Economics who has been published in Investopedia, AP News, TIME Stamped and Business Insider among other publications.
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