Via Bloomberg:
Generation Y professionals entering the workforce are finding careers that once were gateways to high pay and upwardly mobile lives turning into detours and dead ends. Average incomesfor individuals ages 25 to 34 have fallen 8 percent, double the adult population’s total drop, since the recession began in December 2007. Their unemployment rate remains stuck one-half to 1 percentage point above the national figure.
American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals – Bloomberg
Points:
- “The nation’s younger workers have benefited least from an economic recovery that has been the most uneven in recent history.”
- “Professionals who start out in jobs other than their first choice tend to stay on the alternative path, earning less than they would have otherwise while becoming less likely to start over again later in preferred fields.”
- “Only one-fifth of those who graduated college since 2006 expect greater success than their parents.”
- “Those who finish only high school or drop out fare worse. Almost four out of five jobs destroyed by the recession were held by workers with a high school diploma or less.”
Ponder:
- Are these graduates caught in the dynamics of structural change rather than a slow recovery? That is, has how they can earn good incomes radically changed from how their parents earned good incomes?
- Should colleges be liable for their graduates’ inability to get jobs?