Tough times for job seekers

Tough times for job seekers

Herald-Dispatch, Huntington, W.Va.: The recession has been tough on all age groups, but the past four years have been particularly difficult for young job seekers.

A little more than 8 percent of Americans are unemployed, but the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for young adults is about 13.5 percent.

But that is just part of the picture.

About 32 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds are considered “underemployed,” according to tracking for the Gallup polling company. That means they are unemployed or they are working part-time but looking for full-time work. Many of us know young people in this predicament.

Unfortunately, the “underemployment” situation can look even worse for recent college grads.

A recent Associated Press survey estimated that half of young college graduates are jobless, working part-time or scraping by in lower-paying jobs that would not normally require their degree — a waiter or waitress, bartender or retail clerk.

For parents who invested in those degrees or young people with student loans to pay, that is discouraging.

Moreover, some experts worry that these trends will continue even as the economy recovers.

With the recession, companies have eliminated a lot of mid-level “white collar” jobs, and some economists say many of those are not coming back. Just as machines once replaced workers with routine manual tasks, today technology is doing the work once done by college grads — from sales to research to analysis.

All of this suggests that young people and their parents need to be careful about what training they invest in and how much they spend.

The AP survey, for example, found that degrees in nursing, accounting or computer science degrees were among those likely to lead to jobs at graduation. But students in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities degrees were the least likely to find a job appropriate to their education.

Colleges, both four-year and two-year programs, will need to adapt more quickly to changes in the job market, too.