No more pencils, no more books. And no more jobs. May and June are usually months of celebration and enthusiasm for college graduates as they complete their degrees and move into the job world. Only this year employment opportunities are way down compared to recent years, causing many twenty-somethings to not even bother looking for a job.
This year’s crop of graduates knew in advance, thanks to the ongoing recession, that finding a job wasn’t going to be easy, which might explain why fewer young people have even tried to apply for work. The NACE survey reported that only 59% of the ’09 class has started looking for jobs, compared to 64% of those in 2007 and two-thirds of last year’s group.
-Noel Brinkerhoff