By Dominick Tao
For many recent college graduates, graduation may have been the last sure thing they knew about their budding careers. Stepping off the stage, degrees conferred, they emerged from colleges and universities into one of the worst job markets since the Great Depression.
And that uncertainty takes its toll.
There’s the anxiety that comes from being educated and jobless. There’s the guilt from taking financial subsidies from already struggling parents. And then there’s the worry of not being able to pay many thousands of dollars in student loans.
Like other ailments of the ego, sometimes, group therapy helps assuage the condition.
At a forum hosted by the Century Foundation, a policy research organization, in Manhattan on Wednesday, the sum of these fears was embodied by the audience — mostly summer interns and recent college graduates — as they took advice from a panel of experts assembled to explain reasons and solutions for their post-graduate employment pain.
On the panel were a writer, a policy analyst, an economist and the leader of a youth advocacy group.
At first, it seemed as though nothing but waves of gloom were rolling off the panel.
“There is $684 billion in unpaid student loans,” said the writer, Anya Kamenetz, author of “Generation Debt: The New Economics of Being Young.”
The policy analyst, Edwin W. Koc of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, said in his research, he was searching for bright spots in the employment picture for young professionals.
“Basically,” he said, “We didn’t find any.”
The economist, William M. Rodgers III of Rutgers University, shared an anecdote on how he and his wife landed tenure-track jobs in the same department. “We were able to use her network,” he said.
And Matthew Segal, a 2008 graduate of Kenyon College and the executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment, asked for all the unpaid interns in the room to raise their hands. Half the audience gave a signal, and shared a nervous laugh of camaraderie.
Toward the back of the room, Tufts University student Sara Mishra, an unpaid intern working in New York this summer, muttered something to a friend seated next to her.
“All I’m getting from this is depressing,” she said. “But, oh well.”
Later, she explained: “To be fair, that’s what it is. They’re just telling us the facts.”
But the panelists at the forum, titled “Out of College and Out of Work: Good Employment Policy for a Bad Economy,” did their best to make light of the seemingly endless string of bad news and rejection letters facing the current cohort of recent graduates.
Ms. Kamenetz pointed out that compared to many other groups of people, college graduates, even if their dream jobs need to be deferred for a year or so, are one of the best-placed groups to weather an economic meltdown.
Few need to worry about supporting families, or paying for mortgages on drastically devalued homes. Their 401(k)’s didn’t take much of a hit, since most college students didn’t have one to begin with. And compared to other young people who skipped college entirely, unemployment rates for degree-holders is more than half that of their less educated peers.
“Education is the greatest hedge against joblessness,” Mr. Rodgers said.
And the fact that the forum took place to begin with is a sign that young people are not taking their gloomy job prospects laying down. The event was the brainchild of Julia Mellon, a 19-year-old junior at Washington University, who is an intern at the Century Foundation this summer.
“A topic like youth unemployment that hits close to home motivates my generation to be active in politics,” Ms. Mellon said.
via NY Times Citiblog
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