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You May Need a College Degree to Work in Fast Food

Published 12/09/08 Craig Harrington - Print Article
E-mail - editor@economyincisis.org

Our nation needs productive and profitable career options for its workforce. Unfortunately, the job market for college graduates is getting increasingly grim as layoffs and a slowdown in “new hires” cracks down on employment figures.

College graduates are rapidly leaving the labor force due to an utter lack of reasonable talent-based opportunities. This phenomenon is removing the ingenuity and innovation of young and able minds out of the work-force. It has also led many college educated and skilled workers to leave the United States is pursuit of better opportunities abroad.

For most of the recession America was experiencing completely normal unemployment figures. Workers with less education or less skill suffered from the highest unemployment as employers began cutting back on basic jobs and entry-level positions. However, following the Bear Stearns collapse in March – which kicked off the financial tumble still being witnessed today – unemployment numbers for highly educated and highly skilled workers have outpaced those of their less skilled counterparts. In November alone, 533,000 jobs were slashed, accounting for the largest loss in 34 years, and the unemployment rate catapulted to 6.7 percent. In the past three months 1.25 million jobs have been lost.

In a typical recession industries with simple, minimum wage positions tend to make the greatest cutbacks. As our current economic spiral turned the corner from a simple recession to a full-scale crisis the market for skilled labor dried up. To make matters worse hundreds of thousands of highly educated, highly skilled and highly paid professionals were dumped into the labor pool via massive layoffs and budgetary cutbacks. Recent graduates are now being forced into competition for entry-level positions with older professionals who have similar educational pedigrees but are vastly more qualified in terms of their work experience.

College graduates are competing – and losing – to seasoned professionals in the ever dwindling market for “new hires” in the corporate sector. In turn, they are now competing with non-college educated workers for even lower level positions. Princeton economist Alan Krueger expects the number of college graduates working in food service and other “unskilled” industries to increase as employers take advantage of an increase in the skill of their labor pool. This shift could not only lock highly overqualified individuals into menial jobs, it could completely faze unskilled workers out of any reasonable competition in the labor market.

The backsliding in our economy is forcing workers to take a step down at every level, which is having a domino effect on the economy. Our nation can never pull itself out of this malaise without viable, productive employment options. To make matters worse, the increase in unemployment will put even greater strains on our already indebted government as the number of participants in federal and state unemployment compensation programs increase. The unemployment figures represent a lose-lose situation for the United States.

Source The New York Times:

The gap between declining employment and rising unemployment is greatest for college graduates because they are leaving the labor force at a rapid rate.

…

The job situation is likely to weaken considerably for less-educated workers as the downturn persists, however, because employers are likely to raise skill requirements. Employers tend to be more selective in downturns. A study by Paul Devereux, for example, found “the education levels of new hires within occupations are higher when the unemployment rate is high and this effect is more pronounced in lower-paying occupations.” If this is right, then more college graduates should be working at Starbucks in the months ahead.

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