Opinion: why are college graduates ending up unemployed?

 

Hello everyone,

Welcome to this week's opinion post (basically the posts where I don't write about business news). Before we dive in, thank you so much for reading my other articles in this blog and supporting me. Additionally, I am working on an opinion article about the value of modern art, and I would appreciate it if you fill out this survey (link: http://bit.ly/3Ec9BRf). Your response would greatly contribute to my research. 

Let's get started on today's talk. This post will be a part of my goal to explore how this society could change to maximize human capital to its fullest. To start off easy, let's talk about college, the step most of us take before we join the workforce.

In the millennial generation, college directly correlates with future success. Most college graduates could work hard to obtain a job and fulfill their version of the American Dream. In contrast, many college graduates, especially liberal arts majors, have not been able to get a job in recent years. Like Charlie Kirk said many times, college is a scam because it no longer guarantees your future. 

Many people have debated the relevance of college, so we will focus on something different: Why are college graduates ending up unemployed? It could be the lack of popularity of that major or the job associated with the degree. Or could this imply some problem with this system we live in? 

First, let's start with the economic aspect of our situation. Assessing a person's capability, Education, skills, and experience are important aspects of human capital (a person's value). Human capital is what employers look for in an employee. Receiving higher education represents more skill in an employee. 

Instead of heading straight to the workforce after high school, a person spent more years sharpening some specialized skills by attending college. Even for liberal arts majors, those students spent four years of college sharpening their soft skills to bring a different perspective into any field they go in. Each skill matters. Therefore, higher education, regardless of the major, matters. 

In theory, an economy provides an endless amount of work to complete before it reaches its ultimate productivity. Similarly, our economy still faces many problems such as unemployment, poverty, and inflation to fix. However, According to the Pew Research Center, only 37.9% of adults in the United States have a college degree. Now here we raise a question, if the population with higher education is relatively scarce, why aren't they utilized to their fullest and end up unemployed?

The most popular majors are STEM, business, and healthcare. Those three majors' corresponding careers have high demand and require specialized skills. For liberal arts majors, college mainly focuses on developing transformable skills such as critical thinking and analysis. Although those skills are easily applicable to any career, many liberal arts students do not have specialized knowledge of a specific career option. The careers that liberal arts students mostly lean towards -- journalism, artist, public relations, and nonprofit work -- became overly saturated, intensifying the competition, and resulting in unemployment. 

But guess what? It's not the end of the world for you if you are a college student in liberal arts because your skills and knowledge still matter to this society. Your skill is already well-rounded, and you just need an extra nudge of the knowledge for a specific field, which you can achieve by doing an additional minor degree.

Unemployment in society also came for some other reasons. To save money, an employer would prefer to give a raise to a skilled professional to stay in the field rather than hire new workers. Because new workers cost more to train, employers obviously favor keeping a skilled professional. From many job descriptions on Indeed, the words "prior experience" always pop up. However, Most college students these days do not have that much real-world experience to begin with, automatically placing them at a disadvantage to survive in the job field. 

Although you might not start off experienced, you can always learn the experience through signing up for volunteering or internship opportunities. Additionally, a network could also bring you far in terms of getting a job. 

If none of the above work out, you can always start your own business or project because there is an endless amount of work needed to solve all the problems in this society. This process is all about exploring your passion and making your contribution to help make this economy a better place. You don't need an employer here. Perhaps you won't need college to help you find a job opportunity either.

Anyway, this brings us to the end of this post. Stay tuned for more opinion posts in the future --expanding on utilizing human capital to maximize productivity in this economy. If this post inspired you to start a business, check out "Entrepreneur Essentials" while you're at it. Thank you so much for reading this week's post!