The Choice: Job Prospects Uncertain for New College Graduates

Those readers of The Choice who are still in high school may, at first glance, find little that seems relevant in the front-page article in today’s Times under the headline “Many With New College Degree Find the Job Market Humbling.”

But I urge you to give the article a look, nonetheless, if only because it raises some fundamental questions about why we go to college — and what we can expect after we graduate.

“Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, as have starting salaries for those who can find work,” my colleague Catherine Rampell writes. “What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is ‘worth it’ after all.”

Ms. Rampell cites a study released Wednesday by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers that found the median starting salary for students graduating from four-year colleges in 2009 and 2010 to be $27,000 — down from $30,000 for those who entered the work force from 2006 to 2008.

I was particularly struck by a quote Ms. Rampell provides from Kyle Bishop, 23, who graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2009 and who, in the reporter’s words, “has spent the last two years waiting tables, delivering beer, working at a bookstore and entering data.”

He told her: “I have friends with the same degree as me, from a worse school, but because of who they knew or when they happened to graduate, they’re in much better jobs. It’s more about luck than anything else.”

There’s already a steady stream of comments accumulating in response to Ms. Rampell’s article.

But if you want to start a discussion more focused on how these issues relate to college admissions — including whether these statistics might alter the discussion of whether four-year college is the best route for everyone — you can do so using the comment box below.

And for those who want to read more, I would point you to two articles I wrote over the last year for The Times’s Week in Review: “Plan B: Skip College” and “Is Going to an Elite College Worth the Cost?”