@AuraObscura - I got married in graduate school, too - at the beginning of my fourth year of my PhD program. The most important thing a married doctoral student needs to remember is to come out of your own head from time to time and attend to your spouse. It’s SO easy (especially in the dissertation phase) to neglect your personal relationships and personal care in general when you’re in a doctoral program, and professors kind of tacitly encourage that behavior.
The BLS defines “unemployed” as someone who does not have a job but is currently available for work (e.g., not incarcerated) and has actively looked in the past 4 weeks. (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm). They also have a category for those “marginally attached to the labor force”, which are people who want a job and have actively looked for work sometime in the last 12 months, but for whatever reason not in the last month. (This includes “discouraged workers,” who have stopped looking for work because they don’t believe anyone will hire them.) The BLS estimates that this rate is about 0.9%. A further 1.4% of people say they want a job but having searched in the last year at all. (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/07/employment-vs-unemployment-different-stories-from-the-jobs-numbers/).
I have not seen anywhere that the BLS stops counting people after they have been unemployed for over 18 months - someone has told me this before, but the neither the BLS nor any other government or reliable non-government source has said this. Could you provide a citation for that?
Underemployment is very different from unemployment, which is why it’s not included in the unemployment rate (that would muddle the data). The BLS doesn’t exactly track this, but a common definition from others sources is a person is often counted as “underemployed” if they are working in a job that doesn’t require the highest degree that they hold, as defined by their employer or by the field they’re in (an example: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/current_issues/ci20-1.pdf) But as this article (http://www.nber.org/chapters/c13697.pdf), which uses the same approach, points out, that ended up included a wide range of jobs - IT specialists, web developers, computer network architects, paralegals, police officers, detectives, professional musicians, actors, and dental hygienists. This article categorizes underemployed workers into five different tiers and shows that the low-skilled service job tier, which is what most people think about when they think “underemployed”, is actually quite small even for recent bachelor’s graduates.
There are very few jobs that actually require a PhD, so I’d imagine that if you used the standard definition of “underemployed” that most PhDs in industry would look “underemployed” on paper - even the ones in highly-paid, highly-skilled careers. For example, by this definition, both I (a user experience researcher at Microsoft) and a close friend of mine (a management consultant at McKinsey) would be considered “underemployed.” I would contend that neither of us are anything of the sort.
So I don’t think we can possibly extrapolate that the “real unemployment rate” is probably 5-6% without some unwarranted speculation and including people who are actually not unemployed. (I also definitely was not limiting my definition to “people who can find academic work,” since many PhDs don’t want academic work and most PhDs won’t get it anyway.)