NY Fed: Are Recent College Graduates Finding Good Jobs?

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<p><a href=“FEDERAL RESERVE BANK of NEW YORK”>http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/current_issues/ci20-1.pdf&lt;/a&gt;

While there appears to be a cyclical component to underemployment among recent college graduates, the broader V-shaped pattern in the underemployment rate over the past two decades is also consistent with new research arguing that there has been a reversal in the demand for cognitive skills since 2000. 4 According to this research, businesses ramped up their hiring of college-educated workers in an effort to adapt to the technological changes occurring during the 1980s and 1990s. However, as the information technology revolution reached maturity, demand for cognitive skill fell accordingly. As a result, during the first decade of the 2000s, many college graduates were forced to move down the occupational hierarchy to take jobs typically performed by lower-skilled workers. From this perspective, the relatively low underemployment rates among recent college graduates at the peak of the technology boom around 2000 may in fact be an outlier, while the recent rise in underemployment represents a return to more typical conditions.

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