Liberal arts grads struggle with underemployment, study says

The Chicago Tribune reports:

Warning to college students and millennials still trying to recover from the Great Recession: About 44.5 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed after settling for jobs that typically don't require a college education.

Students in college now may face a struggle in their early career even though the recession has been over for years. That's especially true for students majoring in the liberal arts.

A study of people ages 22 to 27 by researchers at the New York Federal Reserve confirms some of the worst beliefs about the recession. People who finished college during the last few years were hit hard by the unusually cruel economy, much harder than people who had gone to college ahead of the recession.

During the worst point for jobs, around 2011, almost half of newly minted college graduates settled for jobs that didn't require degrees, said Fed researchers Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz.

The impact seems invisible when economists focus on only the nation's unemployment rate. Most of the people who finished college after the recession got jobs, just not the type they imagined when they paid handsomely for college.

Meanwhile, students still in college aren't likely to float easily into the career of their dreams, either.

Since 2000, opportunity has weakened for people with newly minted college degrees. The researchers note that the massive increase in jobs around 2000 was a result of a boom in new technology that seems to have been a one-time burst of opportunity as new jobs were created that hadn't existed previously.

Just a reminder for you rookies out there.