The Talent Disrupted Study on College Graduates' Employment Outcomes: Some Thoughts

The Strada Education Foundation's new study of the employment outcomes of four-year college graduates, "Talented Disrupted," is making the rounds of the news.

The content of the study, which concentrates on "underemployment" among these graduates (their working jobs that do not require four-year college degrees a year after graduation), affirms the conventional wisdom on many a point. Yes, a humanities degree is more likely to lead to underemployment than, for example, an engineering degree. Yes, certain demographics suffer more than others (with no surprises to be found here regarding which ones), while the problem is bigger in some U.S. states than others (and, again, nothing striking me as very surprising on that score here). And so on and so forth. Yet there was much in the numbers, at least, that will seem surprising to those who abide by the conventional wisdom, not least that

* Over half of college graduates are underemployed, such that a college graduate has a less than even chance of being employed in a job actually requiring a college degree (never mind their particular degree) a full year after graduation.

* The major a student chooses is more important than the school they went to--a student with an in-demand major from an "inclusive" school less likely to be underemployed than a student with a less in-demand major from a selective, elite, school (contrary to stupid claims such as "a Harvard graduate who majors in somersaults will be able to find some kind of job to pay the bills").

* Where differences in the employment prospects of majors are concerned even those majors with the lowest rate of underemployment still leave the degree-holder a 1 in 4 chance of being underemployed.

* There is significant underemployment among the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) majors, with engineering graduates having a 26 percent rate of underemployment, the figure 35 percent for majors in mathematics and statistics, and 36 percent among computer science graduates--while the underemployment rate is an appalling 44 percent for physical science majors and 47 percent for majors in biology and the biomedical fields.

* The underemployment rate among business majors differs immensely depending on how "math-intensive" their subject is. Those business majors that are math-intensive, like finance and accounting, have a "low" underemployment rate of 29 percent, but those that are not math-intensive, like marketing or management, have a rate of 57 percent--which is actually slightly worse than the figure for such "useless" majors as the social sciences (51 percent), communications, journalism and related programs (53 percent), psychology (53 percent), the visual and performing arts (54 percent), and the humanities (55 percent).

In short, the prospects for underemployment of college graduates are worse than fifty-fifty, the "safest" majors still carry significant risk (worse than 1 in 4 for engineering graduates!), while many "STEM" and business majors are in almost as much danger on this score as the despised social sciences-communications-arts-humanities majors, and attendance of an elite school falls short of saving those who picked their majors without an eye to their later economic prospects. Moreover, all this matters because those who become underemployed have a hard time "escaping" that condition, especially if they were likely to end up underemployed to begin with.

Considering the situation in, as the study terms it, a "historically tight" labor market, with all that implies for these being particularly good times rather than bad ones, it seems far from unreasonable that many young people are becoming much more cautious about college than before--both what they choose to study, and whether they decide to go at all. Indeed, as I have remarked before, we may be starting to see a fundamental change in the way we think about higher education--one arguably long overdue.