Parents, rejoice: Your new college graduate is less likely to squat on your couch than in recent years.
Graduation ceremonies are increasingly turning into sendoffs for gainful employment rather than a sobering reminder of mounting student debt and job rejections for the newest members of the real world in the Washington area.
“Employers can ill afford to keep their pipeline closed down for too long without damaging their organization,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a Chicago outplacement consulting firm. “This year, employers are visiting more college campuses and doing far more hiring than what graduates’ brothers and sisters experienced.”
The class of 2012 was fortunate to spend the worst years of the recession on campus, while their older siblings hit the job market as the economy was hemorrhaging jobs at the fastest rate since the Great Depression.
Between January and April, the unemployment rate for college graduates 24 and under fell to 7.2 percent — down almost 2 percent from a year earlier — nearly a percentage point below the national average. And the newest annual survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers shows employers plan to hire 10 percent more graduates than they did last year.
“These students started as freshmen in 2008 when things were pretty bleak and have been bombarded with bad news about jobs,” said Brian Rowe, assistant director of the George Washington University Career Center. “The mood of students is totally different. We’ve seen an upswing in students networking, working and actually landing jobs in a field more fertile than what we’ve seen.”
Still, even graduates of the region’s best universities aren’t doing back flips, as hiring has yet to return to pre-recession levels.
Ben Levy, who just graduated from American University, originally expected to have a job lined up by the time he left the Northwest campus. Now he wants to be employed by September.
“I feel more confident, but I don’t believe the job market is fully recovered,” he explained after finishing an interview with a New York advertising agency. “A lot of my friends have yet to find a job. But more people I know have jobs right now than when my sister graduated two years ago.”
Levy added that students have become far more realistic about their job prospects, focusing on landing respectable employment rather than their fantasy gig.
And in Washington, where hordes of college graduates have flocked to a steady flow of government jobs, the spigot will likely slow in coming years.
“Things are getting better for the younger worker, but the Washington metropolitan area is no longer a leader in job growth,” said Anirban Basu, chairman and CEO of Sage Policy Group Inc., an economic and policy consulting firm in Baltimore. “Many of those graduates in future years will find out that the Washington area isn’t as easy to find a job as it used to be. Job creation is likely to slow as federal government adjusts to fiscal realities.”
George Mason University economist Stephen Fuller echoed that sentiment.
“We’re not the top of the heap anymore,” he said. “Uncle Sam isn’t helping us like he used to. It’s a particularly good market for younger people because we specialize in college-level work. But we’ll grow like the rest of the nation instead of having a built-in advantage.”
