By the time you finishing reading this article, another college student will have taken a job he or she doesn’t exactly want. That’s because recent college grads accept unfavorable employment every five minutes, a new report by McKinsey and Company revealed.
Titled “Voice of the Graduate,” the report attempted to assess some of higher education’s shortcomings through the perspective of college students and graduates as opposed to higher education experts.
The study found that approximately 120,000 recent college graduates ended up taking jobs in the retail and service sectors rather than in the industry they studied in college.
“This means roughly 120,000 young Americans who’d rather work elsewhere have taken jobs as waiters, salespeople, cashiers, and the like — because that’s the only work they could find,” the report said.
These figures demonstrate what other statistical measures of the workforce have found, according to the report. For example, 10 percent of cashiers, 15 percent of waiters and waitresses, and 25 percent of retail salespeople have a college degree, McKinsey and Company detailed.
The group’s findings also said a student’s college major significantly determines the value of one’s college experience.
For example, though half of graduates — and 4 in 10 at the nation’s top schools — don’t gain employment in their desired field, liberal arts majors tend to suffer the most.
“This disappointment is most acute for language, literature, and social-science majors, and for marketing and advertising majors,” the report said.
But liberal arts majors were far from the only students to emerge from college with damaged prospects, the report stated.
Many students questioned the decisions they made at the beginning of their college experiences, with more than half saying they would choose another college or major if they had the chance to start over. And one-third of college students said their education did not prepare them for their jobs.
A similar report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce presented similar conclusions about the relationship between major and post-graduate employment, and another in June conducted by Wells Fargo said more students are coming to regret college attendance in the first place.
Perhaps students are beginning to question the benefits of higher education.
