It’s “Pomp and Circumstance” time for 1.6 million US college graduates.
While members of the Class of 2014 have some cause to celebrate, they also know they are a few short months away from starting to pay down their share of the $1 trillion-plus student-loan debt.
The most shocking number of all is that only 17 percent of these soon-to-be grads have a job lined up, according to AfterCollege Inc., which crunches these numbers and also tries to help match employers with recent graduates.
Despite our being a year further along on the road to economic recovery, this year’s 17 percent is actually down from the Class of 2013’s 20 percent who had a job lined up before graduating.
Most kids who go to college do so to get skills for work after graduation. It’s never going to be 100 percent or even 90 percent of graduates who have job offers waiting, but it shouldn’t be that 83 percent of seniors have nothing lined up, either — especially when 73 percent say they were actively looking for work.
Oddly, even 82 percent of supposedly more “marketable” majors (engineering, technology, math) were still empty-handed.
The problem with the country’s job picture is clearly a lack of growth coupled with an equal lack of confidence in our economic direction. Hence the tendency of CEOs to buy back stock and increase dividends while laying people off. For a company to build products it doesn’t need or spend money on bridges to nowhere would be irresponsible.
And yet, with these job stats facing graduates, DC plans to raise federally funded student loan rates by nearly a full percentage point for students next fall.
Kudos to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for trying to fight this by proposing in her first bill to allow kids to borrow at the same rate that banks do at the discount window from the Federal Reserve.
Yes, it would cut into the government’s profit from student loans, but making money by putting kids and their families into deep debt has to end.
Here’s another idea: Mandate by legislation that college and university endowments use 5 percent to 10 percent of their capital to reduce tuition and college expenses across the board.