Recent college graduates may face tough times landing jobs at first, but things tend to get easier as graduates acquire more experience and education, according to a new report being released today by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.
The report, titled Hard Times: College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings, stresses that although college is valuable, students should also know how much it pays based on their chosen field of study, explains Dr. Anthony Carnevale, director of the center and co-author of the report.
“The message in general — and it’s a message that we send out all the time — is you need to pay attention to what you major in because in the end, unemployment rates differ by major,” Carnevale said.
The report notes that higher than average unemployment rates tend to be concentrated in specific majors.
For instance, unemployment is highly concentrated in information systems (14.7 percent) as opposed to computer science (8.7 percent).
Despite the fact that both majors are related to computers, Carnevale says the difference is that information systems involve people who do clerical work, such as data entry. According to the report, the implication is that “hiring tends to be slower for users of information compared to those who write programs and create software applications.”
