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tailfins
11-13-2012, 12:54 PM
Recent Grads May Never Recover from Recession

(http://prospect.org/article/university-hard-knocks)http://prospect.org/article/university-hard-knocks


Picture three people: one person who doesn’t go to college, someone who graduates with average grades from a non-elite college, and a third who graduates from the top of her class at an elite university. Having the bad luck to graduate into a recession has a long-term impact on the earnings of all young people who graduate into a recession. Looking at the downturn of the early 1980s, labor economist Lisa Kahn found that for every 1 percent increase in unemployment, young people experienced an initial 6 percent to 7 percent decrease in their wages. Even 15 years out of college, wages for these grads were 2.5 percent lower.


The biggest change for this group of workers can be seen in the massive growth of the unpaid internship. Data on unpaid internships are difficult to find, but surveys tell us that taking an unpaid internship doesn’t lead to better job placement than going straight into one’s first job


Ben Bernanke might seem like the oddest guy to be causing grief to the characters of the TV show Girls and other millennials, but his failure to bring unemployment down forms the backdrop of their unpaid internships, cruel bosses, returns to their childhood bedrooms, and general collapse of the idea that a “career” could exist for them.

It's an interesting point that high unemployment adversely affects even those who have a job.


THANKS A LOT, BARACK!