In New York and Connecticut, unemployment is at 5.4 percent, the lowest it has been in seven years. Nationwide, unemployment has dropped its lowest levels since the recession, giving those entering the workforce more opportunity. But for many, that elusive dream job is still out of reach.
63-year-oldJoan Goodman has been struggling to get a job with her liberal arts degrees since she was 24. Instead of teaching English in a university or primary school setting like she once hoped, she is pitching her art on the streets of Woodstock, NY.
And then there’s 29-year-old Connecticut native MikeTobey, who comes with a familiar story. He earned a degree in English from the University of New Haven back in 2009. He has held a variety of jobs, but none in the field he went to school for. He has held an on-and-off part-time security job at Toad’s Place, a music venue in New Haven, CT, for the last seven years.
“It’s always been a side-job to me. Right now it’s my only job,” he says.
He works anywhere between five and 30 hours a week, averaging about 10 hours a week. He’s being paid a little above Connecticut’s $9.15 minimum wage, taking home between $90 and $150 per week. This isn’t enough to live on, so Tobey lives with his parents. He said he started off applying to jobs all over but...
“Motivation isn’t quite like it used to be, I guess,” he said.
It wasn’t always like this. For a while Tobey had a job he actually enjoyed.
“I worked for my friend’s record label for about eight months, before they just up and decided to move to Pittsburgh a couple months ago, which left me out of that job,” said Tobey.
He said he has always wanted a job in journalism, but has made no progress in that direction. He said he would also like to continue working in the music industry, but breaking in is difficult.
With more students graduating with college degrees than ever, many struggle to find rewarding full-time jobs in their field.
Jobs once reserved for fresh-faced teenagers are now jobs that college graduates are trying to live on. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than 42 percent of low-wage workers over 25 have at least some college education. Only 16 percent of workers in the fast food industry are teenagers, down from 25 percent a decade ago.
And while unemployment drops, the types of jobs being created are low-paying, keeping wages down even as employment rises.
Not all fields have enough jobs to meet the demand of a young, educated workforce. Like teaching. There are more teachers than there are teaching jobs in much of the Northeast, leaving this group of people to search for jobs elsewhere.
Middlebury College economist Dave Colander, who studied the phenomenon, said of those who received a Ph.D. in English over the past 35 years, only half were employed in tenure-track academic jobs upon graduation.
Goodman has struggled to get a teaching job since she got her Ph.D. in 2002.
Since then, she has bounced between jobs, trying everything from substitute teacher to retail employee. But she wasn’t doing what she enjoyed, so she tried a different tact.
This brings us back to the streets of Woodstock, where Goodman has started peddling her art in the form of what she calls instant portraits. Goodman will capture the attention of people on the street, drawing them without looking at her paper, in hopes that they will like the sometimes comical depiction of themselves. If they want to keep it, Goodman asks for a suggested donation of $5. She makes barely enough to be considered pocket money.
Goodman thinks that her struggle to find consistent and steady employment partially stems from society’s attitude when she entered the job market.
“You’ve got a bachelor’s, you’ll get something and then later on it was, you’ve got a master’s, you’ll get something,” says Goodman.
This rings true to millennials, who have been told that any college degree is better than nothing.
But is that true? If so, why are so many college graduates still working at low-wage positions that they are clearly overqualified for?
Michael Sattinger, professor of economics and director of Undergraduate Studies at the University at Albany, has a theory. He specializes mainly in labor economics and income distribution. He says there have always been a group of people overqualified for their jobs. But now, he says, something a little different is happening.
“We’ve sort of taken the center out of the labor market through computerization and communications. With the result that people either go for jobs that have a high demand for skills or they go for jobs that have low demands for skills," said Sattinger. "But we don’t have that middle part of the market anymore. That’s called job polarization.”
New York State’s wage board recently approved a $15 minimum wage for fast food workers despite objections by the business community. Sattinger believes this will increase the demand for fast food jobs.
“Some people who haven’t been able to find jobs that use their qualifications might be seeking those jobs in the meantime,” Sattinger said.
Sattinger says different people, including those who can’t get jobs they’re qualified for, might pursue these jobs, changing the makeup of who works in the fast food industry.
But Peter Skott, a professor of Economics at UMass Amherst, anticipates another result. He thinks the low-skilled workers will see an increase in pay and benefits.
“The more highly educated workers might see their employment in those jobs reduced and they may then get pushed into higher skilled jobs for which the wage might fall a bit,” said Skott.
This might be some consolation for graduates like Tobey, who could reap the benefits if this were the case. But for now, the struggle continues.
WAMC News Intern Acadia Otlowski graduated from Central Connecticut State in May with a degree in journalism and criminal justice.
Copyright 2015 WAMC Northeast Public Radio
