Unemployed Graduate Quotes

Just as a CEO could care less about pay equity, the university administrator is unconcerned with how many of her program graduates secure employment of any particular quality.

Decades later, universities in Sri Lanka likewise had “a backlog of unemployed graduates” who had specialized in the humanities and the social sciences.

The majority of my generation decides to move back in with their parents after college. Unemployment, for them, is twice the national average. According to one 2011 study by the University of Michigan, many graduates aren’t even bothering to learn how to drive. The road is blocked, they are saying, so why get a license I won’t be able to use? We whine and complain and mope when things won’t go our way. We’re crushed when what we were “promised” is revoked—as if that’s not allowed to happen. Instead of doing much about it, we sit at home and play video games or travel or worse, pay for more school with more loan debt that will never be forgiven. And then we wonder why it isn’t getting any better.

In choosing to be a Psychology major, I decided to learn for the joy of learning for the first time in my life. I'd always been fascinated by human nature. What makes us act the way we do? Why do we make the same mistakes over and over? But I guess my interest is purely theoretical. I'm a Psychology major who has no desire to work with people. This was poor planning on my part, I suppose. My parents definitely think so. But choosing passion over practicality seemed so honorable when I was a first-year student and graduation seemed so very, very far away . . . But now, a semester away from unemployment, I realize how much better off those Engineering students really are. Sure, they're boring conversationalists that make you want to kill yourself because every story begins, “The other day? In the lab?” But people become a whole helluva lot more interesting when they're pulling down six figures, don't they? If I'm going to drag my friends out to my cardboard box, the pressure's on to provide some pretty goddamned sparkling conversation once they get there. And even with all my noble knowledge for knowledge's sake, I'm not sure I can.

in January 2004, the number of unemployed American college graduates actually exceeded the number of unemployed high school dropouts.

I decide to scope out craigslist to see all the vibrant economic employment opportunities available to me in this depression. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean “recession.” No matter how many millions of jobs are lost, how much debt our country accrues, or how many years the stagnation drags on, it’s not a depression until the dogmatic media officially declares it to be a depression. It’s as if they believe by repeatedly printing or saying economists are afraid the economy will slip back into a recession, they’ll fool the masses of unemployed or underemployed into believing that not only are we not in a depression, but we aren’t even in a recession. I’m sure the millions of unemployed, freshly graduated college kids who have thousands of dollars of unshakable debt to pay off feel comforted by the empty repetition.

. . . I bet I'm beginning to make some parents nervous - here I am, bragging of being a dropout, and unemployable, and about to make a pitch for you to follow your creative dreams, when what parents want is for their children to do well in their field, to make them look good, and maybe also to assemble a tasteful fortune . . . But that is not your problem. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to live it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are . . . I do know you are not what you look like, or how much you weigh, or how you did in school, or whether you start a job next Monday or not. Spirit isn't what you do, it's . . . well, again, I don't actually know. They probably taught this junior year at Goucher; I should've stuck around. But I know that you feel best when you're not doing much - when you're in nature, when you're very quiet or, paradoxically, listening to music . . . We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it's a really busy person, like you, taking care of the needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you. In fact, that's often when we see Spirit most brightly . . . In my twenties I devised a school of relaxation that has unfortunately fallen out of favor in the ensuing years - it was called Prone Yoga. You just lay around as much as possible. You could read, listen to music, you could space out or sleep. But you had to be lying down. Maintaining the prone. You've graduated. You have nothing left to prove, and besides, it's a fool's game. If you agree to play, you've already lost. It's Charlie Brown and Lucy, with the football. If you keep getting back on the field, they win. There are so many great things to do right now. Write. Sing. Rest. Eat cherries. Register voters. And - oh my God - I nearly forgot the most important thing: refuse to wear uncomfortable pants, even if they make you look really thin. Promise me you'll never wear pants that bind or tug or hurt, pants that have an opinion about how much you've just eaten. The pants may be lying! There is way too much lying and scolding going on politically right now without having your pants get in on the act, too. So bless you. You've done an amazing thing. And you are loved; you're capable of lives of great joy and meaning. It's what you are made of. And it's what you're here for. Take care of yourselves; take care of one another. And give thanks, like this: Thank you.

You don’t mention what you’d like to study, but I assure you there are many ways to fund a graduate education. I know a whole lot of people who did not go broke getting a graduate degree. There is funding for tuition remission at many schools, as well as grants, paid research, and teaching assistantships, and—yes—the offer of more student loans. Perhaps more importantly in your case, there are numerous ways to either cancel portions of your student loan debt or defer payment. Financial difficulty, unemployment, attending school at least half-time (i.e., graduate school!), working in certain professions, and serving in the Peace Corps or other community service jobs are some ways that you would be eligible for debt deferment or cancellation. I encourage you to investigate your options so you can make a plan that brings you peace of mind. There are many websites that will elucidate what I have summarized above.

Rather, part of the argument is that with so much graduate unemployment, juvenile delinquency and high-school absenteeism, there could be practical alternatives to what we have now. A case could be made for a return to apprenticeships in trades such as car mechanics. Another would be to rearrange our priorities during workplace hiring. Less dependency might be placed on easily-achieved academic certificates - and more public recognition be given to hard-won experience. Other possibilities include early entry into the armed forces or police - via military finishing schools or junior police academies, instead of book-obsessed senior high schools and colleges of the woolly-minded humanities. But, for sure, a campaign of objections to this broader model would be publicly raised by the very groups who stand to lose financially from the decrease in municipal funding. That is, well-heeled academics and comfortably-off teaching unions.

Ted and Rick. Ted graduates from university and starts his climb up the corporate ladder. Every day he works long hours. He spends Saturday on projects to try to get ahead. No time for sports, no time for relationships, and no money to save. Every month he reviews his goals to see how far he can climb the corporate ladder. Extra meetings, extra projects. Gradually, Ted begins his climb to the top. And after 18 short years, Ted has his chance. He could become the next new, semi-young, chief executive of the company. But the owner gives the chief executive job to his recently graduated grandson, who promptly fires Ted. Ted has lost 18 years of his life, his dignity, his hard effort, and is again unemployed. Ted’s friend, Rick, also leaves university, but takes an ordinary job. However, Rick does something different. In the evenings, after work, Rick starts his part-time network marketing business. Four years later, Rick fires his boss, and lives the rest of his life on the earnings of his network marketing business.

OBAMA WENT THROUGH STAGES. That first day, I was in multiple meetings where he tried to lift everyone’s spirits. That evening, he interrupted the senior staff meeting in Denis McDonough’s office and gave a version of the speech that I’d now heard three times as we all sat there at the table. He was the only one standing. It was both admirable and heartbreaking watching him take everything in stride, working—still—to lift people’s spirits. When he was done, I spoke first. “It says a lot about you,” I said, “that you’ve spent the whole day trying to buck the rest of us up.” People applauded. Obama looked down. On the Thursday after the election, he had a long, amiable meeting with Trump. It left him somewhat stupefied. Trump had repeatedly steered the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Obama could draw big crowds but Hillary couldn’t. He’d expressed openness to Obama’s arguments about healthcare, the Iran deal, immigration. He’d asked for recommendations for staff. He’d praised Obama publicly when the press was there. Afterward, Obama called a few of us up to the Oval Office to recap. “I’m trying to place him,” he said, “in American history.” He told us Trump had been perfectly cordial, but he’d almost taken pride in not being attached to a firm position on anything. “He peddles bullshit. That character has always been a part of the American story,” I said. “You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.” Obama chuckled. “Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.” In breaks between meetings in the coming days, he expressed disbelief that the election had been lost. With unemployment at 5 percent. With the economy humming. With the Affordable Care Act working. With graduation rates up. With most of our troops back home. But then again, maybe that’s why Trump could win. People would never have voted for him in a crisis. He kept talking it out, trying on different theories. He chalked it up to multiple car crashes at once. There was the letter from Comey shortly before the election, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server. There was the steady release of Podesta emails from Wikileaks through October. There was a rabid right-wing propaganda machine and a mainstream press that gorged on the story of Hillary’s emails, feeding Trump’s narrative of corruption.

One Forbes article suggests that as many as 53 percent of college graduates are unemployed or underemployed relative to their education level.

A knot grew in his chest.  All signs of weakness, nerves, stress.  He looked around him at the true examples of men—at least it seemed that way. Six years ago he had graduated from New York University, around the middle of his class in film school.  He quickly learned that the middle meant “unemployable.

No Arab country produces graduates who can compete with their East Asian counterparts; the only Muslim country whose graduates meet world standards is Turkey. University graduates throughout the Arab world have miserable prospects. “The average unemployment rate for the age group 15-24 years in the Group of Arab Countries reaches to 30%, compared with an average rate of world 14.4%,” according to the Arab Labor Organization. “Problem [sic] of high unemployment rates among the educated graduates from universities and colleges, which reaches to 26.8% in Morocco and 19.3% in Algeria, 17.7 % in Jordan. It was noted that 94% of the unemployed in the Arab Republic of Egypt are in the age group 15-29 years, reflecting a lack of consistency of education plans to the needs of the Labor market.”9

He gave me the promise when I was weak, unemployed, not even a graduate, and in my vest and half pants.

People with brain and body differences have the lowest graduation rates, highest incarceration rates, and highest unemployment out of any minority group.

Let’s take the case of US law schools as an example. If you were to say to someone educated, “There are too many law schools producing too many lawyers in the US,” she would probably agree, in part because there have been dozens of articles over the past several years about the precipitous drop in positions at law firms and the many unemployed law school graduates.9 The general response to this problem is, “Well, people will figure it out and eventually stop applying to law school,” the suggestion being that the market will clear and self-correct if given enough time. On the surface it looks like this market magic is now happening. In 2013, law school applications are projected to be down to about 54,000 from a high of 98,700 in 2004.10 That’s a dramatic decrease of 45 percent. However, a closer look shows that the number of students who started law school in 2011 and are set to graduate in 2014 was 48,697, about 43,000 of whom will graduate, based on historical graduation rates.11 We’ll still be producing 36,000–43,000 newly minted law school grads a year, not far from the peak of 44,495 set in 2012, from now until the current entering class graduates in 2016. Meanwhile, in 2011, only 65.4 percent of law school graduates got jobs for which they needed to pass the bar exam, and estimates of the number of new legal jobs available run as low as 2,180 per year.12 Bloomberg Businessweek has projected a surplus of 176,000 unemployed or underemployed law school graduates by 2020.13 So even as applications plummet, there will not be dramatically fewer law school graduates produced in the coming several years, though it will have been easier to get in as acceptance rates rise due to the diminished applicant pool.14 We’ll still be producing many more lawyers than the market requires, but now they’ll be less talented. If anything, the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. Human capital markets don’t self-correct very quickly, if at all. At a minimum there’s a massive time lag that spans years, for several reasons.

I graduated from college in the spring with a history degree, only to discover that there are no jobs for someone with my specialty. We've all decided being doomed to repeat history is fine, I guess.

Will Spelling Keep You Out Of Interviews? Whether we like it or not, hiring managers judge job seekers based on how our resumes, cover letters, and LinkedIn profiles are written. That’s why it is essential that you turn on Microsoft Word’s spell-check so it catches every error in your resume and cover letter. But don’t stop there, after turning on Microsoft Word’s spell check, copy all of the verbiage in your LinkedIn profile and paste it into a Word document. Here are some of the reasons I say this… • 5,908 LinkedIn Profiles contained “Universiry” where they meant to write “University”. • 34,254 profiles contain “Graduat” where they meant to write “Graduate”. • 25 English teacher’s profiles contain “Colege” where they meant to write “College”. If you’re not getting interviews, take a second look at your resume, cover letter and LinkedIn profiles. Hiring managers get to choose who they want to hire. Don’t let your spelling be the reason they don’t hire you.

Desert Ridge High School in Arizona even blamed the future unemployment of high school boys on the domino effect that occurs when boy sees young woman in yoga pants, boy gets distracted, boy fails all his classes, boy works as a fry cook. Boys getting distracted is not the female student’s problem. I spent half my time in high school looking into basketball shorts to stare at dicks and I graduated with a 4.0. Sounds like these boys have a time-management problem, not a yoga pant problem.

Spending all your waking hours doing only what feels good is a viable life plan if you’re a Labrador retriever, but for humans it’s a blueprint for unemployment, divorce and irrelevance.

The first of these CDC-funded studies came out in November 2015.9 Using data for Wilmington, Delaware, the study discovered that the majority of young men who were involved in firearm crime were also involved in crime as juveniles. Many got expelled from school, were abused as children, dropped out of high school prior to graduation, or were unemployed. Then, the study simply asserts that government programs would help solve the problem. It suggests providing “life skills training,” “individual placement and support” for jobs, “multi-dimensional treatment foster care,” and something listed as “coping power.” It isn’t surprising that research funded by a Democratic administration would reach these policy conclusions.

The Russians are graduating five times as many engineers each year as the United States. There is no unemployment of them. Here, unfortunately, there is little or no stability in our programs. It’s train, hire, and fire.

Wages for new university graduates have actually been declining over the past decade, while up to 50 percent of new graduates are forced to take jobs that do not require a degree

Which is where the next ambitious ALG project comes in: African Leadership Unleashed, or ALU. Led by Fred Swaniker, ALU is a plan to establish a network of 25 universities across the continent by the end of the decade—Africa’s Ivy League—each of which will have 10,000 students. The first ALU has already opened in Mauritius. The idea is to apply the exact same boutique model of the African Leadership Academy to tertiary education. Once the 25 colleges are built and running, it will mean that every four years 250,000 young Africans trained in business, government, ethics, social policy, medicine and the arts will be entering the workforce. Among them will be the new generation of Africa’s leaders. Says Swaniker, “Hundreds of thousands of university graduates on the continent today are not equipped with the skills to lead change. About 45 percent of university graduates in Africa today are unemployed. This is a tragedy. I want to change this by applying ALA’s model in a tertiary space to provide the critical skills and leadership experience necessary for success.” Swaniker announced the project in a powerful talk at TEDGlobal 2014 in Rio de Janeiro titled “The Leaders Who Ruined Africa, and the Generation Who Can Fix It.” The talk has been downloaded over 1 million times and is a powerful and inspiring manifesto for this, the African Century.

The G.I. Bill, formally known as the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, provided many benefits for the returning World War II veterans. These benefits included cash payments of tuition and living expenses to attend a university, high school or vocational education school, provided low-cost mortgages, and supplied low-interest loans to start a business, as well as one year of unemployment compensation. About 2.2 million returning, honorably discharged veterans used the G.I. Bill in order to attend colleges or universities, and another 5.6 million used the G.I. Bill for other kinds of training programs. This program helped make the United States the best educated country and the exceptional leader of the world, for years to come. It was an exciting time in America and I had a center aisle seat to witness it.” I and many other veterans used the G.I. Bill to help pay for my education. In my case it allowed me to attend Central Connecticut State College (now a State University) to do my graduate work in education. The fact that so many people could afford to go back to school made the United States the best educated country in the years following World War II. Unfortunately during the past five years the United States has dropped by 11 points in our educational standing worldwide and now scores 17th among the 34 OECD countries. To make matters worse is that we are below average in math and science when the world depends more than ever on technology. A good part of the reason is that young people cannot afford the cost of a college education! The defense used by many of the less educated is that college is for egg heads and being a deplorable is worn as a badge of honor. If something doesn’t happen soon we will become a third world country but that opens up another topic for another day!

It hung above his mantel, the painting of the headless hawk, and on those nights when he could not sleep he would pour a glass of whiskey and talk to it, tell it the stuff of his life: he was, he said, a poet who had never written poetry, a painter who had never painted, a lover who had never loved - someone without direction, and quite headless. It wasn't that he hadn't tried - good beginnings, always, bad endings, always. Vincent, white, male, 36, college graduate: a man in the sea, fifty miles from shore; a victim, born to be murdered, either by himself or another; an actor unemployed.

Congratulations to all those who just graduated and those who will still graduate. I wish all of you can get employed. For those who might get jobs immediately please don’t lose hope. Never allow people in your hood to tell you that you are the same because you are sitting with them being unemployed. You are not the same. You are a post graduate. Get yourself The Theory of 46 Be’s book to keep you going. I would say, All the best with your future life, but I remembered that you are the future.

We borrowed their syllabus, they borrowed our graduates.