Underemployment in the early careers of college graduates following the Great Recession

Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz

No 749, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: Though labor market conditions steadily improved following the Great Recession, underemployment among recent college graduates continued to climb, reaching highs not seen since the early 1990s. In this paper, we take a closer look at the jobs held by underemployed college graduates in the early stages of their careers during the first few years after the Great Recession. Contrary to popular perception, we show that relatively few recent graduates were working in low-skilled service jobs, and that many of the underemployed worked in fairly well paid non-college jobs requiring some degree of knowledge and skill. We also find that the likelihood of being underemployed was lower for those with more quantitatively oriented and occupation-specific majors than it was for those with degrees in general fields. Moreover, our analysis suggests that underemployment is a temporary phase for many recent college graduates as they transition to better jobs after spending some time in the labor market, particularly those who start their careers in low-skilled service jobs.

Keywords: college graduates; college majors; Great Recession; labor market dynamics; STEM; underemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 J23 J24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr749.html Summary (text/html)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/rese ... orts/sr749.pdf?la=en Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Underemployment in the Early Careers of College Graduates following the Great Recession (2017)
Working Paper: Underemployment in the Early Careers of College Graduates Following the Great Recession (2016)
Working Paper: Underemployment in the Early Careers of College Graduates Following the Great Recession (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednsr:749

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().