With the 2021 college graduation season in full swing, there is some good news for this year’s class: Their first job’s pay is slightly improving.
The percentage of recent grads who are taking jobs that pay less than $25,000 and don’t require a degree fell to 10.5% in March, the lowest rate since November 2001, according to New York Federal Reserve research.
As the U.S. economy recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, well-paid entry-level jobs are still not easy to come by, however. The percentage of graduates who hold what the Fed identifies as “good non-college jobs”—positions with a full-time average annual wage of $45,000 or more—has been declining in the past 20 years.
Data show that about one-third of all college graduates are in a job that typically doesn’t require a college degree, a rate of underemployment that has remained fairly flat for about three decades now.
For this year’s grads, the job-hunting outlook has improved. The unemployment rate for recent college grads has halved since last June, at the peak of the pandemic. At 6.4%, it remains twice as high as the 2017-2019 average. But it is 3.9 percentage points below unemployment among young adults without a bachelor’s degree, which stood at 10.3% in March, data show.