Degrees for Dollars

JOSEPH NEY-JUN
Staff Writer

In the past decade, the U.S. unemployment rates have risen to their highest level since the recession of the 1980’s with an unemployment rate of 10.1 percent in Oct. 2009. As of February the current unemployment rate is 6.7 percent and slowly declining, but what caused it to reach that height in the first place?

In late 2008, the Great Recession shook the global economy, triggered by the burst of the U.S. Housing Bubble. Due to new policies put forward by American banks, housings costs from 1999 to 2007 grew exponentially. When neither the banks and their clients nor the government could keep the money flowing from a combination of loans and investments, the U.S. entered a recession and the world with it.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 8.7 million jobs were eliminated between Feb. 2008 and Feb. 2010. This drop in job number made any available job all the more valuable in the U.S.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Labor, in 2011, 53.6 percent of college graduates holding bachelor’s degrees under the age of 25 were unemployed. The growing number of graduates continues to compound the issue at hand, and only adds to the backlog of workers.

The jobs cannot be instantly restored but even as the market is healing, it still cannot compensate for the ever growing number of available workers.