Memo to parents: It’s time to call your decorator and redo the den, which you never thought your unemployed college grad was going to leave.
The unemployment rate for college grads ages 22 to 27 is rapidly falling, while salaries for this group are now at the highest level in more than a decade, according to new data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
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From a peak of 7.1 percent in March 2011, the unemployment rate for recent college grads fell to 4.9 percent in 2015. It’s now lower than the current national average of 5 percent.
Millennial college graduates are also getting paid a lot more: Median incomes jumped to $43,000 last year, up about $3,000 from the year before, almost back to the pre-recession high of $44,737 in 2002. The top 25 percent of college graduates earn at least $60,000 a year.
Underemployment has also been falling for the past two years. The report found that as of September 2015, about 44.1 percent of workers with degrees are in occupations where college isn’t required, down from 45.9 two years before.
The New York Fed also found evidence of a growing economic divide between those with a college degree and those without. The median wage for those with only a high school degree remained at $25,000, the same as the year before. The unemployment rate is 10 percent, over twice that of people with college degrees.
