People with a bachelor's degree or higher have unemployment rates that are about half the unemployment rate of people with just a.....HELP!!?
People with a bachelor's degree or higher have unemployment rates that are about half the unemployment rate of people with just a high school diploma. In a minimum of five sentences, provide two explanations for why this is true.
Where will a major in finance get you? What kind of jobs will be available? Is employment rate an issue?
The chart below shows the major occupations of those who are currently employed and holding a degree in finance, using data from the 3-year samples of the 2011 American Community Survey. There are more job classifications, but I limited the chart to the fifteen most common ones. As you can see, most go into accounting, auditing, or financial management (for example, financial planning). Others go into sales, marketing, computers, and general management. As far as employment rates are concerned, they have a higher than average employment rate, at 82.7% and a lower than average unemployment rate, at 4.31%. Hope that helps!
If job prospects are so bad for PhDs, why is the unemployment rate so low?
Because it's not getting a job, but the type of job:1) I don't know of any Ph.D.'s that have been unemployed for any serious length of time. I do know a few people that have Ph.D.'s in high energy physics that worked as a bartender for about a year. 2) Because Ph.D.'s don't work like other degrees. If you get a medical degree you expect to be a doctor. If you get a law degree you expect to be a lawyer. If you get a physics degree, you expect to be a physicist. The good/bad news is that it's likely if you get a physics Ph.D. that you won't be a physicist. You'll likely get a rather high paying job doing something else which has no obvious connection to physics (like investment banking).3) Because the psychology of the Ph.D. program is totally messed up. There is this idea that if you get a Ph.d. and you don't get a professorship then you are a total failure. Part of the problem is that the only people that you see in graduate school are people that go into academia, and you miss the fact that a lot of people don't end up in academia. You can get over the brainwashing, but it turns out to be traumatic and painful.
Are unemployment statistics inaccurate?
All statistics are flawed in the sense that they try to reduce complex situations to simple numbers (but they're still necessary because we can't all take the time to try to understand the complex situations). Employment/unemployment is complicated because there is lots of gray area between being employed and being unemployed, and in the definitions of those two states. Consider the following examples: A housewife (or househusband) who stays home to care for the house and children; someone who leaves their job to go back to school (hoping to eventually get a better job); someone who's disabled and can't work; a person who works part-time but is looking for a full-time job; someone in prison; a worker on maternity/paternity leave; a seasonal worker whose job regularly disappears on the off season but then comes back. Which of these examples should be counted as employed and which as unemployed, and are there some which shouldn't be counted either way? As I think you can see, the meaning of these statistics can be difficult. How to actually measure them (short of a nationwide census) is another problem. So yes, unemployment statistics are inaccurate, at least to some degree. Part of this may not matter. If the main purpose is to just compare employment levels over time then you can still say employment is getting better or worse as long as you're measuring it the same way. Unfortunately, the government *does* change the way it measures unemployment from time to time, so that can make it difficult to compare statistics from different times. These changes are done supposedly to make the statistics more accurate but, because there are politicians involved, there's always the possibility they are changing the statistics to make the politicians look good (at least in part).