After a painful year of joblessness, the future has finally brightened for Alycia St. Germain, a 22-year-old college senior at the University of Minnesota.
Having lost a part-time job at Barnes and Noble in March last year as the viral pandemic tore through the U.S. economy, she was left unemployed like tens of millions of other Americans. But now St. Germain has a job lined up -- with benefits -- even before graduation and in her chosen field of developmental psychology. A family friend established a new child care center in St. Paul, and St. Germain landed a job as an assistant in the infant room.
"This," she said, "is probably the most positive thing that could happen."
Not all new college graduates will find a job so quickly. But collectively, this year's graduating class is poised for better prospects than were the 2020 seniors, who had the misfortune to graduate into the depths of the brutal coronavirus recession. Though the competition will be stiff -- this year's graduates will have to compete, in many cases, with 2020 graduates who are still seeking their first full-time job -- employers are ramping up hiring. And many are desperate for workers.
On Friday, the government reported that employers added 266,000 jobs in April, a surprisingly sharp slowdown from the 770,000 that were added in March. Yet much of that lapse reflected a shortage of workers, economists say. The economic rebound is strengthening so quickly that many businesses are struggling to quickly attract enough applicants to fill jobs.
The pace of job openings, in fact, has fully recovered from the pandemic and is now far above pre-recession levels, including in professional occupations that college students are more likely to seek and that can typically be done from home.
"I don't think this recession will be as bad for college graduates as previous recessions have been," said Brad Hershbein, an economist at the Upjohn Institute in Kalamazoo, Mich. "That segment of the labor market is going to recover faster than other segments where jobs can't be done remotely."
Hershbein said he worries, though, that the pandemic will dim the economic prospects of young adults who were unable to complete, or even start, their educations during the pandemic. Data has shown sharp drops in enrollment at community and four-year colleges.
"Because there is a large pool of unemployed workers, companies can pick exactly who they want and skip over people with less experience," said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Graduating into a recession has historically led to poor outcomes for many young people, with research showing they sometimes bear long-running scars. Starting a career in a recession can lead to lower incomes for as long as a decade for those graduates, compared with their peers who completed college just before or after a recession.
Sheila Jordan, chief digital technology officer at Honeywell, said she's recruiting more students and recent graduates for paid internships than she did last year -- positions that often lead to permanent jobs. She is especially interested in students with a range of technical backgrounds, including software, data analytics and cybersecurity.
"We like to recruit once, hire twice," Jordan said of the internships. "That's a feeder group for us."
Information for this article was contributed by Todd Richmond of The Associated Press.
