Photo by Brian Hawkins
The unemployment rate for the month of June was a huge disappointment to most experts, analysts, and officials. It showed a sharp increase despite assurances that hiring was at a steady pace keeping unemployment relatively stagnant. From May to June 2011, the American unemployment rate rose from 9.1% to 9.2%. Currently, 14.1 million individuals are classified as unemployed. Of nearly 9 million jobs lost since the Great Recession began, less than 2 million individuals have been able to return to work.
If you think these numbers are bad, consider that they’re just the overall picture. Those numbers include all levels of education, all industries, and all the individuals who’ve managed to get some part-time labor under their belt but need full-time paychecks to survive. When you start to pull the figures apart, you start to see how the level of education a person has affects their chances of getting hired. Simply put, the more education you have, the more likely you are to find a job.
According to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, people over the age of 25 without even a high school diploma are doomed with an unemployment rate of over 14%. Those with a high school diploma have it a little better, but not by much, with a 10% rate of unemployment. That’s nearly a single point higher than the current overall unemployment rate. Things start to improve a little once individuals carry their education past high school. For folks with some post-high school schooling, the unemployment rate stands at 8.4%, and for those who earn an undergraduate degree or higher, the rate of unemployment is less than half of the 9.2% national figure, at 4.4%.
What does all this mean? It means as jobs that demand technical prowess increase and employment opportunities that require hard labor and physical prowess decrease, a college degree has never looked better. The opportunities that are out there call for higher education from the workforce, and there’s no easy way of getting around that.
But getting yourself a college degree is easier than you think. Stop viewing four years or more of extra education as an obstacle too intimidating to conquer. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the chunk of your lifetime you’re going to spend struggling to make ends meet if insist on not getting a college degree. Consider too that attending an online university can not only make the experience more user-friendly, it can also reduce the cost by eliminating campus living expenses and can even get you out of the door and onto starting your career in less time than the traditional university experience.
The statistics don’t lie. College is essential in finding work. You might be employed today without a degree, but what about tomorrow? Next year? One decade from now? The unemployment rate isn’t going to change for the better anytime soon. Consider improving your odds.