The modern adage, “a college degree is the new high school diploma,” is becoming a painful reality for some.
Employers requiring job applicants to have a minimum
of a bachelor’s degree is on the rise, making it more of a conundrum for non-college graduates. Even low-level jobs such as office runners and file clerks are required to have at least a bachelor’s degree.In a story published in the New York Times, economists call this shift “degree inflation,” in which the less educated are being pushed down the employment food chain, or forced to obtain a costly degree with little probability of finding a high-salary job.
The unemployment rate for non-college graduates is 8.1 percent compared to that of Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree, which is 3.7 percent.