The unemployment rate among black college graduates last year was higher than the jobless rate for whites who never finished high school. Via Patricia Cohen at the Times: William Zonicle did what all the job experts advise. He majored in a growing field like health care. He studied hard and took time to develop relationships with his professors. Most important, he obtained a great internship in the human resources department at Florida Hospital in Tampa the summer before his senior year. But more than seven months after receiving his diploma from Oakwood University, a historically black religious school in Huntsville, Ala., Mr. Zonicle is still without a job in his field. Instead, he is working part-time for $7.60 an hour at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in the center of town. “It was tougher than I expected, said Mr. Zonicle, 23, who applied for jobs at hospitals and nursing homes from Ohio to Florida after graduating in May. Because of the work I had put in as an undergraduate, and making connections, I thought it would be easier to find a decent position. College graduates have survived both the recession and ho-hum recovery far better than those without a degree, but blacks who finished four years of college are suffering from unemployment rates that are painfully high compared with their white counterparts. Among recent graduates ages 22 to 27, the jobless rate for blacks last year was 12.4 percent versus 4.9 percent for whites, said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. While there has always been a gap between black and white college grads, this 7.5 percentage point difference was far greater than before the recession burned through the economy. In 2007, for example, there was only a 1.4 percentage point difference, with 4.6 percent of recent black graduates out of work compared with 3.2 percent of similarly educated whites. “This is very different from the past, said Mr. Schmitt, a co-author of a study of employment among recent graduates published by the center. You’d have to go back to the early 1980s recession to see that pattern. Historically, the periods during and immediately after downturns have been harder on blacks than on whites. But in this current cycle, the trend has been even more extreme.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 22:52:02 +0000
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