Attention recent college graduates — as well as parents who covered those big tuition bills. You may not want to hear this, but a study released on Wednesday found that entry-level wages for students who graduated from college in 2010 was lower than a decade earlier, after adjusting for inflation.
The study was done by Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research and policy center. She found that after gains in the 1980s and 1990s, entry-level hourly wages for college-educated men (without advanced degrees) were $21.77 in 2010, down 4.5 percent from $22.75 in 2000. For college-educated women, entry-level wages were $18.43 in 2010, the study found, down 5.2 percent from $19.38 10 years earlier. (The figures are in 2010 dollars.)
Source: Economic Policy Institute, based on analysis of Current Population Survey, Outgoing Rotations Group
Ms. Shierholz said in an interview, “We’re seeing increased demand for college grads, but the fact that we see these declining wages suggests that demand is being more than met by the increased supply of college grads.”
She said that in the decade after 2000, the business cycle was tough on workers and wages across the board, except for those at the very top. “These young people coming out of college get swooped up in the bottom part of the wage distribution that really suffered during the whole decade after 2000,” she said.
Her study concluded on a pessimistic note: “With unemployment expected to remain above 8 percent well into 2014, it will likely be many years before young college graduates — or any workers — see substantial wage growth.”
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f0c9b9d7ee6751b3eae77d9bf0bfa0d9
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