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Many undergraduates are fearful of what they’re going to do after graduation.
Although the economy has started to recover, as unemployment is down to 8.3 percent, the unemployment rate among young adults, aged 16 to 24, is higher. Yet, with millions of baby boomers about to retire, fresh workers are going to be needed to fill their jobs.
But there is an issue — the best and brightest of our generation are being drafted into financial services, leaving abysmal holes in other job sectors.
However, if someone wants to work in finance, they certainly have the right and constitutional freedom to do so. But the simple truth is the country is in desperate need of more entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists and other professionals. It also needs intelligent, over-achieving, creative and ambitious students to develop in those fields.
What’s causing this mass migration to the financial industry? It has a lot to do with student loans. Members of the class of 2010 who took out student loans owed an average of $25,250 when they graduated, 5 percent more than the class before them.
About two-thirds of the class of 2010 borrowed money for college, and they were hit especially hard because the unemployment rate for new college graduates stood at 9.1 percent the year they graduated. The financial sector, forced to face debt with its high salaries, offers a rare chance to pay off debt accumulated over the course of college.
The first problem with the mass exodus into the financial sector is it stalls the growth of new businesses. Despite efforts in the United States to encourage the creation of new companies, entrepreneurship has not increased, according to a study done by Paul Kedrosky and Dane Stangler of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
The study began looking at why entrepreneurship was stagnating. “The more we looked into it, we realized there was this great sucking sound in the economy, and that great sucking sound was some of the best and the brightest in the economy — not just in business, but in science and engineering — getting diverted into the financial economy,” Kedrosky said in a Huffington Post article titled “America’s ‘Brain Drain’: Best and Brightest College Grads Head for Wall Street.”
A version of this article appeared in the Feb 22 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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