Illustration by Ivan Kostovski | Infographics Editor
With commencement on the horizon, soon-to-be Ohio State graduates are staring down a less-than-ideal job market due to the pandemic.
The unemployment rate for young adults between 15- to 24-year-olds was 12.5 percent in December 2020, more than four percent higher than the 8.4 percent rate from December 2019, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
That figure spells trouble for college students and recent graduates, who will be entering job and internship markets ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, Bruce Weinberg, professor of economics at Ohio State, said in an email.
But when young people have experienced poor labor market outcomes, having more education was an advantage, Weinberg said.
Among 2020 Ohio State graduates, 62.8 percent had to restart or change their job search after the pandemic hit, 31.1 percent lost a previously held job, and 19.4 percent lost a job offer, Scott Kustis, director of industry connections with the Arts and Sciences Center for Career and Professional Success at Ohio State, said.
Additionally, many people who lost their jobs last year are returning to the same employers, which could make it difficult for recent graduates with less experience vying for those positions, Weinberg said.
Students not graduating in 2021 could be harmed by the loss of internships, according to a report from Glassdoor, a job search website. The report states that more than half of the internship listings on the website disappeared in the spring of 2020.
Kustis said this is because some organizations and companies couldn’t shift their program online fast enough.
“Instead of creating a bad experience for an intern or full-time hire, they just kind of pulled back,” Kustis said.
Now that companies have had a full year to transition to virtual activity, internship opportunities should return, Kustis said.
Weinberg said recent graduates also have the advantage of higher education, which has protected their employment more than those working in industries harder hit by the pandemic — such as the service and travel industries, which are less popular among college graduates — because of the ability of those positions to transition to remote work.
Less than one percent of 2019’s college graduates wanted to go into the “service sector,” according to a study co-authored by Matthew Mayhew, a professor of educational administration at Ohio State.
The same study also reported that 31 percent of 2019 graduates were planning on entering more than one career field, hoping to increase their chances of getting a job.
As vaccine distribution increases, Kustis said students shouldn’t be discouraged by the job market.
“We’ve been talking with employers and they say that their intention is not to hold it against students that maybe didn’t have the opportunity to do the perfect internship,” Kustis said. “What they are looking for are students who made the most of a bad situation.”
