How many college grads actually use their degrees? It’s complicated

This story is part of GBH's podcast “College Uncovered” and was first reported on GBH.

Inside a gymnasium on the Boston campus of Wentworth Institute of Technology on a recent afternoon, hundreds of students clutched resumes and wore little colored stickers showing their majors, hoping to find a potential employer — and the right fit.

If you closed your eyes for a moment, it almost sounded like speed dating.

“I don’t really have any openings right now,” one employer told student after student waiting in a line that wrapped around a corner of the gym.

“OK,” one replied, smiling before moving on to the next booth covered with swag.

At this career fair, students said it’s a difficult moment to be entering the workforce.

“It’s true what they say about the job market,” said Anna Claro, a 22-year-old mechanical engineering major from Blackstone. “It’s a little tough right now.”

“It’s definitely scary,” added Ryan Ballard, a 21-year-old senior from Norwalk, Connecticut, majoring in electromechanical engineering.

Students nearing graduation are often asked what comes next and how they plan to put their expensive new degree to use. While it’s typical to joke that many will end up working at the neighborhood coffee shop, that may be reality for more grads this year than in years past.

Young grads are facing a grim job market competing for limited openings in a low-fire, low-hire environment. Economists say many recent grads are underemployed, meaning they’re working in jobs that don’t require the degrees they just earned. There’s evidence that even students with degrees once considered safe, like computer science, are now being impacted. But getting exact numbers gets tricky, they say, because it’s often hard to find the data, and the reports that do exist don’t always match up.

The Burning Glass Institute, a research nonprofit, estimates the underemployment rate for new grads could be as high as 45%. A survey from economists at Georgetown University says it may be closer to 22%. And another survey from Gallup and Lumina found that among bachelor’s degree graduates since 2015, about 71% reported having a job within six months, while another 10% said it took between seven months and a year.

Meanwhile, colleges and universities often report that more than 90% of their graduates are employed or in graduate school within six months.

So what’s the real number?

“It’s an easy question, a hard answer,” said economist Jeff Strohl. “Nobody has a consistent methodology to address the question.”

Strohl, who directs Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, said it’s hard for colleges to track all of their alumni, what jobs they get, and when they get them.

“We dump all these graduates into the labor market — often 3 million at the same time — and then tell them to go swim,” Strohl said. “It takes a while to find a good match.”

Whatever the precise number of college grads who are working jobs they don’t really need a degree for, many in higher ed say underemployment among them is too high and the issue for consumers is that many colleges don’t report it.

Another challenge is that there are few ways to measure how schools prepare students for work, Strohl said.

“We don’t track it,” he said. “The only thing we have is Professor Joe or Sally says, 'I attest that my course produces X, Y, or Z, and you’ve just got to believe me.’ And that doesn’t seem very rational.”

At Wentworth’s career fair, many students had questions about how artificial intelligence and other new technologies might shape their futures. They were doing exactly what Strohl described: trying to find the right match.

“Do you feel like you get to support people,” senior Dalton Crawford asked one employer, “or do you feel removed from the individual consumer?”

Crawford is a 25-year-old computer science major from Idaho Falls, Idaho. After walking the floor of the gymnasium, he said he appreciated the chance to meet employers face-to-face.

“I’m really grateful to have the opportunity to meet people that match my values and get to suss that out,” he said.

But Crawford said that kind of matchmaking takes time. “It can seem like there aren't any options,” he said. “But they do exist.”

With graduation day around the corner, he’s optimistic he’ll find a job in his field — and avoid joining the ranks of the underemployed.