The modern adage, “a college degree is the new high school diploma,” is becoming a painful reality for some.
Employers requiring job applicants to have a minimum of a bachelor’s degree is on the rise, making it more of a conundrum for non-college graduates. Even low-level jobs such as office runners and file clerks are required to have at least a bachelor’s degree.
In a story published in the New York Times, econom
ists call this shift “degree inflation,” in which the less educated are being pushed down the employment food chain, or forced to obtain a costly degree with little probability of finding a high-salary job.The unemployment rate for non-college graduates is 8.1 percent compared to that of Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree, which is 3.7 percent.