Hasta La Ideas

We’re sorry to start your morning out on a gloomy note, but sometimes the news just plays out that way. Yesterday, Georgetown University‘s Center on Education and the Workforce published a report entitled “Hard Times,” a look at the employment prospects, or lack there of, college and graduate school students face upon graduation. While there’s been plenty of talk about the national 9% unemployment rate across the board among all graduates, the study breaks down the data by a variety of majors, analyzing just how difficult a time they’ll have finding a job and how much, on average, they’ll wind up making. It’s a fascinating report, though if you are a student in any sort of creative field, the news is, as expected, much more bleak. When broken down by majors in the arts, those seeking a major in design face an 11.8% unemployment rate. That’s eclipsed by fine arts majors (12.6%) and those in film, video and photography programs (12.9%), but it gets particularly grim when it comes to architecture, which ranks at the top for unemployment, coming in at a staggering 13.9%. Granted, none of that’s new, as we’ve been writing about students rethinking architecture programs since 2008, and about how impossible the post-school prospects have been in the proceeding years. You’d expect and/or hope that things had gradually improved at least a little over these long four years, but apparently that just isn’t the case yet. Here’s a bit from the report:

…majors that are closely aligned with occupations and industries in low demand can misfire. For example, unemployment rates for recent college graduates who majored in Architecture start high at 13.9 percent and due to its strong alignment with the collapse in construction and housing, unemployment remains high even for experienced college graduates at 9.2 percent.

You can read the full report, here (pdf).

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