Hundreds of Flathead Valley Community College students graduated earlier this month and many of them will have a better shot at getting a job than they did two years ago. It was the school’s largest class ever, attributable partly to economic necessity.
Many so-called nontraditional students returned to class when the recession swept through the valley, wiped away hundreds of jobs and inflated unemployment rolls. We followed many of them as they returned to school to retrain or even reinvent themselves.
In 2009, in interviews with these new students, they were optimistic – “it’s like a second life,” one said – but also weary. “There’s nothing out there, period,” said another.
The numbers show that the job market hasn’t improved much since then. In April, the non-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 12.7 percent in Flathead County, a full two points higher than two years ago at this time. Many of the jobs lost in construction and manufacturing have yet to be replaced.
Nationwide, the statistics are also bleak. A survey of recent graduates of four-year schools by Knowledge Networks for the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University finds that many of their careers aren’t panning out how they had expected.
For one, the median starting salary has actually dipped for those graduates – dropping from $30,000 to $27,000. Cliff Zukin, who co-authored the study, also told the Associated Press that nearly half of graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a college degree and more than half don’t expect to do as well financially as their parents.
One would reckon that these newly minted graduates, the class of 2011, would be approaching their respective job searches with a whiff of pessimism. But that simply is not happening. Their commencement speakers tell them that they can overcome any obstacle, and the vast majority of graduates believe them. Of course, the odds of the majority of them overcoming the odds can’t pencil out. But it doesn’t matter. And that’s a good thing.
Tali Sharot, a research fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, wrote a column for The New York Times explaining the benefits of blind optimism.
Students who graduate with lofty, even delusional goals and downplay the obstacles that stand in their way often work harder toward attaining them. Their brains may even be triggered to have these beliefs
“We now know that underestimating the obstacles life has in store lowers stress and anxiety,” Sharot writes, “leading to better health and well-being … Their hopes may not be fully realized, but they will be more successful, healthier and happier if they hold on to positively biased expectations.”
That’s not to suggest a sparse job market won’t discourage graduates. And there is still some debate about whether a degree is worth the accompanying debt when many recent graduates who returned to school as a way to wait out the recession have discovered that the job market is as brutal and competitive as ever.
But the unemployment rate for people with college degrees is still well below the overall nationwide unemployment rate of around 9 percent. And since we’re looking on the bright side, at least those recent graduates finished school before tuitions increase. The Montana Board of Regents recently approved price hikes at most institutes of higher learning across the state.
So think about that, too, but don’t allow it to discourage. Apparently, you’ll be healthier for it.