Dive Brief:
- A Payscale survey of 900,000 college graduates reveals that 50% of employees with associates degrees report being underemployed.
- More than 75% of surveyed associate degree holders say they are not using their earned education or training in their current jobs. But that percentage is lower than the number of bachelor’s or advanced degree holders who also do not put to use their college training in their professions.
- Millennials are among the hardest hit in underemployment, with another study indicating 51% underemployment for the group.
Dive Insight:
As manufacturing, affordability and politics converge to make community college a first-tier higher education option for millions of students, studies continue to show that the skills learned in these institutions don’t generate wealth or upward mobility. Ideally, the way to make community college affordable and industrially relevant is the partnerships between two-year and four-year schools.
But these partnerships must go beyond the typical, core-course-to-major-program articulation agreement. The agreements should begin to offer practice industrial training, which offers students in select majors the chance to not only get a job, but to also create a path to upward mobility. Some are offering this opportunity through bootcamps, but college leaders should look to create the same training with two-year peers which, like them, also have the benefit of federal and state grant writing to support the effort.
