Wall Street Journal employment story highlights recent grad’s success
St. Olaf College alumna Mackensie Quade ’14 tells the Wall Street Journal that when she started looking for a full-time job during her senior year, she heard plenty of warnings about how difficult the job market would be.
“By Thanksgiving, I was sitting around eating turkey, had a job, feeling great,” says Quade, who landed a position as a business analyst more than six months before graduating.
Her experience is highlighted in a Wall Street Journal story titled “Class of 2015 Is Summa Cum Lucky in the Job Market.” The piece notes that this year’s graduating class “will be starting first jobs with an unemployment rate below the average of the past 40 years, foretelling career success.”
It also points out that “these graduates will likely earn more money over their lifetime compared with others their age who didn’t finish college. Those with a bachelor’s degree, on average, earn 80 percent more than those with just a high school diploma, according to the Labor Department, a record earnings gap between the two groups.”
The overall unemployment rate is also lower for college graduates — it was just 2.7 percent in April.
“For a lot of majors it’s a truly great time to be graduating from college,” Wells Fargo chief economist John Silvia tells the paper.