For all the right reasons, John Higdon bought into the dream of being the first in his immediate family to earn an undergraduate degree.
"All through high school and college, I thought, ‘I’ll get this piece of paper and it will open up doors that weren’t open to my parents, because they didn’t go to college,’" Higdon, 24, said over a cup of coffee last week.
Instead of opening wide, however, the door cracked after Higdon earned his bachelor’s in finance from Missouri State University in December 2008.
"I’m not where I thought I’d be almost a year after graduating," said Higdon.
Nor are thousands of others in the classes of 2008-09, who marched from the commencement stage into the teeth of the worst job market since the Great Depression.
Higdon did manage to land a job in his chosen field.
But earning a commission cold-calling potential commercial insurance clients is a far cry from employment as an analyst with a prominent financial or investment firm in the St. Louis area — the objective the Hannibal, Mo., native set for himself as an undergraduate.
Nor did his short-term goal include a plan to stay afloat financially by moonlighting behind a bar a few nights a week.
"That’s the norm now," he said. "All my buddies (from Missouri State) are working two jobs, too."
Adding insult to the insult of dual employment that netted him less than $20,000 in 2009 are the bills now coming due: The $315 monthly payments on his $42,000 student loan.
His college education, Higdon said dryly, "is definitely not paying dividends right now."
His won’t be the only one, according to some experts. Look for an exponential increase in the ranks of underemployed graduates struggling to cover an education they hoped would boost their earning potential, said Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University and executive director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. "It’s going to be a long-running crisis independent of the recession," Vedder predicted in a telephone interview from his office in Athens, Ohio.
The economic downturn, he continued, "exacerbates the fact that beginning salaries are lower and the ratio of the amount of (student) loans to those salaries is getting higher and higher. When that happens, you’re getting into problems."
The lag in processing comprehensive higher education data makes it impossible to know how many underemployed 2008-09 graduates are wrangling with student debt.
But the U.S. Department of Education announced in September that the default rate, 6.7 percent, was already on the rise in 2007 — a year before the recession took hold.
More and more students, Vedder said, are deferring payment (and incurring additional debt) by pursuing advanced degrees. The latest statistics from the Council of Graduate Schools bear him out.
From 2007 to 2008, the council said, first-time graduate school enrollment among U.S. students jumped nearly 5 percent — the largest increase since 2002 — according to its survey of schools serving 1.7 million grad students in 2008.
John Drenkhahn of Collinsville opted for graduate school after evaluating the odds of getting a job in electrical engineering following his 2008 graduation from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville.
"If I hadn’t gone back to school, I would have been competing with other (graduates) along with (experienced) people," said Drenkhahn, 25, who planned to graduate this summer.
While the market hasn’t improved much for graduates, Drenkhahn’s decision appears to have paid off: He landed a job.
"They agreed I’m a little overqualified in terms of education for this position," said Drenkhahn, who will handle customer support for a technical product sold by a company he did not want to name.
Although the master’s degree may not have been the difference in getting the job, Drenkhahn said he found the education useful and expects the advanced degree will help as he tries to move up the ladder. He said his new employer indicated there may be opportunities for advancement.
"That’s all I’m looking for," Drenkhahn said. "That’s all anybody who is graduating right now is looking for."
He said he was thankful to find a job with a local company. Otherwise, he was prepared to expand his search outside the area where he has lived his entire life.
Higdon, meanwhile, is staying put.
He and his girlfriend, a teacher, recently scraped together the down payment on a small condo in Valley Park. A wedding, Higdon said, will start taking shape once his employment situation is settled.
A year into the business, Higdon doesn’t rule out continuing in the insurance field, perhaps as a broker.
As he considers his options, Higdon’s eyes are on two components of the employment market — job openings in the local financial sector and the influx of graduates poised to compete for those positions.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers reports the job outlook for the Class of ‘10 is slightly better than it was for the two preceding classes. Then again, it couldn’t get any worse than 2009, when campus hiring dropped more 20 percent from the year before.
Higdon hopes there’s room in the slightly improved market for him.
"I know it’s a matter of timing, but it’s also a matter of increasing costs," he said. "I didn’t go to Dartmouth or Harvard, I went to a school that cost about $13,000 a year. I thought it was affordable, but it doesn’t pay for itself if your job prospects are poor."
Michele Munz of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
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