With high tuition and student loans, many recent graduates are barely scraping by working lower-wage jobs such as retail clerk, bartender or server.  As the loan payments pile up, your local barista might be standing at work wondering why he majored in a liberal arts field.

The prospects for graduates are highly uneven depending on what field they studied in school. There are significantly more opportunities in the sciences, education and health fields, while those who studied arts and humanities are finding opportunities scarce.

The median income for those with bachelor’s degrees is down from where it was in 2000. Another bad sign is that projections are showing that many of the futures jobs will be in low-skilled fields.

Harvard economist Richard Freeman notes, “you can make more money on average if you go to college, but it’s not true for everybody. If you’re not sure what you’re going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college.”

According to Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, “simply put, we’re failing kids coming out of college. We’re going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow.”

The AP states “About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.”

This is why it is so important to search for as many scholarships as possible to make college as affordable as possible!

Want to search for scholarships or find your perfect college fit? Make your profile today on Cappex!

Today’s question:

This August in the U.S., there was no increase in net jobs, and the unemployment rate stayed constant at 9.1%.

Does the current economy have any effect on your decision to go or not go to college? How do you think the recession affects high school grads’ choices?

Leave your answer in the comments below or tweet at @Cappex to chime in (we’ll post your answer below)!

The survey results were indicative of nontraditional students who find time before or after work to take classes and earn a college degree. Enrollment in online educational programs has skyrocketed in the past two years – especially at community colleges — as millions of adults return to school during the country’s economic downturn.

“Students live online; our classes need to live there as well,” said Ken Baldauf, director of Florida State University’s Program in Interdisciplinary Computing, adding that students’ technological preferences show that traditional classroom lessons might soon be a campus relic. “Lectures need to transform into brainstorming sessions, and textbooks need to move online to take advantage of the wealth of resources available there.”

Incorporating familiar online platforms such as Facebook or other learning management systems that have similar interactive functionalities, Baldauf said, would be key in satisfying technology preferences for students with jobs and family lives, and those with neither.

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