In less than three weeks, the planned four-year college path that Mike Stock, Merriam senior, has known with certainty will suddenly end. And the sense of merriment and accomplishment traditionally tied to graduation, for Stock, will be unavoidably subdued by another feeling — concern. Stock, who is majoring in German and political science, said he recognized that with two secured internships, one in Vienna and one in Berlin, he sits better than most. But even that can’t erase his concern that by July, if he believes statistics of recent graduates, he should have nothing.

“I’m very uneasy,” Stock said. “I’ve got some student loans I’ve got to pay back. Basically finding a job in this market, especially with a liberal arts degree is very, very difficult.”

The unemployment rate among college grads under 26, which reached 7.7 percent last April, has dropped to 7 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But Kathryn Edwards, Economic Policy Institute researcher, said these students, and young adults overall in the U.S., are failing to keep up with older people who are equally educated.

“It is difficult for college graduates,” Edwards said. “But it’s also a reflection of the economic downturn and a reflection of the difficulty all young people are facing in the labor market.”

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, college graduates over the age of 25 have an unemployment rate of just 4.7 percent. Edwards said the difference in experience seemed to be the principal cause for the disparity in unemployment.

Joshua Rosenbloom, economics professor, said he thought December graduates might experience additional difficulty finding long-term jobs at first because employers often wait to recruit in the spring.

“There are some pretty big seasonal fluctuations in job seeking,” Rosenbloom said. “Of course, there are a lot of temporary jobs, but finding full time work in December is probably a little harder.”

Edwards said that inexperience, which can hurt recent graduates as they apply for certain positions, could also make them ineligible for unemployment checks if they’ve never held a full-time job. She said this lack of government assistance, when combined with outstanding student loans, made unemployment an especially difficult struggle for young graduates.

“Unemployment benefits are based off of your previous jobs,” Edwards said. “Young college graduates are in a particularly difficult situation because they will have debt, won’t have experience, and won’t be eligible for any government benefits.”

David Gaston, director of the KU Career Center, said he and other career advisers were encouraging students to pursue internships and workshops while in college to make their job candidacy more competitive by graduation.

“I would encourage students to start sooner than later,” Gaston said. “Right now it is a challenging market, There’s a lot of folks who are experienced who have been laid off and are looking for work, and they’re competing with graduates.

He also said he has noticed more students with concerns about future jobs coming to the Career Center for advice using the Career Center Web site to post their resumes and search for jobs.

“Our staff’s been really busy this semester,” Gaston said.

Gaston also said employers that use the Web site for job postings have been posting fewer positions this fall than in the past. He said he was hopeful, however, that an in-person career fair at the University in February would present students with close to as many opportunities as it featured last year, when roughly 90 hiring businesses attended.

“It’s probably the place where students can meet with more employers at one time than they’ll ever see,” Gaston said. “They’re coming here to specifically recruit KU students.”

Edwards said, on a national average, six unemployed Americans are applying for every one position that opens. She said while these odds weren’t great, it could help to know that the market has been worse before and later recovered. In December of 1982, the most recent example of a recession, 7.8 percent of college graduates under age 26 were unemployed.

Jeffrey Smith, 1983 KU graduate, said he remembered feeling terrified as he prepared to enter the market. He spent the last half of college working internships as a photographer with local papers and even changed his pen name to J. Sharp Smith to make it more memorable.

“Since I hadn’t had jobs, the internships were my jobs,” Smith said. “The idea was to make the resume look like everyone else’s resume in that it had similar information.”

Looking back, however, Smith said the excitement of the unknown and trying as many new experiences as possible created some of the best memories of his life. Now a successful editor in Des Moines for the Biby Publishing LCC company, he said he only feels grateful that his career path carried him everywhere from Newton to Denver to Washington, D.C.

“I just chose something that I loved to do,” Smith said. “So it wasn’t hard at all to do internships for little or no money or even to take jobs that maybe didn’t pay as much at the beginning because I loved what I do. If you love what you do, if you’re surviving, that’s the payoff.”

— Edited by Jonathan Hermes