Appalling wage decreases and persistant gender gap for recent college graduates

While our country’s leadership is indecisive about the best way to deal with the high unemployment rates, research is showing us the chilling reality that not only has the wage gap between genders not gone away, but recent college graduates are making less and less in wages.

Via Daily Kos a study from the Economic Policy Institute (accompanied with the above graph) tell us,

After gains in the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s, hourly wages for young college-educated men in 2000 were $22.75, but that dropped by almost a full dollar to $21.77 by 2010.  For young college-educated women, hourly wages fell from $19.38 to $18.43 over the same period.  Now,with unemployment expected to remain above 8% well into 2014, it will likely be many years before young college graduates — or any workers — see substantial wage growth.

The gender gap is still strong which one would hope despite a shift in the overal economy, wouldn’t be true given the change in women’s roles in the workplace–but it appears that they are being hit disproportionately  with lesser wages.

Furthermore, as someone who graduated college 10 years ago (eeek), I can probably count on one hand which of my contemporaries was able to buy a house, start a family (and not be struggling) or live a financially comfortable life. And something we all have in common is staggering student loans that impair our finances in disastrous ways.

If the situation has gotten more dire, we are looking at another generation of young people that are unable to provide for themselves, create families, buy houses or even have access to health care. What this says for the country in 50 years is nothing short of financial doom.

The system is broken and it seems to only be getting worse. Happy Monday.