For recent college graduates, surviving on their own may prove harder than ever.
Starting salaries for students transitioning into the real world have dropped well below what they were 10 years ago. A study by the Economic Policy Institute on the labor market for young graduates reports that college graduates ages 21-24 are earning an average of 5.4 percent less than they were right out of college in the year 2000. The situation is far worse for women than for men, with women facing a drop of 8.5 percent and men a drop of 1.6 percent.
In 2011 graduates received, on average, an hourly wage of $16.81 per hour, or an annual income of around $35,000 for full-time employment, which may seem all right, but not when you factor in the rising costs of college tuition and loan debt.
For Matthew Stayton, who graduated this past spring from Saint Michael's College with a degree in accounting, the market did not appear nearly as scary.
"I was never too concerned with the overall decrease in average wages," he told Next Generation Journal. "Accounting has always been a well-paid field and demand for accountants has kept salaries stable."
