If one majors in finance, that individual will not necessarily be offered a job. In fact, with the present economic situation, companies are much less likely to hire interns during the summer, formerly an opportunity for finance majors to put their foot in the door of Wall Street, and without much job experience, businesses are reluctant to hire students out of business school unless they demonstrate exceptional ability, and even in that case employment cannot be guaranteed.
As far as an education major, the chances for getting a job are relatively similar to those prior to the recession. However, many public school systems have suffered from cutbacks in state spending on education, since the recession, and in that sense are more reluctant to hire as many new teachers as they would consider in past years, and with pressures to cut back existing teacher salaries, schools with experience-scaled salaries are less accommodating to new teachers than in the past, although compared to finance majors education majors are managing considerably better.
However, one sector of the economy with the many job openings currently is the employ of the federal government. Thus, it can be inferred that political science is a college major that could lead to a sizable number of job openings; a law degree (J.D.) would also fare well in obtaining a federal government position, particularly in working with state and federal courts or working in the law firms of D.C. attorneys (technically not a federal position but one closely affiliated with the higher Courts as well). As we have learned in class, however, other careers with openings include nursing, teaching, and bankruptcy law.
Given the nature of rising unemployment, it becomes increasingly important to have some sort of income, versus pursuing what one loves; indeed, many adults in their mid-twenties feel that living in a reasonably comfortable apartment and having a consistent, reliable salary (in such an unpredictable economy) holds greater importance over pursuing a career whose pay is less stable, such as a career in writing or music or even a career in professions that traditionally do not pay highly. Sadly, the recession forces people to make sacrifices of their true loves, pursuing jobs that they may not prefer in exchange for fiscal security, with tenure, wealth.
To my surprise, the article did not resonate as dramatically as I would have anticipated before reading it. To me, the numerous statistics - 600,000 jobs lost in January, total of 3.6 million jobs lost since December '07, a 7.6 percent unemployment rate - seemed oddly surreal and yet at the same time so gravely true. When I consider the recession, these are not the numbers that I see - after all, even in a community like the New Trier township where people are scaling back, we are still able to fund multi-million dollar community projects, and to my knowledge, most of my friends' parents continue to be employed, though to what extent they are as fiscally secure as before I cannot know for certain.
I do, however, appreciate one number: $38,088. This, based on the 2008-2009 tuition reported on northwestern.edu, is roughly the cost of tuition that my family will have to pay for me to attend Northwestern next fall, and it is through the financing college that the reality of the recession has truly resonated with me. Considering that the median salarly in the United States is just below this amount, and that many working Americans can barely make this amount of money annually, much less accumulated in college saving accounts from the time of their childrens' births. In this sense, considering how each person's family has struggled in one way or another from the recession, I believe for teenagers this is the most real context from which to understand the economic plight our nation faces, and it is in only in this respect that I will truly be able to sense the impact of our economic plight in the next several years of my education.
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