Posted on 04/24/2004 11:59:19 AM PDT by traumer
Edited on 04/24/2004 12:20:53 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
If you are among the 1.2 million students expected to graduate in 2004, your starting salary should be higher than your 2003 counterparts'. The good news is 24 percent of hiring managers will increase salaries for new grads.
For those college graduates lucky enough to find a job, 60 percent can expect to make less than $30,000 a year, according to CareerBuilder.com's "Life at Work 2004" survey. Of this 60 percent, 17 percent of hiring managers will be offering college graduates salaries of less than $20,000. Further starting salary breakdowns are: 43 percent starting at $20,000 to $29,999; 26 percent starting at $30,000 to $39,999; 8 percent starting at $40,000 to $49,999; and 7 percent starting at $50,000 and above.
Kind of makes you wonder - why should families spend $70,000 to $100,000 on college when only 15% of grads are going to earn over $40K a year? Why not learn something like air conditioner repair, electrical contracting, plumbing, something that can't be outsourced?
I also want to know what percentage of college grads have an offer before graduation; how many wait 3 months, 6 months, etc. My husband has interviewed new grads (*not* slackers) who've been looking for a year since graduation from engineering school. I think this article is unnecessarily rosy.
I graduated in May 2003 and got a job in which I earned $65k my first year. The job didn't require a degree and most of my peers were high-school grads in their mid 30s. But hey, it's 65k. In case you're wondering what it is, it's phone-based collections for a bank. It's not all that hard if you're a good communicator/negotiator.
Congrats! Do you like the work? It's good to hear that your co-workers didn't have to go to college to do well for themselves.
I'm not doing that anymore, moved on to bigger and better things in the company. I did enjoy it though. It was a mix of young people out of college and seasoned customer service reps (call center experience). So in the sense that having a degree enabled me to get a high-paying position that generally was open only to highly experienced CSR's, I'd say it was worth it. It was harder for those without degrees to advance, although the best people in "labor" made much more than those managing them.
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