Will My Child be Prepared to Get a Job Upon Graduation?

This is usually the second question that parents ask me about academics. In other words, “Will he be moving back into his old bedroom at 22 years of age? Because honestly, we were going to turn it into a home office.”

When we were graduating from college this wasn’t really a concern. Students graduated with little or no debt and the economy absorbed us into jobs with decent salaries and benefits. If you moved home at all it wasn’t because you didn’t have a job, it was just to save money for a car or your first home. Today’s students’ prospects are still upbeat, but their pay and benefits have dropped considerably. So, yes, he will be prepared to get a job after graduating from college, but whether his first job will pay enough for him to move out on his own depends on a number of factors including what he studied and where he chooses to live.

As I write this article, I am sitting in a coffee shop in Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA. Many of you have never heard of Stillwater, so I’ll tell you a little bit about it. It is a lovely college town of approximately 48,000 year-round residents, not counting college students. It contains everything you need and most of what you want in a small city. In Stillwater, and in many small to medium cities like it, a single person can live quite comfortably on a $26,000.00 to $30,000.00 per year salary.

Rent for a nice, safe one bedroom apartment costs about $600.00 a month, you can buy a week’s worth of groceries for $55.00, attend concerts and sporting events nearby for little to no cost, and a gallon of gas hovers around $3.30 even though you can commute by bus or bike. Consider a similar lifestyle in Boston, D.C. or San Francisco and you would have to earn between 54-80% more to maintain an equivalent lifestyle.

Now I know, mid-western college towns aren’t for everyone, but this example just goes to show that your child can be employed and live on his own, if that is his goal and he’s willing to move to a less expensive part of the country or even another country as is the trend for recent graduates who want to live abroad before they settle down. A college degree doesn’t guarantee anyone a job, but it does open up considerable choices.