The transcript below is from the Weekend Edition program where host Scott Simon talks with Dr. Richard Vedder, co-author of a new study on the underemployment of college graduates.

Study Says Many College Students Underemployed After Graduation

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

If you dig into this latest employment report, the unemployment rate for those with a college degree is roughly half of the national average. But a new report by the nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity says that roughly half of those college graduates who have jobs are now working jobs that don’t require a college degree. People with Ph.D.s. are driving taxis and waiting on tables. They are earning much less than expected, and certainly bargained for when they began to rack up college debts. Dr. Richard Vedder co-authored the study. He’s also a distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University and joins us from member station WOUB in Athens, Ohio. Dr. Vedder, thanks so much for being with us.

RICHARD VEDDER: Glad to be with you, Scott.

SIMON: Help us understand what this means.

VEDDER: Well, it means there’s a lot of people that are going to college, I suspect most of them with expectations that upon graduation they will make a pretty good living and live sort of an upper middle-class American life. But instead, a lot of them are getting jobs upon graduation working as bartenders, taxi drivers – a million of them are retail sales clerks, 115,000 of them are janitors. They’re getting jobs that I’m fairly certain are less than what they’re expected when they began the college experience.

SIMON: What’s happened? Did the economy shrink but the number of college graduates grow?

VEDDER: Both things have happened. It is true that the downturn in economic growth in the last several years and the sluggish job growth – some call it the jobless recovery – has aggravated a problem that already existed. But I think the more fundamental long-term problem is that there is simply something of a mismatch between the expectation of students and also the reality of the job markets.