In a recent press briefing William C. Dudley, President and CEO of the New York Federal Reserve, addressed the issue of unemployment among recent college graduates. Here’s an excerpt of his remarks.

Are Recent College Graduates Finding Good Jobs?

The special topic of today’s press briefing is a look at how well recent college graduates are faring in the job market, both nationally and here in our region. A college education represents an important investment in one’s human capital, meaning the knowledge and skills people build. Historically, it’s been pretty clear that those who’ve invested in a college education have tended to earn a sizeable economic return. And the benefits of college-educated citizens go well beyond the individual. Regions with a higher concentration of college graduates tend to be more innovative, have higher living standards and experience more rapid economic growth.2 So a college education plays an important role in helping individuals prosper, as well as in strengthening the broader economy.

More recently, though, rising costs, increasing student debt and widespread reports of recent college graduates not being able to find good jobs have raised some troubling questions about whether going to college is still a good investment. In fact, some of our own research, including material that we discussed at our last press briefing, has shown the dramatic increase in student debt over the past decade.3 In today’s briefing, we’re going to take a close look at the question of just how weak today’s labor market is for new college graduates by putting their recent experience into context using some hard data.

It is important for us to undertake this kind of analysis because, as we’ll show, newly minted graduates always take some time to transition into the labor market and find jobs that utilize their education. And young people with college degrees still fare far better than those without. At the same time, with the sluggish jobs recovery from the recession, it’s clear that the transition of recent graduates into the labor market is taking longer, and they’ve experienced higher unemployment and higher underemployment than in years past.4 Still, while times have gotten tougher for recent graduates, we shouldn’t be too hasty in concluding that getting a college education won’t help people find good jobs.