The unemployment rate has been higher for black college graduates than for all graduates for decades, but the gap widened since 2007, according to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Black students who graduated during the recession fared even worse. Between 2007 and 2013, black workers who had just graduated from college saw their unemployment rate nearly triple, jumping from 7.8 percent to 12.4 percent. That’s a much faster increase than for everyone else: all recent college graduates saw their rate increase 2.3 percentage points. And young black college graduates have been doing worse and worse: their unemployment rate at age 22 was 5.1 percent in 1970, 15.4 percent in 2000, and 19.2 percent between 2010 and 2012.
But black college graduates don’t just have to deal with higher unemployment rates. Those who manage to get a job aren’t necessarily getting to put their degrees to use. A third of all college graduates were working low-paying jobs that don’t typically require a four-year degree between 2003 and 2013, compared to 40 percent of black college graduates. Recent grads fared even worse: 44 percent of recent graduates ended up in these jobs, but for black ones, the rate has averaged about 50 percent since 2003, and in 2013, it shot up 10 percentage points to 55.9 percent. That means more than half of black people who graduated from college in recent years were in jobs that didn’t use their degrees.