In a recent column I responded to a conservative scholar’s (Victor David Hanson) claim that U.S. “employment rates for college graduates are dismal” by showing that the employment rate for college graduates seeking employment was 96.8% – and rising.
Employment rates for recent college graduates are far worse than “dismal” in the periphery of Europe because the EU troika (the ECB, the EU Commission, and the IMF) have inflicted austerity on these nations. This produced a gratuitous second Great Recession in the Eurozone as a whole, but it also caused Great Depression levels of unemployment in Spain, Greece, and Italy. Those three nations have over 100 million in total population – roughly one-third of the eurozone’s total population. College graduates in these nations have unemployment rates ten times greater than in the U.S. (Hanson is a big fan of austerity, so he managed to get everything – the facts and the cause – reversed in his fable.)
