The unemployment rate rose to 7.3% in October, higher than the unemployment rate when Barack Obama came into office. And, the US labor force participation rate, plunged from 63.2% to 62.8% in the same month. Zero Hedge reported the number of people not in the labor force exploded by nearly 1 million, or 932,000 to be exact, in just the month of October. It was the lowest participation rate since 1978 – during the Carter years.
Things are so bad that even people with graduate degrees are having a rough time finding work.
In fact, PhD grads on welfare have tripled from 2007 to 2011.
The College Insurrection reported:
And just how many folks with graduate degrees are currently living off government assistance? The Chronicle article throws out some remarkable statistics:
The percentage of graduate-degree holders who receive food stamps or some other aid more than doubled between 2007 and 2010.
During that three-year period, the number of people with master’s degrees who received food stamps and other aid climbed from 101,682 to 293,029, and the number of people with Ph.D.’s who received assistance rose from 9,776 to 33,655, according to tabulations of microdata done by Austin Nichols, a senior researcher with the Urban Institute. He drew on figures from the 2008 and 2011 Current Population Surveys done by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor…
