A Greenburgh Town Hall meeting Tuesday will be the third and final in a series organized by a college student to tackle employment issues she and other millennials are facing.
The initiative is called Empowering Millennials in Transition, or EMIT, and it focuses on bringing together young men and women having difficulty breaking into the business community. EMIT was started by Elizabeth Skovron, a Greenburgh resident who will be starting her senior year at the University at Albany this fall.
The first and second meetings were held in June and July. Skovron took an internship at Greenburgh Town Hall after she had difficulty finding paid summer work or desirable unpaid internships. Tuesday”™s meeting marks the last meeting before Skovron heads back to campus.
“There”™s this shared feeling of fear to graduate,” Skovron, a sociology major, said. “The fear I see has been, am I going to be able to get a job? Will I be able to work in a field that matches the degree?”
Skovron said the good news is there are opportunities available for young people with an entrepreneurial spirit looking to find them.
The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is about 4.3 percent, and 44 percent of young graduates who find work end up in jobs that don”™t require degrees, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study. College-educated millennials are paid better than their counterparts without degrees over the long haul, studies have shown, but recent graduates ”“ particularly those with liberal arts degrees ”“ face stiff competition for jobs and are often underemployed or facing the prospect of multiple unpaid internships with little chance of those opportunities translating into full-time employment.
Adding to the desperate situation is what is quickly becoming a national college debt crisis as tuition grows while appropriately-waged job prospects are few and far between. According to Forbes, 71 percent of college graduates enter the job market with some college debt, with $26,000 the average amount of loans to be paid back after college. Total student loan debt in the U.S. has reached $1.2 trillion, or more than the entire credit debt of the country.
The meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Greenburgh Town Hall. For more information or to RSVP, click here or email eskovron@albany.edu.
