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Wow. That's a statistic that doesn't get reported nearly enough. It puts an entirely different spin on the unemployment rate.

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It could probably afford to be aired in the "is college a waste of time and money?" threads which crop up here every day too.

I doubt it, the correlation does not imply causation. My hunch is that the people graduating from college are the kind of people that would find it easier to find a job anyway.

There was actually an interesting study about this which got mentioned recently on the Freakonomics podcast (you can see a transcription of the segment at http://freakonomicsradio.com/does-college-still-matter-and-o..., the original study is at http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/tlemieux/papers/unintended.pdf).

Basically, it uses men who were eligible for the Vietnam draft (who enrolled in college in greater numbers than they otherwise would have, to avoid military service) to demonstrate that success from college graduates is more than a "these people are the ones who were already going to succeed" thing.

Thanks for the link, that is interesting. Of course, there were no startups willing to eschew traditional hiring practices back then.

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