Overqualified and Underage: Recent College Graduates Face Working World Realities

So imagine this: you are young, college educated, ambitious and ready to dive into the working world. You put time and effort into a great cover letter, and you beef up the resume to highlight all of your various experiences. Then you send it out to what seems like a hundred companies. You meet and exceed their requirements. You wait. You wait some more. Of the dozens of resumes you've sent out, you get a mere few responses. The responses baffle you. In some cases you are grossly overqualified, and in other instances, for seemingly the same job, you are grossly under qualified.

As more and more Americans attend and graduate college, holding a Bachelor's Degree is no longer a plus, but rather, it's the bare minimum. The result is a reduction in the age of people entering graduate school. I, myself, graduated with my Masters from New York University this past year at the ripe young age of 24. I am now over qualified for many jobs. It sounds ironic that a higher degree would hold you back professionally, but the reality is that not many companies want to pay a 24-year old a higher salary, because of his or her higher degree. In all my job rejections, the reason most often given to me was that I was too qualified at too young an age.

So why is age so important? The anomaly we are seeing now is that younger people have a high education, but low levels of life experience and professional experience. So basically, no one will hire you until you get experience, but you can't get experience, because no one will hire you. It's the catch-22 plaguing twenty-something year old Americans.

So what's the solution? It's hard to postpone graduate school. Most statistics show that the longer you wait to enter graduate school, the less likely you will actually follow through. On the other hand, it is hard to gain valuable work experience if you possess only a Bachelor's Degree.

I decided to take a new approach in resume writing. Little things I did in college that I ignored on my resume were now appearing on my resume. I took advantage of every ounce of experience I could get in college, and it was worth re-examining for the resume. One major solution for the job hunt is to try to acquire as much life experience as possible in addition to your undergraduate and graduate studies. It may mean living on a smaller budget, so you can take lower paying jobs in exchange for better experience. It may also mean eating out less in order to use the money to travel abroad. It may also mean extending the length of your graduate work so that you can gain practical experience along side the training.

As we barrel into the twenty-first century, more and more young people will be trying to enter the work force with more education than experience. It's a new problem, but one that needs to be dealt with. These graduates are graduating in droves, and have a lot to offer to the working world.