“The Great Recession and its aftermath have decimated job prospects and earnings for young workers, a new EPI briefing paper shows. In The Class of 2013: Young graduates still face dim job prospects, Heidi Shierholz, Natalie Sabadish and Nicholas Finio find that for the fifth consecutive year, new graduates will enter a profoundly weak labor market and will face high unemployment and underemployment rates and depressed wages. Because young workers always experience disproportionate increases in unemployment during downturns, young workers have confronted particularly high unemployment rates since the end of the Great Recession. For young high school graduates, the unemployment rate is 29.9 percent, compared with 17.5 percent in 2007, and the underemployment rate is 51.5 percent, compared with 29.4 percent in 2007. For college graduates, the unemployment rate is 8.8 percent, compared with 5.7 percent in 2007, and the underemployment rate is 18.3 percent, compared with 9.9 percent in 2007. (The definition of underemployment includes the officially unemployed, people who want a job and are available to work but have given up actively seeking work, and people who are working part-time but want full-time jobs.)”