South By North Strategies, Ltd.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute points out that the wages paid to entry-level workers, including those with college degrees, fell over the course of the last decade. From the report …

Entry-level wages fell among both women and men college graduates from 2000 to 2007, declining by 2.5 percent among men and 1.6 percent among women, and tumbled further in the recessionary years after 2007. This means that young college graduates who finished their education in the last five years or so are earning significantly less than their older brothers and sisters who graduated in the late 1990s. The poor wage growth in the last decade contrasts markedly with the strong period of rising wages for entry-level men college graduates from 1995 to 2000, during which time they increased 20.3 percent. In contrast, from 1979 to 1995, the entry-level hourly wage for men college graduates fell more than $1. Thus, the period of falling wages since 2000 does not stand as the exception to the rule for young college-educated men; rather, it is the wage boom of the late 1990s that seems exceptional. In 2011, the hourly wage of entry-level college-educated men was slightly more than $1 higher than in 1979, a rise of only 5.2 percent over 32 years.