Ezra Klein posts this graph with the headline "the benefits of a college degree in one graph," and cites Matt Yglesias, who notes that there simply isn't much of an economic crisis among college graduates:
Virtually every single member of congress, every senator, every Capitol Hill staffer, every White House advisor, every Fed governor, and every major political reporter is a college graduate. What’s more, we have a large amount of social segregation in the United States—college graduates tend to socialize with each other. And among college graduates, there simply isn’t an economic crisis in the United States. [Emphasis mine]
I would actually be a little more careful about making that assertion, since it isn't actually true for all college grads. For most of the recession, the unemployment rate among black college graduates has greatly surpassed the rate for whites:
In April, when these statistics were compiled, the unemployment rate for black college graduates was 7.4 percent. By contrast, the unemployment rate for white college graduates was a low 4 percent. A college degree certainly helps black workers, but not by much, at least compared to the national average. What's more, well-off blacks tend to have more social proximity to blacks lower on the income scale, so while white college grads are mostly isolated from the recession's effects, I'm not sure if you can say the same for their black counterparts.
