VOA常速英语:Job Prospects for 2017 College Grads, Best in More Than a Decade

Time waits for no one, but if you had to pick a year to graduate, 2017 would be the year to do it.Nicole Smith is chief economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.“We are at one of the lowest unemployment rates we’ve had since May of 2007,so what that means for the graduating class is, you know, the likelihood of getting a job is really, really good".

“Awesome! I feel absolutely amazing.”Zeeba Manavi is graduating with a master’s in biochemistry,but she knows in today’s economy, her education is just getting started.“Because science has never ending, so that’s why you are not limited to four years or five years, you have a lifelong to learn.”

Visa requirements make job prospects for international students less clear.Despite graduating with a Ph.D in chemistry, Zhongyu Mou says he will probably have to move back home to China to begin his career.“Would you prefer that you got a, you search for a job here?” “I do. I do if I have assurality (assurance). Yeah.”

Other graduates would need to face similar choices.On Skype Bankrate. com’s Mark Hamrick says opportunities in today’s economy means going where the jobs are.“The strongest demand for workers is encoring on both coasts and not so much in the middle of the country.And that suggests that there are still people who are either not faring as well or having been left behind by the economic recovery.”

But for those still hoping for high paying manufacturing jobs, “Those jobs are requiring a lot more skills than their predecessors.I mean they are gone, they are not coming back.”Smith says in the 1970s, manufacturing represented nearly two of every five jobs in the United States.Today they account for fewer than one in ten.

Mil Arcega, for VOA News, Washington.