The employment outlook will be a bit brighter for college graduates this year, if statistics keep moving in the same direction.

College Graudation
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The U.S. Department of Labor reported this week that the recent unemployment rate for 2013 four-year college graduates was 10.9 percent, down from 13.3 percent reported last year for 2012 grads.

While the 2013 figure is the lowest since 2007, it's still a far cry from where it was before the Great Recession began.

Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, said the nation has regained roughly all the jobs it lost during the economic downturn, but the labor market is much larger today, and it gets bigger with every graduation ceremony.

"There's just more people in the economy," he said. "You still don't have enough jobs to fulfill the needs of everybody who wants one."

Many of the young grads who do land a job, meanwhile, are struggling to find the same type of success they would have had in the past. Van Horn noted a lot of graduates are taking temporary positions and ones that may not even require a college degree.

"They're earning less money, and this means that as they start their careers, they're in a sense starting behind," Van Horn said. "They're essentially a victim of a bad luck of timing."

Van Horn suggested the investment into college is still worth it, though, because folks with a college degree are better off than those without one.

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