WASHINGTON (AP) — The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees.

Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.

While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.

Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.

Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he got financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. “There is not much out there, it seems,” he said.

His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having long-lasting financial impact.

“You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it’s not true for everybody,” says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. “If you’re not sure what you’re going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college.”

Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor’s degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. “Simply put, we’re failing kids coming out of college,” he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. “We’re going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow.”

By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed — roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.

On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs.

The figures are based on an analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey data by Northeastern University researchers and supplemented with material from Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. They rely on Labor Department assessments of the level of education required to do the job in 900-plus U.S. occupations, which were used to calculate the shares of young adults with bachelor’s degrees who were “underemployed.”

About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields.

Out of the 1.5 million who languished in the job market, about half were underemployed, an increase from the previous year.

I mean really is anybody surprised? I’ve been telling people this for months!!! Anyways I know I haven’t written anything about education or college in a while so I decided to finally do so people would be aware of corrupt education system today. So I ask everyone out there to please read, send, or reblog this to your friends and followers because I feel as though not enough people are aware of this.

Here is a negative review of one student. Judge for yourself

For an exclusively online program, this school is terrible.  They sell their online program by starting out with a very video oriented classroom environment and sell you the idea that you can complete your classes while running on a treadmill, etc….however this is not the case after the very first course.  The next 12 courses barely utilize the “online classroom” environment, which is nothing more than a low-tech discussion forum.

Regis puts no money at all in to their online program.  They actually don’t even have professors teaching the courses, they have “facilitators” who actually have a policy to not assist students, rather defer you to other students for help.

They are all about the money, and operate at the lowest cost possible…embedded in the course materials you will find advertisements, links to 3rd party tools, etc…  I got a call one day from a Regis faculty member who called to “verify” my personal information, was very nice, chatted for a while, and then asked for a donation which is all he was really after.

The quality of students in this program is terrible.  Most of them can’t even spell.  I think this says a lot about their program since this appears to be who they gear their program towards.  Most of these students really think they’re making something of themselves and refuse to believe they have been conned by Regis.

I am near completion of my MBA, and for the very little work I have put in to maintain a 4.0 GPA, I already know that this degree will be worth nothing when I finish.  VERY disappointing.  I would be completely outraged had I been the one paying the tuition rather than my employer.

I would recommend the Regis MBA to anyone that has their employer paying for the degree, and is only after a piece of paper that says “MBA” on it.  Word to the wise, do not expect to gain any knowledge or business experience through the course of this program.

The only “Masters” are those who created the Regis MBA program.  They have truly built a complete gold mine scam out of a .edu website and continue to scam thousands of students across the country out of $30,000 for a worthless degree.  It is one thing to run a smaller scale university and provide a reasonable education to their on-site students, but whoever is responsible for the MBA program should be ashamed of themselves.

The funny thing is that Regis refuses to comment on any complaints submitted about the program, which only further proves that they are fully aware of the situation they have created, and want to ride this out until the law otherwise prohibits.”