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Abstract
Over recent years, progress has been made toward improving Hispanic American’s education and work outcomes. However, even among college graduates, Hispanic Americans face marked difficulty on the job market in terms of both salary and hiring (NCES, 2016; 2019). Research suggests that entry into the workforce after education is a critical and potentially stressful period in one’s career (Yang & Gysbers, 2007) and could be the starting point to a lifetime of cumulative disadvantage in income. Yet, a targeted examination of this critical time period is lacking in the literature, and focus remains mainly on long-term systemic solutions that are necessary but do not improve outcomes for current Hispanic graduates. This project aims to fill this gap by examining early job outcomes of Hispanic graduates relative to their White peers, providing insights about new entry to the workforce which may be leveraged in future research on early job seeking experiences. I analyzed secondary data collected by the career services center of a large, Southeastern university in the United States to assess how racioethnicity (Hispanic vs. White) relates to starting salary and job search length—time spent actively job searching before being hired—for graduates entering the full-time job market, with or without internship experience. The results indicate that there are no differences between White and Hispanic graduates in starting salary nor job search length nor does internship experience matter in the relationship between racioethnicity and job search length.