Megan Thee Stallion is trying to help college graduates get jobs

You will soon be able to call Megan Thee Stallion the Hot Girl Graduate, as she’s set to complete her years at Texas Southern University with a bachelor’s in health administration. But she’s not just graduating for the degree. She has plans to help fix the hiring problem for students who recently graduated from college.

In her Glamour cover story interview, Meg spoke about switching her major from nursing to business to finally landing on health administration. Besides the A grades that she says she’s racking up like platinum plaques, she explained how her health administration major is meant to help more people than just herself. According to the profile, the Grammy Award-winning rapper plans to open up assisted-living facilities to offer not just familial care, but also opportunities for recent graduates who she’s seen shut out of the job market due to not possessing years of experience that it would be virtually impossible for them to get.

“I see a lot of my peers — a lot of people I went to high school with,” she says. “They get their degree in, like, biology and then work at Forever 21. But why? Because nobody wants to give you a job because you don’t have experience.”

Megan specifically has her sights set on helping HBCU women graduates, telling them “come and get your experience over here.” Megan’s help couldn’t have come at a better time. The global pandemic made an already tough job market to enter nearly impossible for college graduates to get hired in. According to a survey released in July from employment site Monster, 45% of 2020 college graduates were still looking for jobs.

The summer months are usually when college graduates have the best luck gaining employment. Data from payroll and benefits provider Gusto shows 20 to 24-year olds typically made up 39% of all new hires in the month of June before the pandemic hit. But, that same age group only accounted for 26% of new hires this June, a 33% decline. It’s even worse for Black college graduates who are twice as likely to be unemployed a year after graduating compared to their white counterparts. The catch-22 of needing experience you aren’t old enough to have was exacerbated by the debilitating effects the pandemic had on the labor market.

“College graduates, they were more impacted early in the pandemic because they did not quite have the experience. So as companies are getting re-ramped up and trying to get their revenues back on track with where they were before, they’re starting with people with more experience who've done that sort of thing,” Jay Denton, a chief analyst at job market tech firm ThinkWhy, told NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth.

Helping people get employed has been on Megan’s mind long before COVID-19 upended the workforce of every company. In a separate December 2018 interview with Billboard, she implies she was partly inspired to open up her assisted living facilities to help her Texas Southern University classmates gain employment out of college. Luckily for Megan and her classmates, the jobs are starting to come back. This summer, administrators at major HBCUs noticed a significant increase in recruitment of their students by major corporations. Howard University’s exit survey for the 2020-2021 academic year puts the median starting salary for its graduates at roughly $72,680. Even during the pandemic, the hiring rate for HBCU alumni declined less than it did for non-HBCU alumni in 2020.

Hopefully, Megan’s philanthropy can catch on with other hip-hop artists and a #GetTheseKidsSomeJobs challenge can begin.