Jul 22, 2014 10:27 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Adding to a tough job market for graduates fresh out of college, those entering the work force are seeing their wages grow slower than ever before.

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (FRBSF) released a report Monday that showed how the Great Recession is still affecting recent college graduates' wages. Recent studies have also shown the unemployment rate for such job seekers is slightly higher than the national average.

According to Reuters, the new report from the FRBSF is an example of a major weakness still plaguing the economy.

Led by Bart Hobijn and Lisa Benagali, the report states that recent college grads are not getting different jobs, just that their salaries are not rising as quickly as before the recession. The researchers' report also agreed with various other studies and they found an uptick in part-time jobs and work outside of a graduate's degree field.

"While this post-recession pattern was also present after the 2001 recession, earnings growth following the most recent recession has been held down longer than in the past, which reflects the depth and severity of the recession," Hobijn and Benagali wrote in their report.

They argued that employers find that they cannot change their tenured workers' salaries with the same freedom they have when hiring new employees. For this reason, the researchers said reading into the wages of recent college graduates is a better barometer for the price of labor in the economy.

"Other signs of the continued weakness in the labor market are the shares of recent graduates not in the labor force, unemployed, or working part-time, which are still elevated compared with the start of the recession," reads the report.

However, they concluded that college is still a worthwhile investment because graduates still earned more money in their lifetime on average than their peers without a degree. Due to their findings, this generation of college graduates are simply going to be in debt for their education longer than their predecessors were.

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