It seems logical: College graduates have lower unemployment and earn more than less educated workers, so, the thinking goes, the fix for today’s anemic growth in jobs and wages is to make sure that more people earn college degrees. But that’s a common misperception, deflecting attention from the serious work that has to be done to create jobs and improve incomes.

A college education remains a path to more stable, higher-paying employment. The recent jobless rate for college graduates ages 25 and older was 3.2 percent, and their median pay at full-time, full-year jobs was $75,300 for men and $53,700 for women. That is a far lower rate of joblessness and a far higher pay level than for high school graduates and people without high school diplomas.

But that doesn’t mean that enough good jobs are, or will be, available for college graduates. Though joblessness for college graduates ages 25 and older looks tame, the jobless rate for those under 25 averaged 8.2 percent in 2013, compared with 8 percent in 2012 and 5.4 in 2007, before the Great Recession hit in full force.

Recent graduates also face rising underemployment, meaning that they work in jobs that typically do not require bachelor’s degrees. According to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the rise in underemployment for graduates ages 22 to 27 never fully retreated after the recessions of 2001 and 2007-9; in 2012, it was a dismal 44 percent for that age group, compared with a steady underemployment rate of 33 percent for college graduates as a whole over the past two decades.