The AP reports that Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell, showing that the job market is improving in the U.S despite slower growth.

But the U.K. has 20,000 unemployed after graduating this past year. 

The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 346,000 last week, reports the Associated Press. 

Those figures show that the job market is improving, but modestly, despite slower growth in the economy than many would like. 

The four-week average--which is considered a less volatile figure--declined 2,750 to 345,750, the Labor Department said Thursday.

That's near the five-year low of 338,000 that the average touched last month.

Applications are only a proxy for layoffs. Since March of this year, they have fluctuated between 340,000 and 360,000, which is consistent with steady hiring despite a lack of growth in the overall economy. 

Employers have added 175,000 jobs in May, coming close to the average monthly gain for the past year. 

The unemployment rare was 7.6%, down from 8.2% from a year earlier. 

But the United Kingdom isn't so lucky, with the recession and the problems with the European Union affecting the young people of Britain that have just graduated from college. 

20,000 of them are unemployed 6 months after graduate, reports the UK's Daily Mail, with men more likely to be jobless than women. 

But even those young Brits that are employed are working jobs that don't even involve a degree. 

Overall, 20,415 UK and EU full-time university leavers were assumed to be unemployed after completing their first degree in 2011/12, accoring to data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), by way of the Daily Mail. 

So about 1 in 10 graduates are sitting in a bedroom somewhere unable to work. 

That's not even counting those UK grads who are in "elementary" jobs that don't require a degree: think window cleaners and road sweepers. 

More than one-third of new graduates currently working in Britain are in "non-professional" jobs that did not necessarily require a degree, at least according to HESA's figures. 

Around 9,695 people were working in 'elementary occupations', taking jobs as office juniors, hospital porters, waiters, bartenders, road sweepers, window cleaners, shelf stackers and lollipop men and women.

The chair of the university group million+ and vice chancellor of Staffordshire University, Professor Michael Gunn, told the UK's Daily Mail: 

"Six months is a relatively short time to make a judgement about the value of getting a degree and the occupations which graduates will enter in the future.

"However, these statistics confirm that even in a very difficult labor market studying for a degree on a full-time or a part-time basis remains one of the best ways of securing employment and a career."

Tell that to the street sweepers with a college degree.