Congratulations and best wishes to the class of 2015, particularly to graduates from our local institutions: Butler County Community College, Slippery Rock University and Grove City College.

Slippery Rock University conferred 1,549 diplomas — 45 doctorates, 245 master’s and 1,301 bachelor’s degrees — during spring commencement exercises on May 9 in the university’s Morrow Field House.

The ceremony included presentation of 49 doctor of physical therapy degrees; 245 master’s degrees, including 25 masters of business administration degrees in the program’s second cohort; and 1,301 under graduate degrees.

At Butler County Community College, more than 230 of the 548 graduating students took part Wednesday in BC3’s 47th commencement. Seventeen students graduated with two degrees, while two were awarded three degrees.

Grove City College commenced 544 graduates on May 16 during the college’s 135th commencement.

A bit of bright news greets the new graduates: their employment prospects are the best seen in at least three years.

According to Liberty Street Economics, an online publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “Openings for jobs requiring a college degree have picked up since last summer. Not only has this increase in the demand for educated workers continued to push down the unemployment rate for recent graduates, but it has also finally started to help reduce underemployment, though the underemployment rate remains high.”

Landing that first good job is still going to be a challenge, “it appears that finding a good job has become just a little bit easier for the class of 2015.”

Writers Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz tracked online help-wanted postings from December 2007 to the present. They noted a sharp drop in employment opportunities after the Great Recession of 2008 that lingered through the summer of 2009. Since then, the employment rate for noncollege level jobs has increased steadily. Graduate-level jobs remained relatively flat through the spring of 2014. However, Abel and Deitz write, the demand for college graduates has increase over the past 11 months and appears likely to keep increasing.

“Fortunately, the demand for college graduates started to pick up again last summer, rising by more than 10 percent through the first part of this year,” they wrote. “This recent increase in the availability of college jobs has led to some improvement in labor market outcomes for young college graduates.”

The trend is encouraging for two reasons. The first is obvious: there are more and better-paying jobs available, which increases the likelihood of gainful employment for every graduate.

The second reason is the increased odds of finding employment that’s satisfying for a college graduate — a job that requires and challenges the skills and knowledge that college education instills in graduates.

That should be encouraging news for all area graduates and their families. For many, the job search will seem daunting and discouraging — the first job turns out to be the finding of a job.

And that freshly printed diploma is no guarantee of immediate employment, but it does raise the status and employability of every individual who has earned one — or two or even three degrees.

Best wishes to all our graduates as they embark on this adventure we call a career.