Economic news released today by the National Association of Colleges and Employers contained a lot of great news for students and recent graduates of one-, two-, and four-year colleges and universities.

According to a survey of NACE employer members, only four percent of employers plan to decrease their hiring of recent college grads while a whopping 57.4 percent plan to increase such hiring. For those who aren’t human calculators, that means that 38.6 percent plan to maintain their number of hires. Even better news is that the percent increase in projected hires came in at 16.6 percent, which would be the largest increase in 12 years. It is noteworthy that the hiring rate has not been increasing year-after-year since the Great Recession of 2008-09. Indeed, the class of 2018 saw hiring decrease by 1.3 percent.

Why are employers planning to hire so many new grads? A number of reasons:

• Overall hiring is up;
• Improved economy;
• Company growth;
• Anticipated retirements;
• Increased focus on early talent/succession planning; and
• Conversion of a higher percentage of interns into permanent hires, which now averages 45.6 percent.

Worth noting is that NACE employer members are not representative of all employers. The vast majority of employers in the U.S. have just one employee — the owner — and only a very small percentage have more than 100 employees. Yet NACE employer members have an average of 14.3 full-time, university relations staff members. According to NAICS, almost 70 percent of employers have four or fewer employees and only 16,276 have more than 1,000 employees.