What type of unemployment insurance can recent undergraduate degree earners expect to receive? If it matter, in Illinois.
If you think that someone can graduate with a degree, and then be unemployed, and receive unemployment insurance payment, then you are mistaken (at least in NY and NJ).
First you have to be employed, and pay for unemployment insurance, and then if you lose your job through no fault of your own, the insurance will start making payments to you. Those payments will be based on your recent incom, up to a certain maximum.
I’m not really familiar with Illinois unemployment law, but if it’s anything like other states, generally the requirement is that the person filing for unemployment must have worked full time for a certain amount of time (usually a year), and then be unemployed through no fault of their own.
So someone who recently graduated from school and wasn’t working a full time job wouldn’t be eligible to file for unemployment compensation.
You can expect anything you want. What you’ll get it $0.
Do what I did! Stick a big toe in the job market - too cold, go back to grad school! Now I have an M.A., Everybody wants me to work for them.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go and work on my applications for law schools and PhD programs…
What everybody else said. Unemployment is funded through a combination of money that comes out of your paychecks and money that your employer contributes, so it’s only available (a) after you’ve been working and (b) lost that job without a good reason.
Lemme guess … OP graduated in May and still hasn’t found a job yet?
Just like Antonio107, that’s what happened to me, and that’s largely why I have a (-n *utterly *useless) M.A.
Welcome to graduating-when-the-economy-sucks, dude. (Dudette? Guessing not, from the username, but around here ya never know.)
This is why people should only get undergraduate degrees in liberal arts. No english major has graduated from college expecting a full-time job in their field since 1966.
Though, oddly, though bizarre flukes of timing, we sometimes end up with them.
In most states unemployment is funded only the employeer. Many people mistake SDI as part of unemployment, it is disiability insurance only.
Yeah, I wasn’t sure which states included a portion from the employee and how much, which is why I went with a fuzzy “combination of sources” explanation, since the employee contribution could be 0. 
Yes, I believe that in Texas, unemployment comes entirely from the employers, and not from the employees. Pretty sure that’s the case here. But either way, you have to have worked before you can get unemployment. Since the OP has never had an employer, he hasn’t “paid into the system” so to speak.
If you need money, I suggest you sue your alma mater. Unless, of course, you slept through those classes that taught basic research skills (PDF warning) in which case they would probably have a suitable defense to your claim.
Uh…none? Been unemployed on and off since graduating in 2008 (probably close to 30% of the time now that I think about it) but never for a second did I assume that there’d be some kind of unemployment payments or insurance for it. As sucky as it is, that’s life.