7 ms·

The data doesn't seem to add much support for this, outside of a blip because of the pandemic. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:expl

• cagenut 2y ago
  sure it does its just subtle on that graph if you click/turn-off 'all college' and 'young workers' and look at recent-grad and all-workers you can see that the historic trend of recent grads having lower unemployment than average inverted during covid and that recent grads are now worse off than the random average worker. actually interesting enough it looks like it began juuust before covid, ~2018
  • dwallin 2y ago
    Oh, you are right, I missed that inversion. Although it's worth noting, the absolute employment rate for graduates doesn't seem particularly out of line historically speaking. It might be more accurate to say that the current low employment rate is affecting primarily existing workers in the market. I don't think looking at the date of the crossover point is particularly helpful though, probably better to look at the derivative of the ratio between the two to see when the trend began. At a glance it looks like it might have began in 2009 during the recession, which actually matches up really well with when labor participation rates saw a big drop off. My off-the-cuff hypothesis would be that this effect could be explained by existing workers leaving the labor market, which wouldn't necessarily affect recent grads. I wasn't able to find a historical labor participation rate for recent grads though, which would help support that hypothesis. For general labor participation rate information: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART