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 histori

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