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New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

• armchairhacker 4mo ago
  Since 2019, although now the gap is higher than ever (1.4%). College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares for academia (graduate school).
  • CSMastermind 4mo ago
    I'd argue the value of college has been steadily declining ever since we tried to push more and more people through it. When it's a filter it's a good signal, when it's a participation trophy far less so.
    • bombcar 4mo ago
      A bachelor's now is a high school diploma of 70 years ago. It doesn't tell you much and it delays your earning potential four years, and saddles you with debt.
• nikolay 4mo ago
  Isn't getting a college degree actually making you more selective, too, leading graduates to pass on jobs they would otherwise have taken?
  • gravypod 4mo ago
    I've known a few college graduates who have come up in this market. From what I see, the common pattern is to try and get a position in your field for 3-10 months. Somewhere in that time range, they burn out. Then they apply for something field related for a few months. Then anything. Once they've exhausted all options they usually give up. We will likely have a similar concept in our country as China's "lying flat" movement unless we make a big shift.
    • trescenzi 4mo ago
      This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.
      • AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
        Yeah, I also wanted to question the "now" in the headline. But if you can believe the article's data, this is new - new since 2019.
      • majormajor 4mo ago
        "College grads are fully employed" certainly wasn't true in 2013 but the chart ain't that hard to read. The news here is how much it's changed. 2011 and 2013 were the years most tilted in the other direction since 1991 (unemployment rate 2 percentage points lower among new grads than all others). Only since 2019 have new grad overall had a higher unemployment rate, and it's climbing. One of the interesting aspects here is that bad economies generally favored new grads because the unemployment baseline was higher and employers were picky and favored "any degree" over "no degree". I wonder how much of the change is from less of a preference for "any degree but not much experience" to "experience regardless of degree" in work that doesn't exactly need a degree. And how much is from job availability shifts eating away at entry level roles combined with the ever-present "get a degree to get a good job" pro-college marketing for most of recent US history.
        • trescenzi 4mo ago
          I was replying to the comment not necessarily the article. The _not new_ was in reference to college grads not always having an easy time. That being said looking at the cited data I don't really know if I agree with the conclusion. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:unemployment https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:... While it is new, since 1990, that recent college grads are doing worse than all workers it's not the case that the degree is no longer a buffer. If you compare Young Workers(7.5%) to Recent College Grads(5.6%), i.e. the same age range, or All Workers(4.3%) to All College Grads(3.1%) as of today there's still a buffer. Edit: They point this out later in the piece themselves
  • hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
    But note the article also points out "Of the new grads who do have jobs, about 41% are underemployed, working roles that never required a degree in the first place." So while I'd assume that yes, some graduates are more selective (as they should be, as they usually need to pay off student loans), a huge number of them are taking jobs that don't require their degrees.
• OutOfHere 4mo ago
  Outside of medicine, a non-CS engineering degree, preferably also a masters, remains a good pathway to a reasonable non-parasitic job, although relocation may be required.
  • dr_dshiv 4mo ago
    Can it be replaced with good references and an interesting portfolio?
    • OutOfHere 4mo ago
      For those with a CS degree, I think the issue is that we aren't correctly using CS and AI to amass power as we rightfully should. We literally hold in our hands the power to delete many desk jobs from existence, also to offer various original new services, but somehow we're feeling crippled. This disconnect requires bridging.
      • SJC_Hacker 4mo ago
        Deleting those desk jobs requires understanding those desk jobs. Which means either working them or teaming up with someone who does
        • deleted 4mo ago
          [deleted]
        • OutOfHere 4mo ago
          A lot of desk job work: 1. To the extent it's standard, it's covered in textbooks which are easily learnable by AI. 2. To the extent it's original, it often is independently rediscoverable by AI from a combination of general intelligence plus workplace training data over which the AI learns. 3. To the extent it's learned (by a human from another human), it'll still slowly be captured by workplace training data over which the AI learns. 4. To the extent it's undocumented, it's up to management to have the processes documented.
  • 4mo ago
• sublinear 4mo ago
  > The comparison is worth pinning down. "All workers" is the whole U.S. labor force, and most of them are older and more experienced than a new graduate, so a fresh grad starts at a natural disadvantage. For decades the degree more than canceled that disadvantage out. Now it does not. > New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.
• andy99 4mo ago
  Are there people who think college education is a shortcut to generic employment? This seems like a very misleading statistic. Average earnings (including those unemployed), etc might be better. Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking.
  • gruez 4mo ago
    >Telling me that it’s harder to get a professional job that I’m qualified for than it is to walk up to a McDonald’s or whatever and get a job is not shocking. But as the graph also shows, graduate unemployment rate was lower for much of 2010s and before, so in some sense it really was "easier" with a college degree.
  • conception 4mo ago
    > college education is a shortcut to generic employment That was/is the societal narrative for the last forty plus years, yes.
    • soupspaces 4mo ago
      How else would you sell it?
    • SL61 4mo ago
      Yep, I remember being told that it doesn't matter which major I pick because there would be jobs that wanted just any bachelor's degree. I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.
      • bombcar 4mo ago
        When only the self-selecting intelligent/diligent/driven went to college, selecting college graduates was a huge win. So then everyone decided everyone should go to college - to me that's manifestly not the case, but that's where we are; plumbers doing quite successfully for themselves with a degree in something or other that doesn't matter at all.
• Rotdhizon 4mo ago
  This is the easiest niche to pick on but I am mid career for cybersecurity. I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable. Really I'm not sure how new people to tech could even enter the industry, it seems like at the lower levels the entire industry is essentially closed. However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.
  • spunker540 4mo ago
    I’m just a swe, but I kinda thought cyber is a good place to be, since the proliferation of insecure vibecoded apps.
    • rfgplk 4mo ago
      Most companies sadly don't care about security whatsoever.
      • delfinom 4mo ago
        Yep, I think my megacorp's cybersecurity department is just a bunch of checklist punchers that now just copy and paste any of our technical writeups into ChatGPT, and I am not even joking. Fucking infuriating. They are doing the bare minimum for cybersecurity insurance requirements, thats it.
        • zdragnar 4mo ago
          That's what it means to be a cost center. Anything over the minimum translates to wasted effort and inefficiency.
        • 4mo ago
• 827a 4mo ago
  I would postulate that there are two reasons why this is happening. 1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence. 2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel. I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop. Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless. I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.
  • WarOnPrivacy 4mo ago
    > Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Is your assertion that if fewer graduates struggled with these things, companies would post more jobs? Asking because there aren't enough actual¹, realistic² jobs to employ the current pool of job seekers. ¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised. ² Qualification requirements that align with what the position actually needs.
• z3c0 4mo ago
  Interestingly (and anecdotally), as a 10-year+ experienced college dropout, I still see challenges getting hired for jobs that list degrees as a requirement. The only time I get a call back on "front door" applications is with the fateful addendum of "OR relevant work experience". (I wonder if agents and their lack of human discretion is amplifying this.) The article's assertion that a college degree still offers an edge beyond entry level still seems very much true.
  • rfgplk 4mo ago
    If you haven't got a degree on your resume, it just gets autodropped at the application stage by an ATS. No human sees it. Same if you're missing keywords.
    • bombcar 4mo ago
      Which is why night school for someone in that position can be useful - just to get the keyword "degree" on there. But the people you meet at night school are likely to be even more useful. Connections rule the world.
  • anal_reactor 4mo ago
    I know it seems awkward, but you can just lie on your resume. Most employers lie on their job ads, most applicants lie on their resumes. This is why the whole recruitment process is so broken.
    • z3c0 4mo ago
      You're correct, and I've long been aware. I just... won't. Principles haven't done much good so far, but my sleep is bad enough as is.
• coolThingsFirst 4mo ago
  the bar is higher and higher for less and less. donezo as a career.
• tamimio 4mo ago
  Now I want to see the males/females ratio in that graph, I bet most of the unemployed are males, which is something weird I noticed where everyone who’s complaining about the job market are men, meanwhile women are hired and sometimes working two jobs on top of that.
  • rozal 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • epistasis 4mo ago
    The difference is only 11% of men versus 10.5% of women age 16-24 (PDF): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/youth.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/youth.pdf
    • tamimio 4mo ago
      That’s probably seasonal/part time/temp jobs given the age bracket, which is another something I noticed, there’s barely any deep studies across the ages. I think there are multiple reasons why females are more employed, but on top of them is the rise of service and nurturing economy (services healthcare etc) compared to other sectors, and these industries are dominated by women, and since there’s a general decline in general in say production or manufacturing, these economies boom, I mean, who’s gonna take care of boomers who dominate the wealth in general?
    • junofan 4mo ago
      How is that relevant? From TFA: > By early 2026 recent grads sat at 5.6% unemployment Which seems very far from your numbers.
      • epistasis 4mo ago
        It's some actual BLS numbers from the same age range, instead of anecdote filtered through the algorithm of social media feeds.
  • Telemakhos 4mo ago
• epistasis 4mo ago
  The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young. We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young). We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.
  • sleepyguy 4mo ago
    Perhaps they should vote, unfortunately they don't. They are unreliable as a base so politicians ignore them and their needs.
    • epistasis 4mo ago
      Vote for whom? The political establishment is locking out an entire generation of younger politicians too. Asking those who have only been able to vote for a few years to have solved the problems, in a system where power is gained only through the accumulation of decades of experience, is, well blaming the victims. The greed of older generations, their lack of compassion and understanding, and their narcissism are all to blame. Young people are entering a system built by others with the ladders already pulled up. Violent revolution is the only way they could have changed the system in a short time, and nobody wants that.
      • sleepyguy 4mo ago
        Talarico? Bernie? etc? When they don't vote, they leave the Boomers in charge. -GenXer
  • lizknope 4mo ago
    Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc. EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc. I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.
• hyperpape 4mo ago
  I wonder what the impact of the rising base rate of employees with college degrees is. In 1992, a fresh college graduate had better educational attainment than 42% of the labor force. In 2016 (latest date I found numbers for), that was down to 32%. https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/educational-attainment-of-the-labor-force/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/educational-attainment-of... That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average member of the labor force.
  • downrightmike 4mo ago
    Outcome is the same as in the great depression: new people can't get on the ladder and if you fall off the ladder, you'll never get back on.
  • hdgvhicv 4mo ago
    Compare under 27s with a degree vs without and you see the problem is youth unemployment. If you are 25 you’re better off with a degree than without though. In the U.K. youth unemployment is about 2005-6 levels. It was far higher by 2010.
  • labcomputer 4mo ago
    Ding ding ding! This also neatly explains why Boomers were able to have a good life with just a high school diploma. Wikipedia has a good chart, but the short version is that having a high school diploma in 1965 meant you were better educated than 50% of the labor force. PhDs are the new undergraduate degree.
  • laughing_man 4mo ago
    It seemed like good advice as the manufacturing sector shrank.
• nxm 4mo ago
  It'd be nice to see a break down by major.
• hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
  I think the article is correct to point out remote work as a big culprit, but for the wrong reasons. The article says "Employers, the Fed argues, are wary of hiring inexperienced people into remote roles, where the on-the-job mentorship that turns a new grad into a productive worker is hard to deliver." And I agree that's a factor, but I really think that what changed in the late teens is that remote software and networks finally got good enough so that the hit you got to productivity from employing people in low cost of living areas really went away. I lived through lots of "offshoring frenzies" that never went very far in the past, but things are different this time. Like in the fallout from the .com bust in the early 00s, there was all this talk about how we'd ship all software development to India, and a lot of companies did try to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. And top companies were still paying crazy high salaries for entry level top talent in the Bay Area because they knew it was worth it. Now, though, I feel like companies are smarter. They know time zone overlap is key, so I've seen a lot more offshoring to Latin America, Canada and Europe where there is sufficient overlap with US time zones. Since even US folks spend so much of their time on Zoom etc. anyway, it doesn't really matter if your Zoom colleague is in your same city or thousands of miles away. I've worked with excellent colleagues from Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland etc. before, and the network speed was good enough so that videoconferencing quality was great. And this is a far cry from the early 00s when I was on choppy voice-only conference calls with a team in India. So new grads are not only competing with other new grads, they're competing with highly competent, experienced grads from all over the world, most of whom have salary expectations much lower than US new grads.
  • 0xDEAFBEAD 4mo ago
    So what are remaining high-paying white collar jobs which aren't exposed to this type of foreign competition? I'm thinking lawyer, since legal skills aren't as portable across international borders?
    • sillysaurusx 4mo ago
      AI’s coming for them. It’s impossible to predict what lawyering will look like in four years.
• ryeguy_24 4mo ago
  I keep going back to the debate with myself. Do I give my now-young kids 500K in an ETF in 14 years or do I send them to college? And the debate is not about how they will spend it (I can hold on to it too), it’s about whether to spend the money or just pass on the wealth to them. People have given me tons of reasons why college is good for them - independence, etc etc. I can find a way to give them independence without spending 500k. I haven’t settled the debate but articles like this are not helping the college path.
  • scruple 4mo ago
    I have the same sorts of thoughts rolling around in my head, and also agree that the college path is looking grim right now.
  • latentsea 4mo ago
    Send them to a country where college is much cheaper and then also be able to give them like $400k ~ $450k
  • shepherdjerred 4mo ago
    Would it make sense to keep that money in a trust and pay a portion of the interest out to them each month/year? e.g. assuming $500k/yr at 4% interest, that would be $20k/yr which is not enough to live on but is still a nice cushion
  • s1artibartfast 4mo ago
    My father offered me a similar deal 25 years ago. I chose college, but itsnt clearly correct. 250k (my offer) would be 2 million today, which is more than my savings from 20 years of work. I would have needed a different career, but that could be better or worse. If I had that and was an electrician for example, I would be far better off
  • laughing_man 4mo ago
    I'm childless, but I go through that with nieces and nephews. I decided to give them a lump sum as a high school graduation gift to do with as they please. IMO you could learn a lot more, as a young person, starting a small business than you'll ever learn at college, and it'll cost less even if you fail. So I don't want to make it a "college fund" or anything like that.
• manesioz 4mo ago
  https://tinyurl.com/cronus-eating-children https://tinyurl.com/cronus-eating-children
• chr15m 4mo ago
  It's smartphones (~2008).
• suchire 4mo ago
  To me the real question is why a new grad would have lower unemployment to begin with compared to the average worker. Presumably the average worker has more on-the-job experience, so it seems like maybe people are weighting that more heavily now compared to before.
• scihuber 4mo ago
  Oh, I ended up in a really funny situation. I inherited a 45-square-meter apartment 1/2 portion, while my mother bought another portion from a relative and then sold that part to my wife, who bought it on credit. We were just so happy when we finally paid off all the debts. And then we had to leave the country and become refugees! And now, after five years of living in another country, I realize that even if a country has democratic freedoms, economic life there is far from a bed of roses. This was a very sad and depressing realization this year, since I still haven’t found a full-time job, and naturally, that’s not having a very positive impact on my life.
• redwood 4mo ago
  The most popular major is probably business which is a little generic or hand wavy and I bet if you were to look at people who study more practical topics you see a much lower rate of unemployment. Another part of it is of course the prestige of the institution. If everyone has a degree it's not what it used to be. I definitely agree with other posters though that once you're in a remote work environment is South America really that different than another neighborhood or City if that same amount of money could bring in a more senior person with experience why hire the green? I think a key part of hiring green folks was culture and having young people around the office but that just isn't what it used to be. The vibe shift seem to correlate with the general feeling that we're all busy and we really want to spend time babysitting a new grad versus all working hard with experienced people it's almost like once you're too busy it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that it's hard to spend time ramping people which is such a short-sihted thought. Still I think in the fullness of time people will realize that eventually you do need to be bringing the next generation into the company and so this might be a temporary fad.
• horns4lyfe 4mo ago
  Is everyone just going to ignore that most of the jobs created in the post few years have gone to foreign born workers? Is it taboo, but some how the “Gen Z is dumb” is brought up multiple times in all its glorious stupidity
• silexia 4mo ago
  Immigration, both legal and illegal, takes up millions of homes and jobs that would otherwise be available to young Americans.