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

• OutOfHere 3mo 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 3mo ago
    Can it be replaced with good references and an interesting portfolio?
    • OutOfHere 3mo 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 3mo ago
        Deleting those desk jobs requires understanding those desk jobs. Which means either working them or teaming up with someone who does
        • deleted 3mo ago
          [deleted]
        • OutOfHere 3mo 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.
  • QQ00 3mo ago
    law is a parasitic job, with shit life-work balance, if you want a job, unless you want to work solo, good luck finding a law firm that wants you. medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.
    • bigthymer 3mo ago
      > medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too. It only is because it effectively has a guild\cartel system preventing an oversupply of doctors and that we have an aging population that increasingly demands medical care.
      • OutOfHere 3mo ago
        The government protects their cartel system at every level. I can't even legally get a blood test without authorization from the cartel.
        • eudamoniac 3mo ago
          If you're in the US, you can. LabCorp and others sell blood tests. Your insurance won't cover it is all.
          • OutOfHere 3mo ago
            It ruins into two issues: (1) The test has to be signed by an online doctor. The firm arranges this implicitly, but it's not free. I can't go directly to Quest for any random test I want. The tests offered directly by Quest without an intermediary are too expensive and too few. (2) States like New York throw a wrench in it by disallowing anyone with an in-state billing address from ordering such tests. Ideally I should be able to pay the same low rate that the insurance firm would minimally pay, but in practice I can't. I have to pay a lot more if I can get it at all. The cartel is strong.
• nxm 3mo ago
  It'd be nice to see a break down by major.
• andy99 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
    > college education is a shortcut to generic employment That was/is the societal narrative for the last forty plus years, yes.
    • soupspaces 3mo ago
      How else would you sell it?
    • SL61 3mo 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 3mo 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.
• armchairhacker 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
• sublinear 3mo 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.
• Rotdhizon 3mo 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.
  • chucky_z 3mo ago
    The absolute wild opposite (for cybersecurity) to this is that higher level individuals are in such insane demand that if you are underpaid even during the current wage suppression, going to over market should be almost completely trivial.
    • SOLAR_FIELDS 3mo ago
      Of course, people actually good at security are rare and in high demand. This is totally aligned with OP’s statement. IMO you shouldn’t even be thinking of going into cybersecurity straight out of college. There’s just too much you have to learn about how software works for it to be a reasonable first job out of university. There will always be exceptional people, of course, but as a general rule I’m not hiring new grad cyber folks. Seems dumb
      • bombcar 3mo ago
        Cybersecurity seems to be either working to fill out forms to satisfy some requirement of some company/government office, or being akin to an exhacker actually trying to improve security. Colleges seem to be producing tons of the first, hardly any of the second.
• 827a 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
  the bar is higher and higher for less and less. donezo as a career.
• tamimio 3mo 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 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • epistasis 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
        It's some actual BLS numbers from the same age range, instead of anecdote filtered through the algorithm of social media feeds.
  • Telemakhos 3mo ago
• epistasis 3mo 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.
  • Georgelemental 3mo ago
    > defunding universities No, the problem is that the universities are too bloated, not that we need to take even more in taxes from working people to feed the bloat
    • bluealienpie 3mo ago
      Universities administrators, yes. Funding for basic research, no.
    • Retric 3mo ago
      The bloat was a result of withdrawing government funding / oversight and replacing them with student loans. Looking like the DMV was no longer accepted as you needed to actually attract students, which means supporting an ever wider array of different things. Daycare, job placement, etc etc individually get tacked on and before you know it administrative overhead has gone wild. You see similar effects with housing where people buying stuff with major loans are simply less cost conscious. Saving even 1,000$ on a kitchen is a big deal for most people if you need to write a check for it today, split it over 30 years and suddenly it seems largely irrelevant.
  • testfrequency 3mo ago
    The transfer of wealth is diminishing also as older generations didn’t save as much, are unable to retire, or are spending through most of their retirement
  • lizknope 3mo ago
• hyperpape 3mo 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.
  • hdgvhicv 3mo 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.
  • downrightmike 3mo 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.
  • labcomputer 3mo 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 3mo ago
    It seemed like good advice as the manufacturing sector shrank.
• hn_throwaway_99 3mo 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 3mo 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?
    • horns4lyfe 3mo ago
      Sales
    • sillysaurusx 3mo ago
• ryeguy_24 3mo 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.
  • alecco 3mo ago
    Trust fund?
  • shepherdjerred 3mo 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
  • scruple 3mo 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 3mo ago
    Send them to a country where college is much cheaper and then also be able to give them like $400k ~ $450k
  • s1artibartfast 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
  https://tinyurl.com/cronus-eating-children https://tinyurl.com/cronus-eating-children
• chr15m 3mo ago
  It's smartphones (~2008).
• suchire 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
  Immigration, both legal and illegal, takes up millions of homes and jobs that would otherwise be available to young Americans.