Students will line up and wait before the start of a career fair at the New York University School of Polytechnic Engineering in New York’s Brooklyn area.
Michael Nuggle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
With a degree from Georgetown University and several internships under her belt, Christina Salvadore was now thinking she would begin a career in the fashion and beauty industry of New York City. Problem: She can’t find a job.
The 23-year-old has not been able to win a full-time role despite filling out hundreds of applications and taking dozens of networking calls since graduating in the spring. She is currently working over her financially, applying for a part-time gig.
“When people have someone like, ‘What are you doing now?’, it definitely sucks,” Salvadore, a native of Florida, told CNBC. “I sit at my parents’ house on LinkedIn 24 hours a day.”
The growing number of data shows that Salvador is not the only one. Young College graduates are undergoing unique and challenging times, trying to clinch their first full-time job and bringing the brunt of a weakened labour market.
At the macro level, this group’s tough luck moves needles with a broader dataset that is partially used by economists and monetary policymakers to determine economic health. For the hundreds of thousands of Americans in this camp, it is changing their vision of what this era of life would look like.
The unemployment rate for “newcomers” including New College graduates and others has peaked for nine years this year for groups seeking to break into the full-time workforce, federal data shows. The share of the total unemployed population group has skyrocketed to its highest percentage in decades.
Simply put, according to Gad Levanon, chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute, and his team at a labor-centric think tank, the United States says, “There is no country with young graduates.”
“Unusual” trends
In a report released this summer, Lebanon and his team discovered that the bachelor’s degree does not offer the “basic promise” of access to white-collar jobs for the first time in modern history. He concluded that the former path from college campus to careers is increasingly unreliable.
After submitting questions about whether Lebanon is affecting all young workers or having a university diploma, he conducted further analysis of federal data. People aged 20-24 with a bachelor’s degree have seen the most extreme levels of unemployment compared to historic levels than other educational groups.
Bachelor’s degree holders of this age group have benefited from lower unemployment rates compared to those with high school diplomas. However, Levanon’s data shows that the gap between the two groups is at least the smallest since at least the early 2000s.
“Here we are clearly looking at something unusual for a bachelor’s degree,” Lebanon told CNBC.
On Tiktok, a popular social media platform, a young adult, who just graduated from university, held trials and hardships related to making their first post-graduation work a kind of sub-genre. They document their journeys and lament the disappointment they feel. They are moving home with their parents. They question why entry-level recruitment requires years of experience. They wonder why businesses are making them “ghosts.” This means you will never get a response to your application.
Some use the “crashout” slang phrase to explain how they carry emotionally.
“I feel like I’m behind right now,” said Michael Hartman, a recent Boston University student. Hartman has a degree in economics and seeks a role in consulting or business strategy.
“It’s very stressful”
The fortune of America’s newest university graduates is in the midst of attracting attention from top economic policymakers and raising concerns about the overall labor market.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell admitted a few weeks ago that young people struggled to load and unload jobs. He pointed to the “low burning, low employment environment,” a landscape the economist said.
The number of employed workers slowed in August, according to government data released Tuesday. Labor Statistics figures released in September show that the number of unemployed residents for at least 27 weeks inflated by about 25% on a seasonally adjusted basis compared to the previous year. Federal labor data scheduled to be released this week is pending during the government closures.
Burning Glass’ Levanon said the problem was partly due to an increase in the share of young Americans with a fourth year degree. He said the demand for workers at this level of education has not kept up to the point. This means that current conditions may not improve anytime soon.
This could be a hit with university admissions, as young people realize that higher education is not the career pipeline they once had, Lebanon added.
New York City College alumni are giving a message to Cap at the university’s opening ceremony in Manhattan’s Harlem section.
Mike Seger | Reuters
Additionally, the rise of artificial intelligence has raised an alarm that the role of entry-level knowledge workers will be automated.
In August, Stanford published a bomb research. This announced that employment for 22-25-year-olds in the most exposed jobs to AI have seen a 13% decline in employment since 2022. Anecdotally, Walmart In Accenture It says that this technology will dramatically change the workforce.
The tightening in the labor market has made the entire generation more concerned about what the future holds. According to University of Michigan data, the chances of losing a job in the next five years in May for ages 18-34 jumped to the last high they saw in 2013.
These concerns have changed the outlook for recent university graduates. After seeing her friend struggle to secure employment, student Emma Zatrak began firing her applications weeks earlier than she had previously expected. The 21-year-old found himself scheduling interviews about the role of sales and insurance between the full class load and two employment.
“It was very stressful,” said That Crack, who is in his final semester as a communications major at Boise State University in Idaho. “I haven’t settled for several months.”
“Real phenomenon”
However, not all new alumni feel this shift to the same extent.
In fact, on the Job Board, the software development job list is about 66% of what is seen before the community pandemic. Meanwhile, postings in nursing positions are up about 16% compared to the same baseline.
“It’s a real phenomenon,” said Laura Ulrich, actually director of North American economic research. “But at the same time, I don’t think that applies to all students or all young people. It depends on which sector they work in.”
Still, Ulrich admitted that there is a reason for the anxiety of young adults. She pointed to the analysis by Moody. This found fewer industries have been removed in the past six months.
In the tech industry, the decline in entry-level employment is particularly clear. According to Signalfire at Venture Capital Firm, between 2019 and 2024, employers with little experience with work fell more than 50% between 2019 and 2024. At startups, that number fell by more than 47%.
A young job seeker told CNBC that the difficulty of finding a job has led to feelings of social isolation and self-doubt. If refusals accumulate, they said it could be difficult not to take it personally.
Over the past few months, Julia Veskova has seen fellow graduates from the University of Rhodes in Tennessee start a new life as young professionals. Meanwhile, Vasedkova was in the self-proclaimed “limbo” state with only part-time work, despite sending hundreds of applications. English Major applied for positions in Education, Publication and Social Media.
The 24-year-old found himself denied invitations to social gatherings to save money for rent and other expenses. Anyway, it’s time she can spend trying to find an increasingly elusive post-graduation job.
“I’m definitely tired. One day I feel like I’m working full-time just to apply for a job,” Vasedkova said. “It really feels like you don’t have a life outside of it.”
