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“I’m 22 years old, just graduated and I’ve been applying to jobs for almost three months now,” says Reddit user TheDearlyt. “Honestly, it’s been super discouraging.”
Young people who follow society’s playbook—go to college, study something, land a job—are finding that playbook falling apart in a brutal job market.
Recent data from Oxford Economics shows that college graduates, who make up just five percent of the labor force, account for 12 percent of the 85 percent rise in unemployment since mid-2023. Their unemployment rate sits at six percent—that’s above the national average of just over four percent.
And this time, it’s not just the arts majors feeling the sting. Even tech and business graduates—long considered safe bets—are struggling.
[RELATED: WATCH: Credentialism’s Toll on American Prosperity]
“AI was designed to replace the average coder, and it has done that fairly well,” John M. Veitch, Ph.D., CFA, Dean of the School of Business and Management at Notre Dame de Namur University, told me.
Entry-level coding jobs are being deleted just as tech-heavy graduates flood the market. Business programs aren’t faring much better. “Business schools must scramble to address the same problems as computer science across its majors,” Veitch said. Junior finance roles are disappearing from the ledger, marketing is increasingly driven by data analytics, and logistics has been upended by geopolitical instability. (Minding the Campus contributor Joe Nalven has examined the AI-driven decline in tech job prospects. One electrical engineering student he spoke with admitted, “I’ll take anything I can find.”)
Universities, Veitch believes, should not serve primarily as credentialing systems for the workforce. And employers need to get the memo.
They still treat the college degree as a default signal of competence even as its value continues to erode. (Employers also set unrealistic expectations for entry-level roles—but that’s a conversation for another time.)
Employers need to “stop relying on the college degree as a signal of employability,” George Leef, Director of External Relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, told me. Instead, he says, companies should “start ‘fishing upstream’—try to interest young people in your industry while they’re still in high school, pointing them to the kinds of study and training they’ll need.”
The degree, Leef argues, once stood for trainability and initiative. Now, it often signals “unrealistic expectations and bad attitudes.”
And this message must reach students before they commit to more schooling as the solution to their joblessness. When the economy slows, MBA and other advanced program applications tend to rise, as people hope that another degree will provide a new trajectory. “Universities are always a ‘résumé filler’ during downturns,” Veitch says, but that doesn’t mean they produce better outcomes.
Leef is more direct: “College was never really a ‘safe haven’ while the employment market was unfavorable, but that notion is patently false today.” The cost, he argues, simply outweighs the benefit. “College is not the best path for most young people. Those who ought to go to college are students who want to get into professions like law or medicine”
“For everyone else, he told me, “college is apt to be a high-cost, low-benefit proposition.”
The solution to this problem is at least threefold: Colleges should stop marketing themselves as job-prep factories. Employers should stop requiring degrees for roles that don’t truly need them. And society needs to shake the stigma around alternatives like apprenticeships, vocational training, and industry certifications. These paths are often faster, cheaper, and better aligned with real-world demand, but remain under-promoted.
[RELATED: America’s Obsession with Diplomas Is Killing Opportunity]
To be sure, higher education still has value.
As Veitch affirms, a university education is “about providing long term skills that allow individuals to meet the challenges they face throughout life. A good writer will still outperform AI when it comes to structuring a prompt … [and] broad areas of knowledge produces not just a better employee, but a person who is better equipped to be a good citizen.”
But most students don’t enroll for civic development—they enroll expecting jobs. And many leave disillusioned.
The college degree is no longer—if it ever was—a reliable on-ramp to the workforce. It’s an expensive detour. Companies must stop treating it as a stand-in for skills, while students must stop seeing it as their sure path to employment.
Until both sides recalibrate, we’ll keep sending young people straight to the unemployment line.
Follow Jared Gould on X.
Image by Inspire Shots Hub on Adobe Stock; Asset ID#: 1236464036
