Graduates listen as actor Sean Astin delivers the keynote speech during the commencement ceremony for the College of Arts and Sciences at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion on June 14, 2024.
Christina House | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
Recent graduates looking to enter an increasingly shaky labor market are painting a dire picture of their job search: “A black hole,” one said. “I’m disheartened,” said another. “I almost feel like it wasn’t worth going to school,” said a third.
NBC News asked people who recently finished technical school, college or graduate school how their job application process was going, and in more than 100 responses, the graduates described months spent searching for a job, hundreds of applications and zero responses from employers — even with degrees once thought to be in high demand, like computer science or engineering. Some said they struggled to get an hourly retail position or are making salaries well below what they had been expecting in fields they hadn’t planned to work in.
“It was very frustrating,” said Jensen Kornfeind, who graduated this spring from Temple University with a degree in international trade. “Out of 70-plus job applications, I had three job interviews, and out of those three, I got ghosted from two of them.”
The national economic data backs up their experience. The unemployment rate among recent graduates has been increasing this year to an average of 5.3%, compared to around 4% for the labor force as a whole, making it one of the toughest job markets for recent graduates since 2015, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released Friday.
“Recent college graduates are on the margin of the labor market, and so they’re the first to feel when the labor market slows and hiring slows,” said Jaison Abel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Across the economy, hiring in recent months has ground to its slowest pace since the start of the pandemic, with employers adding just 73,000 jobs in July, according to data released Friday. The number of longer-term unemployed people who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks increased last month by 179,000 to 1.8 million.
In short, it’s a pretty stable market for those who have a job, but a much more challenging one for those who are trying to get one, economists said.
Driving that trend is hesitation among employers to hire new workers amid wider economic uncertainty in the midst of President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policies and federal spending cuts, economists have said. Then there is the emergence of AI, which some companies have said they are using to replace certain entry-level jobs, like those in customer support or basic software development.
“This is going to be an environment for recent college grads, as well as many workers, which is going to require more patience, more time and perhaps more diligence as they seek to attain employment,” said Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst for Bankrate.
Here is how several recent graduates described their job search:
tech job site TrueUp.
Those cuts mark a retrenchment after the hiring spree those companies went on after the pandemic, while an abundance of workers are vying for the remaining jobs, said Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab. Early adoption of AI is also likely driving some of the cuts and leading employers to rethink hiring plans in anticipation of AI’s future role, Shrivastava said. Mitchell worries that could hurt his prospects long term, so he isn’t limiting his search to tech jobs.
“I’m just kind of looking for anything,” he said. “I don’t know if the tech-side economy is ever going to be the same again.”
80 jobs last year, nearly 40% of its workforce. The town had an unemployment rate of 5.8% in June, when not adjusted for seasonal employment, which was the highest in the state, where the overall unemployment rate was 4.1%, according to the state’s Department of Labor.
Young recently went back to school to get a technical certificate to work as a household electrician. But when he started looking for a job, he learned that he would need to go through a five-year apprenticeship program with the local electrical workers union and travel up to two hours away for work, which would be a financial strain because he and his wife only have one car.
“I just have to figure out a way to get a car and make peace with the fact that there’s a chance I may be put somewhere really far from home and I never get to see my family very much for five years, but I don’t know what else to do really,” Young said.
His wife makes more than $90,000 a year — a salary he would have thought would be enough in a small town in Kansas. But not anymore, he said. An apartment that would have cost $600 a month in 2019 is now $1,000. His weekly trip to the grocery store has gone from costing $80 to $180. Then there are his $20,000 in student loans, and the rising cost of insurance, gas and utilities.
“We still live paycheck to paycheck,” he said, “and we shouldn’t be.”
analysis by S&P Global.
Still, she has a negative view of the job market overall and has seen a lot of her peers go to graduate school rather than head straight into the workforce.
“A lot of adults have confirmed that this is one of the worst times to come out of college,” she said. “I think that is the narrative that is being confirmed by people who’ve been in the job market.”
Dorman, who hopes to go to medical school, is also concerned about the sweeping tax cut and spending bill passed by Congress in July, which will cap how much students can borrow for graduate and professional programs.
The Trump administration has also been cutting research spending and public health jobs. Dorman had considered trying to get a job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but ruled that out as the administration started firing workers.
