New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by singpolyma3 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:07 PM UTC

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #39

andy99 wrote: post #8

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.

> 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. This is so very easily said but how else is this supposed to work, exactly? People have to start somewhere , and McDonalds experience doesn't count for any specialized job. Fuck, the "McDonalds-tier" jobs will often turn down graduates because they'll obviousl…

> or the entire industry gets sent offshore.

Assuming there are any seniors offshore either

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

#52

Post by AnimalMuppet » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:08 PM UTC

trescenzi wrote: post #6

gravypod wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

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.

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.

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

#53

Post by jibal » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:08 PM UTC

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #27

Rotdhizon wrote: post #12

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 i…

> 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. I graduated with an AS in programming in the mid-late 1990s. I continually sent resumes for 18mos and got back 2 replies. I had 2 major strikes against me. I was a new coder. I worked in a region that was reluctant to con…

The Contract On America as many of us called it. And Newt's legacy has metastasized into even more virulent forms.

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

#54

Post by AnimalMuppet » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:08 PM UTC

krackers wrote: post #22

gravypod wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

>as China's "lying flat" movement No, you miss that "lying flat" is only possible when cost of food/living is low and housing is abundant.

Even then, it's only possible when someone is willing to subsidize it, unless both food and housing are free.

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

#55

Post by rozal » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

tamimio wrote: post #50

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.

[dead]

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

#56

Post by 827a » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #36

827a wrote: post #21

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 experimen…

> 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.…

Broadly, every company is on their own journey and makes their own discoveries in their own time, but Yes. I work with a swath of large employers in the midwest, workforce and economic development stuff, and there's a growing feeling among hiring managers that, the best way to put it is: the people they're interviewing out of college are, on the net, less equipped to succeed in the roles they're posting than their expectations on what level of capability college graduates should be at.

This doesn't mean there aren't great candidates.

This could be less on the individual and more on: colleges are getting worse at instruction/preparation (I'm bullish on this explanation among my colleagues; colleges never adapted to computers, let alone AI, the impacts of this just took a decade or so to shake out, which you should expect given the 16 year latency on education most students undergo) (though, again, ultimately its very complicated. multiple factors at play.)

For a lot of these companies this is all surfacing as: They're posting fewer entry level positions than they normally would (oftentimes not zero; just fewer), and if they have money in the budget available due to that, its going into AI.

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

#57

Post by bigthymer » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

QQ00 wrote: post #33

OutOfHere wrote: post #7

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.

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.

> 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.

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

#58

Post by epistasis » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:15 PM UTC

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.

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

#59

Post by epistasis » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC

tamimio wrote: post #50

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.

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

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

#60

Post by crims0n » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:19 PM UTC

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #42

Rotdhizon wrote: post #12

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 i…

I personally as a general rule don’t hire people who work in cybersecurity if they were not traditional developers first. The chances of you understanding “cybersecurity” without also understanding how general software works is extremely low.

This is broadly true for all concentrations in cyber. There is no entry level. Your first job should be learning how what you want to focus on works… be it networking, sysadmin, devops, vendor risk management, etc.

Unfortunately, cybersecurity was a hot topic in the education market and people got sold on the idea that they could get a six figure job with nothing but some theory and an entry level certification.