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

randalolson.com

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

#81

Post by jghn »

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 true for most sub-fields. The average person in them is either a failed dev or more of a pencil pushing box checker. The quality employees are devs with extra specialized expsrtise

Security, qa, devops, data emgonerkng, the list goes on and on.

Infosec also adds the angle that you want someone with actual grey or black hat hands on experience

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

#82

Post by yogorenapan »

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.

100%. I started out in cybersecurity and was complete shit. I gave up and went into software engineering and devops instead. Now returning to cybersecurity again and things finally make sense

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

#84

Post by majormajor »

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.

"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.

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

#85

Post by tamimio »

Telemakhos wrote: post #75
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.

You're getting downvoted because people don't like what you say, but NPR had a piece confirming this just this April: https://www.npr.org/2026/04/10/nx-s1-5773327/women-men-jobs-... > Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by me…

Thanks for sharing that! It’s something I noticed both online and IRL, it’s only guys (especially young ones) who are crying about the job market, I actually don’t know a single jobless female, all of them are working, and I know plenty who works two jobs!

Regarding the downvotes, I really don’t care about the fake online currency, I think their impact is negative in creating echo chambers in communities, and for some reason bringing men struggles is a taboo despite they suffer far more than women, suicide rates are clear example.

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

#86

Post by epistasis »

jvanderbot wrote: post #78
lizknope wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc. EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc.…

"We" in GP was the previous generation, not a nefarious evil cadre. The prior generations followed jobs to highly desireable areas, affordable only because they had the expertise and education to get the high paying job in the first place. Every person that moves there lifts the ladder a little higher behind them just due to market factors. I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wage…

The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed.

Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades and even with the housing problems it simply hasn't happened anywhere else.

It's far easier to remove the law on the books banning housing than it is to build an ecosystem of any economy from scratch in a new area.

We don't need any new cities, we need to allow existing areas to grow. If every city blocks housing, then even that new area is going to be blocked from growing as it grows.

We must stop everybody in their tracks that thinks it says "I don't want new housing or neighbors near me" because that is the literally robbing of our young people and of society of opportunity.

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

#87

Post by hdgvhicv »

lizknope wrote: post #63
epistasis wrote: post #58

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 fo…

Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc. EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc.…

So there’s tons of empty housing? Why are people building new housing then, is it just that much better quality that the empty housing is the old crap?

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

#88

Post by azan_ »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #67
epistasis wrote: post #58

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 fo…

It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth". Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.

Isn't basically every decile getting richer (i.e. able to afford more things) thanks to economic growth?

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

#89

Post by majormajor »

epistasis wrote: post #74
throwaway27448 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth". Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.

I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy. Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.

> I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.

What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US?

Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?

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

#90

Post by hdgvhicv »

hyperpape wrote: post #61

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... That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average memb…

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.

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