About That College Grad Who Can’t Find a Job…

(Originally aired 7/1/2025) Newly minted college graduates are having a harder time landing that first job than in recent years. Is it AI? Is college useless? Is it a crisis? (No. No. And not yet…) College graduates under 27 still have significantly lower unemployment rates (5.8%) than high school graduates of the same age (6.9%). What economist Kathryn Edwards finds worrying is that these new workers, who are typically a lagging economic indicator, may in this case be a bellwether of a weakening economy.
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Read More:

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The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates (newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#-…) [New York Fed, 2025]

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Hires, from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSHIR) [St. Louis Fed, 2025]

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Downskilling: changes in employer skill requirements over the business cycle (sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S092…) [Labour Economics 2016]

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Upskilling: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers Are Plentiful? (direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/102/4/793…) [The Review of Economics and Statistics 2020]