17-07-2025
What the Tough Job Market for New College Grads Says About the Economy
It's been a long time since the dream of working your way up from the mail room to the corner office was a plausible outcome, but it might now be officially dead. Some of the reasons are obvious—for one, the internet long ago made the mail room almost obsolete. But as new college graduates have headed out into the job market this summer, they're reporting a different problem: They can't get a foot in the door at all.
Landing that first job is trickier right now in some fields than in others, but even in sectors with low unemployment, new entrants to the white-collar labor market describe a far steeper climb than they'd anticipated. The unemployment rate for recent grads sat at 5.8% in March, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics—more than twice that for all degree holders and 50% higher than in the spring of 2022.
