Workers with college degrees are increasingly pessimistic about their job prospects, and the data suggest they may have good reason to worry.
A new Gallup analysis finds that educated workers are now less optimistic about the job market than those without degrees — a historic reversal. In a Gallup poll conducted in January, just 27% of college graduates said now is a good time to find a quality job, compared with 44% of those who didn't graduate from college. That gap is the widest on record in data stretching back to 2001. A separate survey of U.S. workers cited in the same report found an even starker divide: only 19% of college-educated employees felt good about the job market, versus 35% of those without a degree.
Until recently, the opposite was true. Workers with more advanced education were consistently more confident — a pattern that held for more than two decades before beginning to crack in 2024.
What's Driving the Anxiety?
The unemployment rate remains relatively low, sitting at 4.4% as of February. But unemployment alone doesn't tell the full story. The metric that matters more right now is the hiring rate — and outside of the pandemic period, it's at its worst level since 2013, according to federal data.
For white-collar workers, the picture is even bleaker. Data from the jobs site Indeed shows that, compared to pre-pandemic levels, job listings for software developers are down 29%, marketing roles have dropped 27%, and media and communications positions have fallen 36%. Manufacturing jobs and healthcare openings, meanwhile, are trending upward — a divide that economist Cory Stahle of Indeed describes plainly: "You see a real bifurcation."
The result is that professionals are navigating a job market shaped by three converging pressures: a slowdown in white-collar hiring, a drumbeat of layoffs in the professional sector, and the ever-present anxiety around artificial intelligence.
The AI Factor
For many educated workers, AI isn't just an abstract future threat — it feels immediate. "Most educated people I know are pretty freaked about what AI means for their jobs," said Martha Gimbel, executive director and cofounder of the Budget Lab at Yale. "We can argue about whether or not that's going to happen, but that's not what fear is about."
That fear is landing in a broader economic environment already clouded by uncertainty. Oil prices are rising, concerns about a private credit pullback are mounting, and worries about stagflation have crept into mainstream Wall Street forecasting.
Is the Pessimism Justified?
Not everyone is ready to call this a crisis. Firing rates are still relatively low, and Gimbel raises the possibility that some of the gloom reflects a "vibecession" — a disconnect between how people feel about the economy and how it's actually performing. She also notes that college-educated professionals tend to skew Democratic, meaning their sentiment may partly reflect the current political climate rather than purely economic conditions. "One thing that's really hard with all these metrics," she said, "is to pull out how much of it is about actual economic concerns versus political concerns."
Still, the underlying trend is hard to dismiss. Sentiment among college-educated workers about the job market is now at its lowest point since 2013 — a time when the country was still crawling out of a recession, and unemployment topped 6%. Today's unemployment rate is considerably lower, but the mood is just as dark.
As Stahle put it: "If we continue to see fewer jobs available and more people wanting jobs, those things are a recipe for unemployment." And for slower economic growth to follow.
The question hanging over the labor market isn't whether college-educated workers feel anxious. It's whether conditions are about to give them more reason to be.