Nobody Told Us It Would Be This Hard
A lot of us did everything right. We went to college, studied hard, and built our resumes. Now we're staring at inbox after inbox of silence — and wondering what we missed.
There's a message board where college career counselors talk to each other. Private, professional, mostly administrative. Earlier this year, one administrator from the University of Delaware posted a question that probably felt small when she typed it: had anyone else noticed fewer employers signing up for spring career fairs?
The responses came quickly. "We are definitely seeing similar issues." "It seems the current environment is not conducive to hiring." "The struggle is real."
These are the people whose job it is to stay calm and encouraging. When even they're worried, it's worth paying attention.
The numbers are hard to look at
The unemployment rate for college graduates between 22 and 27 hit 5.6 percent at the end of last year — sharply up over the past three years, and higher than the overall national rate of 4.2 percent. More than 40 percent of employed recent graduates are working jobs that don't typically require a degree at all. That's the highest share since 2020.
This is, by most measures, the worst spring job market for young degree holders since the pandemic.
And if you're in the middle of it, you probably already knew that. You just might not have had the data to confirm what you were feeling.
What's actually going on
The easy villain in this story is artificial intelligence. It's the fear that gets the most airtime — Anthropic's CEO has predicted AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, and a Stanford study last year found real employment drops for early-career workers in AI-exposed fields like software development.
But most economists think AI is only a small part of what's happening right now. The bigger, less dramatic explanation is that the hiring market has simply frozen.
Job openings are below pre-pandemic levels. Layoffs are also low. Companies aren't shrinking, but they're not growing either — and that peculiar stillness hits new graduates hardest. There's no movement to slip into. No one retiring upward, no team expanding, no opening appearing. As one economist put it: "There's just a general slowdown in hiring and less churn. Those who need their first jobs are probably disproportionately affected."
There's also a longer demographic story unfolding quietly in the background. Older workers are staying in their jobs longer than previous generations did. That creates a kind of invisible traffic jam on the career ladder — less room at the bottom because not enough people are moving up or out at the top.
Add to that the fact that more people are graduating with degrees than ever before, and you get a lot of qualified, eager people competing for a shrinking number of openings.
The people behind the statistics
Erin Torres graduated from Barnard College in December with a degree in psychology. She wanted to work in product management at a tech company — a reasonable aspiration. Since then, she's broadened her search to basically any corporate entry-level role she can find. In two months, she applied to close to 200 jobs. She got four interviews.
She's living with her parents now, working part-time as a hostess at a restaurant that just announced its closing. She's started seeing a therapist. She's half-joking that it might be easier to start her own company than to get hired by someone else's.
"If I really cannot find anything, I am just going to go haywire," she said.
That's not laziness or entitlement. That's exhaustion.
Taleah Reyes is graduating this May from Rollins College with a degree in art history. She deliberately chose college after working at a theme park, because she believed — reasonably — that a degree would open doors. Now she's watching fellowship and internship postings that require master's degrees for positions that used to be for undergrads. She's applied widely. The rejections keep coming.
Her backup plan is to return to the same theme park job she left to get her degree. Twenty dollars an hour, operating rides.
"I went to school to further my career and to have some sense of personal fulfillment," she said. "And then I'm leaving again to enter a job I previously had."
It's hard to read that and not feel something.
This isn't the end of the story
Here's what the economists also say, and it's worth holding onto: we have been here before.
After the 2008 financial crisis, unemployment for young people climbed above 16 percent. The pandemic brought an even sharper shock. Both times, the market eventually loosened. Hiring came back. The graduates who were stuck eventually found their footing — even if it took longer than anyone wanted.
Recent college graduates still fare better overall than young workers without degrees. The gap has narrowed, but it hasn't disappeared. A degree still matters. The road from graduation to a first real job has just gotten longer and more uncertain than it used to be.
That doesn't make the waiting easier. It doesn't make 200 applications and four interviews feel fair, because it isn't fair. But it does mean that the difficulty you're experiencing right now is structural — it's not a reflection of your worth, your intelligence, or what you deserve.
What you can actually do
Career counselors are telling students the same things right now: apply broadly, don't hold out for the perfect role, treat the search as a job in itself. Campus career centers are running resilience workshops. Counselors are holding open Q&A sessions just so students have somewhere to put their anxiety.
None of that makes the market move faster. But it's a reminder that you're not navigating this alone — and that the people who are supposed to help you are paying attention.
The class of 2025 is walking into one of the hardest labor markets in recent memory. That's a true thing. It's also true that labor markets move, eventually. The graduates getting four interviews out of 200 applications today are the ones with two or three years of experience who will be considerably easier to hire in a market that's opened back up.
You did the work. The market just hasn't caught up yet.