'A Black Hole': America's New Graduates Discover a Dismal Job Market

NBC News reports that in the U.S., many recent graduates looking to enter the labor force 'are painting a dire picture of their job search.'

NBC News asked people who recently finished technical school, college or graduate school how their job application process was going, and in more than 100 responses, the graduates described months spent searching for a job, hundreds of applications and zero responses from employers — even with degrees once thought to be in high demand, like computer science or engineering.

Some said they struggled to get an hourly retail position or are making salaries well below what they had been expecting in fields they hadn't planned to work in. 'It was very frustrating,' said Jensen Kornfeind, who graduated this spring from Temple University with a degree in international trade. 'Out of 70-plus job applications, I had three job interviews, and out of those three, I got ghosted from two of them.'

The national economic data backs up their experience. The unemployment rate among recent graduates has been increasing this year to an average of 5.3%, compared to around 4% for the labor force as a whole, making it one of the toughest job markets for recent graduates since 2015, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released Friday. 'Recent college graduates are on the margin of the labor market, and so they're the first to feel when the labor market slows and hiring slows,' said Jaison Abel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Across the economy, hiring in recent months has ground to its slowest pace since the start of the pandemic, with employers adding just 73,000 jobs in July, according to data released Friday... Tech workers have been some of the hardest hit in a slowing job market, with more than 400 employers including Meta, Intel and Cisco announcing more than 130,000 jobs cut in 2025, according to tech job site TrueUp.

The article cites an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab who believes early adoption of AI 'is also likely driving some of the cuts and leading employers to rethink hiring plans in anticipation of AI's future role.' So besides federal policy changes, the article blames 'the emergence of AI, which some companies have said they are using to replace certain entry-level jobs, like those in customer support or basic software development.'
Seven months after graduating, one CS major told NBC News he'd applied for 100 jobs, and got one job offer — for the 4 a.m. shift at Starbucks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.