The Job Market for Recent College Graduates

When I talk with college students, and even high school students, a number of them have a profound sense that it is tremendously hard to find a job coming out of college. The level fear seems to me exaggerated, but some underlying shifts in the young-adult labor market seem quite real. Here’s a figure from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showing unemployment rates for recent college graduates and other comparison groups. The light blue line shows the unemployment rate for recent college graduates age 22-27. If you look back through the 1990s and early 2000s, you see that the unemployment rate for this group is typically below the black line, which shows the overall unemployment rate. Also, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates is below the line for all young adult workers age 22-27, but above the ilne for all college graduates (of all ages). But these patterns are shifting. Even before the pandemic unemployment spike, the unemployment rate for college graduates age…