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Congratulations College Graduates of 2025 - You're Screwed. And no, it's not just student loans... [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-07-01

This news story is just starting to show up on the radar. College graduates are finding it difficult to enter the job market and start their careers. Several explanations are being offered as to why people with higher levels of education are running into headwinds.

Vox calls it a weird job market:

..You and your peers have faced uniquely tough circumstances. You started college during a pandemic, and now you’re entering a job market that’s shifting beneath your feet in ways that can feel discouraging, even though they’re driven by much larger economic and technological forces. This isn’t the first time graduates have faced a difficult transition. The Great Recession in 2008 led to hiring freezes and layoffs that blocked new workers from landing entry-level jobs. The labor market took time to heal after unemployment peaked in 2009, but improved steadily until the pandemic disrupted that progress. …Numbers from the first quarter of 2025 from the New York Federal Reserve show that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates reached 5.8 percent, up from 4.8 percent in January. Companies have also pulled back on hiring. Last fall, employers expected to increase college-graduate hiring by 7.3 percent, according to a survey led by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Now they’re projecting just a 0.6 percent increase, with about 11 percent of companies planning to hire fewer new grads than before.

Marketplace points a finger at A.I. but says that’s not the whole story:

..The labor market advantages of a college degree have been eroding for at least 10 years, said economist David Deming at Harvard’s Project on the Workforce. “A college degree, for most young people who are thinking about it, is still a very good investment, but it's no longer the absolute guarantee that it once was,” he said, noting the wage premium commanded by college-educated workers has plateau’d since the 2010s. And the edge new grads had finding work began to dissipate in the mid-2010s partially because there are more of them. ...Meanwhile, he said we’re now seeing a slowdown in hiring that is cyclical. “You want to sort of think about a young college graduate like a capital investment,” he said. “When businesses are feeling confident about investments overall, they tend to hire more college graduates and when they’re less confident, they hire fewer.” Right now things are definitely uncertain.

Paul Krugman is on the case, with charts and statistics:

..What you need to know: What we’re looking at now isn’t the worst job market college graduates have ever seen. It is, however, the worst such market compared with workers in general that we’ve ever seen, by a large margin. Nobody knows for sure why this is happening, but it’s not a good omen. And the recent graduates themselves will be hurt, not just in the near term, but for the rest of their lives.

Krugman discounts A.I. and suggests there are other things going on:

..Most of the discussion in recent months has involved Donald Trump’s drastic but erratic changes in tariff policy. Imagine that you’re running a business for which decisions about where and how to invest depend a lot on what tariff rates you expect to prevail a year or two from now. Should you make investments assuming that, say, the cost of imported merchandise will be similar to what it was 6 months ago, or should you assume that average tariffs will remain where they are right now, at the highest level in 90 years? ...Nor is it just tariffs. For a few months, the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric on undocumented immigrants wasn’t translating into large-scale deportations. Now significant raids on workplaces have begun. But over the course of just a few days we saw Trump suddenly modify policy, then reverse himself — declaring that agriculture and hospitality would not face disruptive raids, then canceling that declaration. What will actual deportation policy look like? Nobody knows.

Companies are not going to commit to hiring new people when they have no idea what’s going to happen next. The chaos generated daily by the Trump regime makes it impossible to predict where the economy will be in a few months, or even next week, depending on what Trump tweets out overnight. This is going to derail a lot of lives. Krugman observes that:

So how long will it take for students graduating into this bad job market to recover from their bad luck? The answer, according to a 2023 survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is basically “forever.” Graduating into a bad labor market can make you miss a step on the job ladder, depressing your earnings for a decade or more. It increases your chances of being in poor health well into middle age. It even reduces your chances of having a successful marriage.

emphasis added

And of course the Trump regime is reversing efforts to do something about the burden of student loans. Is America great yet?

Krugman likes to end his pieces with a music video. Here’s the one he selected for this story.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/1/2331171/-Congratulations-College-Graduates-of-2025-You-re-Screwed-And-no-it-s-not-just-student-loans?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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