Recent graduates looking to enter an increasingly shaky labor market are painting a dire picture of their job search: “A black hole,” one said. “I’m disheartened,” said another. “I almost feel like it wasn’t worth going to school,” said a third.
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. The number of longer-term unemployed people who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks increased last month by 179,000 to 1.8 million.
In short, it’s a pretty stable market for those who have a job, but a much more challenging one for those who are trying to get one, economists said.
Driving that trend is hesitation among employers to hire new workers amid wider economic uncertainty in the midst of President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policies and federal spending cuts, economists have said. Then there is 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.
“This is going to be an environment for recent college grads, as well as many workers, which is going to require more patience, more time and perhaps more diligence as they seek to attain employment,” said Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst for Bankrate.
Here is how several recent graduates described their job search:
Adam Mitchell
23
Atlanta
Bachelor’s degree, computer science
Unemployed
Adam Mitchell thought he was doing everything right. He majored in computer science at Georgia State University and interned at State Farm doing web development. He’d been told since he was a teenager that a degree in computer science was a guaranteed path to a high-paying job right out of college.
“I was under the impression that since I’ve got three years of internship experience under my belt, this will be a cakewalk,” Mitchell said. “I was pretty quickly humbled. There’s nothing available.”
More than seven months after graduating, he’s applied for more than 100 jobs and gotten two interviews and only one job offer — for the 4 a.m. shift at Starbucks, which he didn’t take because the hours would make it too hard to pursue other opportunities. Among the jobs that turned him down: an hourly role at Costco and a customer service job in the call center at State Farm.
“The very few openings that there were would be so competitive that you would pretty much get a rejection notice as soon as you apply,” said Mitchell, who’s been living at home with his parents in the Atlanta area and spending down his savings.