One of the main issues is the actual applying for a job is so gameified by AI systems that new job posts are drawing hundreds of applicants that are impossible for HR managers to sort through. Employers have kept upping the ante, demanding work experience for entry level positions that is all but impossible for new grads to attain.
‘You’re Fighting AI With AI’: Bots Are Breaking the Hiring Process (5/10/2024):
All people. The fallout from USAID and DOGE has affected people of all ages who have mortgages, kids etc and are now looking at the same small pool of opportunities as everyone else who is out of work. This middle group is not being highlighted in the media.
For sure. It’s laughable that R’s want to delay the age for social security when the 50 something’s are the first to go in a layoff. And no one really wants greyhairs around so you keep getting RIF’ed until you do retire at the legal retirement age IF YOUR LUCKY to get back into the job market.
It would help knowing future job trends before picking majors in college.
Ha. I remember when I was in high school in the 70's, there were all kinds of articles about how physicists will be in very short supply. But when I graduated with my Ph.D, the Regan admin had just eviscerated scientific research and there wasn't a job to be found.
A majority of my college class in the early 1980s picked computer programming as a major based on the future job market trends. By the time we graduated four years later, the degrees were virtually worthless because COBOL was being replaced by other languages and there was a glut of programming majors which resulted from everyone choosing the same major at the same time.
On the other hand, I got my Master's in Computer Science in 1984 and had no problem finding a job. Everyone in my class found work at decent salaries. Of course, nearly all of us had to relocate.
Are you ready to pick strawberries or work in meat packing?
Trump is providing jobs for us there.
In fact, you can even work in dairy and see if you can be ground zero for bird flu jumping from cow to human to human.
Not that anyone would know who was #1 or able to develop a vaccine since Trump and Kennedy are gutting science and real verifiable data and our ability to respond by doing so.
I'm ok on a bit of strawberry picking :) but rather less so on meat-packing.
All joking aside, however, this madness that RFK Jr. is now engaged in, with dismantling vaccination programs in the country is going to cause incredible tragedy if it comes into practical effect.
Polio has now been eradicated in almost the entire world, although it is still apparent in parts of India and one or two places elsewhere.
There was a great article in the New Yorker (quite some years ago now I fear,) entitled "The Mop Up." It was all about how the World Health Organization responds when an outbreak of Polio is discovered.
It's a very informative read, describing how infectious disease specialists track the outbreak back to its source, and engage in 'ring containment' and so on.
The truly heart-breaking matter however, is just how very hard it is to get vaccines out into the field - particularly in the developing world situations in which polio is still apparent.
One issue is that the polio vaccine must be kept refrigerated if it is not to become useless, and this is very hard in the tropics and India.
But more upsetting, is that people who are in the areas where polio is spreading, are often terribly fearful about *accepting* the vaccine.
Owing to political divisions, as well as ignorance, people are fearful that these shots may be a plot by their political or cultural adversaries to kill them off.
I learned quite a lot from my reading that article, and so much of that was about the truly enormous *operational* challenges - both logistical and *social* that make it so damnably hard to curtail the spread of an outbreak, and the absolute tragedy imparted to the lives of all who end up being exposed to the disease.
I'm so sorry: This is not a happy thing to be talking about on a lovely sunny afternoon here in the PNW.
But our needing to cleave to our medical and scientific knowledge is absolutely critical to the quality of life in all of our social civilisations (not just on our insular island culture here in America.)
How can we possibly have come to have a person like Bobby Kennedy as our Director of National Health?
You touch on a number of important issues, but two are critical. When, and not if, H5N1 bird flu becomes transmissible from human to human we may be looking at more deaths worldwide than those from COVID. A degraded disease surveillance system and anti vaccine policies can only worsen this. The second issue is an old one; diseases stubbornly refuse to respect international borders. US Government policies attacking international health organizations, including the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders, will increase communicable disease deaths in all countries, notably including the US. RFK Jr. cannot even address measles outbreaks in this country and is clearly the wrong person to take on global health challenges.
I'm not an infectious disease guy, so I'm not really keeping up with the consequences of the bird flu that you are so rightly drawing attention to.
This matter of taking down our *surveillance* on *all* of these matters is a really really harmful thing of course, and I simply can't believe how anyone could be such a complete fool (as the RFK folks appear that they are) as to
depredate those programs.
Finally, the WHO, Medecins sans Frontieres, and all such programs are incredibly important *operational* parts of dealing with critical medical issues around the globe.
The decimation of USAID plays greatly into this as well.
There is disease, for one thing, but there is also - *so* importantly the matter of food (proper nutrition,) as well as *sanitation* that the USAID funding addresses (I believe.)
Something that we take perfectly for granted in the developed world is the easy availability of clean water. It just runs from the taps in our homes for heaven's sake!
But in the developing world, this a really challenged thing.
It is totally non-trivial to establish and maintain this civil infrastructure, and if it's not in place, you get all *kinds* of disease.
Cholera is a big one, as are many things for which mosquitoes are one vector, and then there is amoebic dysentary (one of the world's top few causes of death,) plus things like worms (I think that's the 4th top cause of death and decimation of populi in the world,) owing to peoples wading into rivers (like the Nile and the Ganges, ...) and/or into lakes and ponds in order to procure water.
This latter thing about worms is what the Jimmy Carter Foundation have been primarily focused upon.
Anyway, now that I've depressed the heck out of all of us, let's think about what we can possibly do to stop the dang train wreck that this present set of idiots *not* running the US Health Program are going to cause.
Who has ideas?
Can we engage with the Gates, and Carter, and/or Rockefeller Foundations, as one possible axis for putting pressure on this broken administration?
I do have at least one friend at the Rockefeller Foundation I could call.
You don't need to be a specialist in anything but science in general and staying awake to realize the dangers of these policies. I'm a long retired EE, and they're obvious to me.
Global health related issues are a very low priority for the government, and the causes of this are obviously complex. To pick only one, our country has mostly lost its humanity. How can we expect our policymakers and politicians to care about underdeveloped countries or treat health issues globally when our own citizens and legal residents are preoccupied with things like lawless arrests and incarcerations? Our leaders no longer talk about the value of soft power or even presenting ourselves as a force for good in the world; modern day Marshall Plan anyone? Food, clean water and medicine for starving people are outlawed or ignored in places like Gaza, Sudan and to a lesser extent even in our own country. To counter these injustices we must stand together and fight using tools like the hugely successful No Kings marches, pushing our elected officials to actually support our system of government, and encouraging friends and neighbors to join in the fight. Any help we can get is welcome, including financial support from the foundations you mention.
And if anything, the Biden years made this problem worse, because now anybody over the age of 50 is assumed to be subject to "cognitive decline" at any moment.
I voted Democrat in every election in my life. Even I think this is a scandal. The rat bastards who propped him up robbed the party of a proper primary election, left us with an uninspiring candidate with a short runway to the election. Mostly this is on Biden, who should have had the wisdom not to seek a second term. Retire already! Enjoy the last few years remaining to you. Spend time with your wife.
One of Trumps big downsides is the man is aged, out of shape and out of touch. What does party leader Biden do? Pitch an even older geezer who shuffles about to run against him. And they wonder why they lost the youth vote. Democratic Party leadership is out. of. control.
I’ve voted Democrat in every election in my life and I think you can fuck all the way off.
The conversation they don’t want to have is that nobody wants a new generation of leadership because the new generation entering politics have decided to be all complete dipshits.
quite honestly, i find your post rather silly...i'm past the 80 mark...a person's mental, cognitive.ability has nothing to do with age..of course, we all lose physical abilities as we age...but general good health is the deciding factor..imo, BIDENS erreor was in tryiing to do too much, without adequate rest, from my having lived so long...i find experience is also imperative..since there is nothing new under the sun..experience matters... Trumpf is nothing new..if you are past 40, you have seen his kind before...and really, whatever makes anyone think he will ever be any different...he is exactly what you see and hear..a vulgar, crude man with no filters, as he has been all his life.
Older workers with more experience also cost more. Someone who's been in one field for 10 or 20 years has hopefully gotten raises over that time. If you decide to look for a new job anywhere in that range, new employers won't pay the same as your old job.
That's because new employers are certain (with good reason) that you will eventually be unhappy at a lower salary. If you were making, say, $45,000/yr and are trying for a job that pays only $41,000/yr, you will not get hired once the new boss finds out what your old salary was.
People have been assuming that anyone older than 50 (or younger sometimes) is likely over the hill, in some way, shape or form, for a very, very long time.
I keep telling my cohorts who talk about "taking the keys away from grandpa" as some totally normal thing that this will, in fact, come back to bite them in the ass when they get old.
lol i quit driving because of the other drivers on the road, driving ceased being fun..and since so many people have moved here [florida] from up north, they simply do not know how to drive and , god forbid, how to park, it became a nightmare just to go to the mall. , and it isn't grandpa or grandma who are the stupid drivers.
Yes it will, but if grandpa is incompetent, it will also be necessary.
Realistically, it is probably the case that self driving cars will reduce the need for the aged to drive, so your schadenfreude might be delayed indefinitely.
Nonsense. They seem to have weird accidents. The yard where Waymo charges cars in a residential part of Santa Monica is apparently so noisy (at night) that folks can't sleep. That will not encourage a push toward self driving taxis.
that all depends on the company..many prefer the older workers simply because they have a strong work-ethic..they do,not take every friday and monday , off, for 'partytime'..so many young people seem to have never left their teeny years.
Yes. This is exactly my son’s experience and he graduated in 2022. He had to take a non degree job that pays barely enough to survive and has zero opportunities for advancement. We are helping him pay back his loans, which eats into what we could be saving for retirement. He’s applied to too many jobs to count, and heard back from 1. Very demoralizing.
Yes it is demoralizing. I hope your son finds a better job soon. One thing I learned the hard way when I was trying to find work was that I needed some coaching. I drew upon government-funded career counselors in my community, but I could have also paid for that help.
The most useful rule of thumb I learned was that if I kept on getting little or no responses to my job applications, that might be a sign that I should take a look under the hood. Did I need to structure my resume and cover letter differently? Was I shooting too high in the specific jobs I was applying for? Did I need to do more "informational interviews" to better understand the industry and gain some visibility? Were there ways that I could improve my skills in interviewing and negotiating with a potential employer?
What I've found over the years is that there is always something more I can learn about the job hunt. That attitude can help keep my morale up.
I also found that rule of thumb useful when I got laid off in 2002. I eventually went with a consulting firm who re-wrote my resume and got me a job. I still don't know what that resume looked like. Of course, as a consultant (AKA "contractor") I was paid less than my former salary, had no health insurance, no paid vacation, and no paid holidays. But I was working again.
doing all that you are doing is fine..i hope it works for you,, try to keep in mind, that sometimes it is easier to find a new job if you are already 'working' at some job.
Of course it's easier to get a job when you have one. So if you are new to the job market, that puts more pressure on you to have decent job-hunting skills. Those skills were not taught in my undergrad major (although the college's career center could be somewhat helpful).
The main thing I would like to counteract is the idea that applying for a huge number of openings is somehow a badge of honor. If one is not getting any nibbles, that's a sign that one might want to investigate whether one needs to adjust one's approach.
I've been on quite a few hiring committees over the years and have been surprised by how many applicants made basic mistakes that undercut their prospects. That includes people with master's degrees and meaningful professional experience.
My older son graduated in 2022 and found work right away. He's now on his 3rd job, by choice, in another city. The vacations and spending of his friends from college suggest none are hurting for work.
My daughter graduated with a mechanical engineering degree, has not been able to be hired for all the resos cited here. Covid also shut down internship opportunities
The data also shows a very sharp acceleration during Trump 1 (2018-2019), an even sharper Covid related acceleration, along with the Trump 2 acceleration. The data also shows a small post Covid improvement under Biden. This suggests that while an undescribed something else is underlying this phenomenon, periods of uncertainty (Trump 1, Covid, Trump 2) clearly exacerbate the problem.
My daughter graduated from college in 2012. It was really a difficult time and she is still cynical about the push to get a college degree . She ended up going to law school with tons of debt now but it was a really demoralizing time when she couldn’t find meaningful work. And I helped her financially thru it, which was also demoralizing for her. And not an option for many. I’m really worried about the unpredictable features of our economy now with seemingly no solutions coming forth from either party.
529 plans soften the blow. It's a pile of money that can't be used for anything else. The market is also up around 100% since I finished contributing, so I guess we are getting the degree half price. Strongly recommend! Just spend it and don't feel guilty. College should be free to young people. The crime is when they have to work to support themselves while studying or end up saddled with a ton of debt later.
Yes, this was not Krugman’s best work. Krugman’s source[1] shows that unemployment among recent college graduates increased from 4.8% to 5.8% between January 1 and March 1 of this year, while overall unemployment remained flat at 4.0%. This could be the result of Trump-caused uncertainty, but I’d like to see a few more months of data before ruling out the possibility that it is just noise in the data.
Krugman should have noted that the data series he is using ends on March 1. He should have acknowledged the existence of a larger trend that predates Trump. I would have liked him to link to his data sources.
Per the graph provided, unemployment for recent college graduates has generally fallen between unemployment rates for all college graduates and all workers, and was the case in 2012. Unemployment for recent college graduates did not trend higher than all workers until sometime around 2018/19 - again per the graph provided. Since 2018/19, however, unemployment for recent college graduates has exceeded the unemployment rate for all workers, whereas unemployment for all college graduates remains significantly lower than for all workers. Over time, there appears to have been a correlation in the up/down movement of unemployment amongst the 4 groups, but for recent college graduates, that correlation appears to have weakened since 2018/19.
Yeah, the economy was already a disaster for college grads when I was trying to enter it in the 2010s.
Part of the problem here is that one or two generations ago, we told everybody to go to college, as that was supposed to be the all-purpose solution to the way Reagan et al had decided to stomp on the working class - "sure, those lazy assholes who get paid too much for just tightening a widget on an assembly line all day are going to have it worse, but if you're smart and ambitious and hardworking enough, you can go to college and get a REAL job! YOU'RE not one of those lazy assholes. ARE you?" With the predictable result being that eventually, the market would get oversaturated with college grads, a college degree would become no more meaningful than a high school degree, and college graduates would end up in the same predicament of finding it hard to get a job and harder still to get a *good* job.
(Brace yourself: by 2040 or so, "the trades" are going to become similarly saturated, and all the people who are currently saying "you don't want to be one of those spoiled brats studying underwater basket weaving, go into the TRADES and get a REAL job!" are going to find a new set of stereotypes to dump on people in the trades, the same way they dumped on blue-collar workers in the eighties and college graduates today. And they'll have a new all-purpose panacea that we should all be trying to get into, which will inevitably end up the same way).
The other commonality, of course, is that much like unionized blue-collar work in the eighties, the college-educated professional world is now firmly in the right wing's sights as something that needs to be destroyed. It requires too much respect for intellect, science, objectivity, professionalism, to fit into the world they want - it's too inherently antithetical to their "what if Cultural Revolution but right wing" ideology. So expect things to continue getting worse for college grads.
And it will turn out just as well as destroying unionized blue collar work did, at least for the workers. Politics over everything with these guys, even if it destroys our universities, health care and entire classes of people.
Remember folks, it's all about shareholder primacy. Between customers, workers, and management, shareholders are the most important and most essential part of the process. The money should all flow to them, blessed as they are.
You are on to something. More specifically, most firms use AI to cull applicants that don't match job requirements exactly. Of course, that's not the way things worked when humans were more involved.
I suspect a large majority of well-educated Americans got at least one job they were not perfectly qualified for because they convinced a hiring manager that they could do the work. Now, they don't even get to that interview. The real losers here are the enterprises that don't get the hires that don't check all the boxes in the job description but would have turned out to be outstanding employees after a little coaching.
We're still learning how to use AI effectively, and I think this glitch will pass as we get better with using AI applicant-screening tools.
Your remark that tariff-uncertainty is not the cause of the bad job market for graduates is also confirmed by the graph in the article which suggests that the, more or less linear, downhill trend already started around 2012.
"Employers have kept upping the ante, demanding work experience for entry level positions that is all but impossible for new grads to attain."
What I saw in the job market in the early 2000s was employers making unrealistic demands because they actually wanted to hire a cut-rate H1 visa guy. They had to advertise for some period of time and needed an excuse to refuse to hire a US citizen. One ad I saw demanded seven years experience with Java (a programming language) when Java had only been created five years prior to the ad. This sort of thing was rampant in the New York metro area at the time.
Looking at the graph, this problem seem to have started before 2016, long before AI became an issue. That does not mean that AI cannot cause trouble , but something else has caused the current decline in employment in the educated young.
Regardless of graphs, thousands of graduates were declaring bankruptcy because the couldn't make headway on their college loans. That was early in the last Bush administration, which "solved" the problem by making it impossible to avoid these loans by bankruptcy.
It could be many things. In 2022, for example, the ability of companies to deduct R&D expenses was nerfed due to a problem with the (I think) TCJA which were put in as a poison pill to prevent early passage and they forgot to remove them. That was behind the tech layoffs that year while CEOs "predicted" recessions that never arrived. Really they were just looking at paper losses due to changes in tax policy. It sure didn't help young people get jobs. It's the recession's fault!! They never fixed it.
The Grad Gap plot also is the difference between two economic data points, so you'd want to make sure that the problem wasn't that in 2016 the value of tradesmen went up.
For any of you sending students to college these days, you might have noticed the male-female ratio at colleges has basically flipped, more women than men, sometimes 2:1. While I guess we shouldn't feel too bad for these guys who are still attending college -- may they ever be so popular! -- one wonders how much of this just inherits from any differences between the historical post graduate experiences of women vs. men. Male college enrollment took a notable drop in 2016 vs female enrollment which held roughly constant.
Finally total college enrollment dropped off rather severely in 2010 for 2 year institutions and has kept going down since by an astonishing 40%. So same story for 4 year degrees vs. two year degrees. Would a larger fraction of 4 year degree holders mean longer job searches?
It is probably worth looking at the Atlantic article that Krugman cites to see if they dug up anything.
It’s fascinating to see the comments with all of the variations on a theme of this idea. I 100% agree that today’s online hiring process is aggravating whatever real life problems exist. It kind of doesn’t matter whether you’re a recent grad or a seasoned worker. If you have to pad your resume with keywords and submit hundreds of apps “into the void” the job hunting process feels lousy.
Actually, and I have no facts to support this, but to what degree might this lousy environment have contributed to the negative “vibes” that offset good economic statistics and may have swung the election? Everyone knows someone either looking for a job or feeling vulnerable in their current job, knowing that it’s awful out there.
We had similar problems with the bug reporter system while I worked at Apple. Within Apple, the bug database is the life blood of engineering. Every single thing that got done had to have a bug report to go with it. Filing a bug was like being able to directly tap into the hive brain and do a bit of mind control!
Yet, it was nearly impossible to convince outside developers to ever file a bug, because (since they couldn't see the bug database) from their perspective it was like throwing time and effort down a black hole. If they got anything back, it was only after months had gone by and the fix finally percolated out to customers and by then they'd worked around it if it was a real problem, or didn't care anymore if it wasn't. "Totally useless!"
How things would have been different if we had been allowed to strike up an e-mail conversation with them when a bug crossed our desk. But, security... privacy...
One thing that happened after the CoVid explosion in 2020, was that the Fed not only lowered interest rates, but the Treasury *also* introduced about $700 billion of *liquidity* into the banking system.
I remember when Mo (Mohammed El Erian) was talking about the macroeconomic consequences of *that* in particular, and how he was pretty confident that the capital markets (stock prices) were going to rise accordingly.
Now this was indeed highly effective at getting the US economy up and going again, as it made money nearly *free* for commercial interests to borrow and develop whatever it was they wanted to. Oh, and there was also this thing where the government gave money directly to individual households to help them keep going.
The former thing was probably the most important though, because companies then could employ people to work for them on these new projects. There was just a ton of building going on - as one of the things I most clearly observed round where I live.
Now, let's get to part 'deux' :)
Come 2022, the economy is looking pretty tickety-boo again, and Jerome Powell observes: "Hey, I think we better manage the throttle a bit here."
And I think that this is when Powell started lifting the Fed Overnight Rate back up from effectively *zero* to what now is something like 4.25% or whatever it is (sorry, I'm being lazy, but you can look.)
And so yes: Borrowing money is no longer *free*, and this of course, is what helps to keep inflation under control. Remember that this is one of the two key things that the Fed is supposed to be doing. Powell wants to get that down closer to 2 to 3% per annum or so.
Mortgage rates are now back up around 6.8% or whatever they are, and peoples' spending has not been so fast and loose since the Fed began this tightening.
Punch line: Corporations have therefore become much more careful about their own spending since this began, and as we 'all' know: the number one way to control spending is to "manage" head-count (employees.)
In some cases this has meant lay-offs, but more broadly, it means that employers become much more reluctant to do new hiring.
I think that this is what Paul's graphs do actually reflect.
As with every recession that was caused by the false “trickle down economy” of Republicans, Democrats had to clean up the destruction wrought by both President Bushes and Trump, which takes many years, thus the slow recovery of jobs.
Clinton’s economy provided the uptick in jobs, so did Obama’s and Biden’s. Biden’s in particular surpassed his predecessor’s economies’ growth by a mile, but 4 years is not enough time to recover from the pandemic in terms of jobs.
These recoveries take time, and trajectories/forecasts were already showing that jobs were forthcoming, laid in place by Biden’s infrastructure law, the Chips Act, etc. But the incompetent tariff roller coaster, the gutting of expertise in the federal government (science, law, military) has once again, devastated the progress in jobs that Dems have put in place.
Now, Trump wants unemployed Americans to work in manufacturing factories to build his golden cell phones. And by kicking out hardworking immigrants (at the same time depriving them of constitutional due process), Trump has made sure prices go up on groceries (eggs!), housing, etc. because of scarcity of workers willing to take those jobs (10-12 hours under the sun, on the ground handpicking vegetables, paid minimum wage).
So yes, these jobs were hard to come by prior to Trump 2.0, but it was Trump 1.0 and his Republican predecessors before him that caused jobs to dwindle, as he’s doing now for future grads.
To not blame Trump because of the lag in repercussions is what Republicans want to happen, that’s why they’re timing the enforcement of their Big Ugly Bill after 2026 & 2028, so that people forget who really made workers suffer and keep themselves, the greedy politicians in power: gutting healthcare & jobs for everyone to put more money into the pockets of rich people who don’t need them.
If you think it's bad for grads - try applying for anything above minimum wage menial labor without a degree. Trust me, you won't get hired - even if you have significant experience.
What i’m seeing (just anecdotal) is that college students are having hard time getting summer internships this year. These are the folks still to graduate, which will likely make harder for them to secure positions in following years unless economy shifts positive. Stated reason from employers is that they dont want to invest in internships if theyre unlikely to have FT positions for them the following year. This mostly the big tech, larger employers.
I do not know why the author would discount AI due to recency, but then proceed to lay the blame at Trump, who is even more recent than AI. Also, Trump’s policies have a much more immediate and drastic effect on blue collar labor than white collar labor.
I also hate Trump, and I think he may end up torpedoing the economy before he leaves office. But I don’t think this particular phenomenon is caused by him.
This is what my son found when he graduated with a software engineering degree. It was gamified. He made the huge mistake of not doing an internship which should be mandatory. He’s still working at his old job in food service which he likes.
It is nearly unfathomable to comprehend the scope of the damage being done by this whole Trump cataclysm. I cannot escape deeming as evil all those who are bought into Trump and any and all Republicans who go along with it. I insist that no reasonable person can approve of any of Trump's predations.
I'd just replace "reasonable" with "reasonable and decent". A lot of Trump supporters think they're good people even though their "goodness" only extends to family, friends and people just like them.
As a retired scientist, I am especially concerned about the fate of young people who have a burning desire to do scientific research. T's policies are destroying the fabric of American science. Young scientists will probably wither on the vine unless they leave the country. I think we are going to lose an entire generation of scientists. I wish them well!!
As a retired scientist with a physics PhD from [ university of SATANIC DOOM in Massachusetts], I can state that science as a career has sucked for several decades, going back to at least Reagan times.
AND, the loss of R&D funding through DOGE & Trump cancellations is making grad school a less available and less reasonable option for science majors, adding them to the group of college students looking for work and not finding it.
I'm not sure that there's a life in academia waiting for anyone today, whether elsewhere or in the US. I mean, a life in academia is possible all right, but probably not like a young idealistic person would imagine it to be. Some time ago, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder posted a YouTube video about why she left the field. IMO it's really worth watching:
Another alternative is that the US will soon start to "export" highly educated and trained young people, who will then "Make Other Countries Great Again." Assuming capital soon follows, you could see a sort of revival of the British Empire as the "refugees" from the US move to other English speaking countries to work.
Britain suffers from the same anti-immigrant bias as the US and the capital they attract since Brexit is mostly financial. The US will follow suit as Trumpxit works its way into the real sector.
1 dead and 1 dying empire clinging to old glory like 2 geezers in a bar.
I'm pinning my hopes on former British colonies holding out against the rising world tide of self-inflicted stupidity and democratic backsliding. Now if Canada could just annex Washington, Oregon, and California, it would really help.
Curiously, one thing Canada and Trump have in common is they both have a deeply un-American fondness for monarchy as a curious and "harmless" institution. Maybe it's why he wanted to annex them. True Americans (US) still actively protest such things, as we learned recently. No Kings! This little incompatibility makes me less bullish about any Pacific Coast / Canada mergers.
There is also the francophone problem. If the 10 million Canadians who speak French as a first language need special treatment, wait until they find out that 10.4 million Californians speak Spanish as a first language, or that the population of California (39.4M) is about equal to all of Canada (40.1M). Let's see the Quebecois forced to learn Spanish. There's some irony there! Besides, once you toss in the population of Oregon (4.2M), Washington (8M) and probably tagalong Nevada* (3.2M), It would be more proper to say the West Coast (54.8M) annexes Canada (40.1M), giving the left coast a near 60:40 supermajority. I wonder what BC wants?
As you can see, any such deal would be immediately dismissed as <french_accent>impossible!</french_accent>
*What, after all, does Nevada share culturally with Utah or Arizona? It is California's playground and tax haven.
Europe is probably better at K-12, and maybe even on bachelor's degree-level education.
The superiority of US education is specifically to do with anything beyond a bachelor's degree, which is why graduate programs are swarmed with international students.
There are many countries other than the US where they can get an English language degree (usually at much lower tuition cost). I agree with Thomas that US primarily differentiates itself with graduate programs.
Look to valid Published studies and papers. America has taken a nose dive on publishing good studies and papers. If you follow papers from Japan... the derived algorithms function. I'm concerned about the ability to express valid studies and papers. The studies are out there and the facts are brutal. Defending a paper is healthy. Published studies are the metric of advanced studies. This clown fish IQ incharge with his sycophants is fracturing our abilities to provide relevant sciience.
We playing with fnumbers there. Let me share an slice of personal live. 40 years ago I was finishig physics. Silicon Valley was a new thing then. Me and a lot of my colleagues wanted to do the postdoc in an University at U.S. Two main reasons 1 we did had a better education which translated in higher scores 2 U.S. was investing at importing talent. My live went in another direction but at least 50% of my course went to US.
US has been a pilar of science all those years.
Now even Europe is willing to import already pre-selected and educated students from US universities.
This is a key point. If China picks up on Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore development approach, especially the adoption of English, and non-politicized enforcement of contract law, the US will be in very deep trouble. China already has Hong Kong as a small scale demonstration project for this. If instead of cracking down on HK, they emulate it more widely, they will be a magnet for talent worldwide. Xi does not seem to be moving this direction.
Canada has been so flooded with legal immigrants that there is now a massive housing crisis. The government has been forced to cut migrant numbers way back as the electorate is furious.
I understand the arguments but I think this is a wider Western demographic problem, rather than a Trump specific one. As a recent grad from the UK from a good university, I found myself completely unable to get a job requiring more qualifications than 5 GCSEs (or a high school diploma in the US).
What was so astonishing is the levels of underemployment in the workforce. As individuals work longer and longer into their old age, the ability for a workplace to regenerate its workforce declines. So the result: management are getting older and older with few places for highly qualified, skilled workers to move into. They are stuck with entry level jobs for longer, and combines with market forces companies are unable to accept graduates without the work experience to compete for jobs.
In short, underemployment is so chronic that workplaces are unable to hire anybody without prior experience and the qualifications can’t possibly compete.
And the worse thing is if this is right, this problem will only get worse. As we live longer and longer, and have a continually ageing population, Nobody will retire at 65 any more, it will become 67, then 70, and so on. Space’s won’t be freed up to welcome individuals new to the workforce, and this trend of unemployed graduates will continue.
What I hope is that this doesnt put people off higher education - it may seem now that you need to have a job straight out of kindergarten to stand a chance, but embracing the freedom and opportunities you can only get at a university is such a privilege. And I hope that society finds a creative solution to this issue, as it has done for so many situations in the past.
You touch on an important issue with an ageing workforce. It also likely means that there will be less innovation and dynamism, as young talent isn't allowed to advance. I hope your job search improves. I graduated in 2004 and with hindsight we had it very easy compared to today.
Thank you very much :) luckily I’ve got a stable job with our NHS, but moving out and finding greener pastures is hard. And it’s a great point - tech is moving so quickly that embracing the skills digital natives bring can produce so many benefits for workplaces…if they can get in
I disagree with the idea that the quantity of skilled jobs should be market led as I feel that inevitably will lead to mechanisation of all “skilled” roles when AI starts to develop further. To future proof this issue, we should start to legislate against and limit the uses of AI in companies and instead be human focussed.
Although this may slow the flexibility of where the skilled jobs are, it guarantees their existence rather than putting it in the hands of corporations who will always choose a cheaper machine over a human.
What it does need is really strong government policy to open up opportunities in a variety of sectors ready for graduates to move into. Innovation in state-led departments often bring more jobs than the private sector, and they don’t need as strong an ROI to give these opportunities a go. Combines concepts of increasing skilled job availability, publicly accessible services and future-proofing our jobs
Owen, I'm an old sparring partner from Economistsview. I think one thing that is often forgotten is how the public sector used to be a training ground and proving ground for new graduates, and how this benefitted the private sector ( who both complain the market doesn't provide the skills they want and refuse to employ and train new entrants).
I was left high and dry after raygun's revolution, but managed to ride the Clinton wave. During my time the gop has given us recessions and excuses, while the dems have always managed the economy successfully.
Good grief. The "New Grad Gap" started falling in the mid-2010s, yet Krugman blames everything on Trump -- who, though a maniac, has been in office only for five months.
On this chart I see a decline starting in 45th's first term and then aggravated by the covid decline. It appears biden stabilized things a bit but now the rate of dropping again. (The biggest drop I remember after the dotcom recession after Y2K was the 2007 recession vs 2010s per se.) A LOT has changed in the u.s.a in 'only five months' starting in January-February 2025 to be blamed entirely on 47 and his appointees.
I would like to see a comparison against salaries for each of the groups. Starting salaries for new grads have changed significantly for some graduates depending on the sector, especially tech, where there have also been big changes in older employee discrimination.
Nice read of the chart. It appears thar be pirates in the executive branch harvesting profits on a marquee from another nation. The lag instead of waiting for galleons full of gold treking to Spain and Portugal is tariff percentage fluctuations based on the caprice of the elected one. Good post Jane.
Not to point out the obvious, but it is rather astonishing how many people forget that Trump was first elected president in 2016, was reelected in 2024 and claimed to still be president in the period in between.
You may think, "Yeah, but 2025 is sooo much worse!" but I remind you that 2017 was bad and it kept getting worse year by year, through lies, grift, an endless train of batman villains serving as his cabinet, culminating in the end with election interference, COVID and the seditious sacking of the halls of Congress! That is truly a tough act to follow, inconceivable really, but I guess we have the man for the job. Again!
The employment situation for new graduates has been similar in terms of job availability in the past, but for different reasons. I graduated in the early 70s when the job market was really bad. I ultimately went to graduate school after failing to find a job other than pumping gas, which I did to support going to college. That may not be an option for many new graduates now, particularly in the sciences due to the Trump administration's cuts to research funding and attacks on universities. I say that because, even back in the 70s, most science grad students received teaching assistant or research assistant support to cover the cost of grad school. It was of course different in the humanities and social sciences where a lot more people were paying their own way. Despite that a lot of my friends "hid out" in grad school until the job market improved.
There are some negatives for an American going to Canada for grad school. Basically you disappear as far as US jobs are concerned. At least that was my experience getting a Ph.D. at the University of Alberta. That issue might be less at McGill or the U of Toronto, but it was certainly real for me. The only US job interviews I got happened when I was a post-doc at U of Illinois. Of course that was nearly 50 years ago.
Overall, Trump's behavior is causing psychotic and depressive ideation. Even children's minds have been harmed, and they are the most resilient.
Get that education no matter what. The economy and the ridiculous state of politics cycles affording better opportunity ultimately.
It is important to at least graduate High School because no diploma means no jobs and a life of crime just to survive.
Thankfully, although unsuccessful, Sanders idea of free Community college was important and will later occur and Biden's forgiveness of student loan debt was terrific that will help offset the hiring problem you outlined.
Never give up. You know what you learned. You will get a job sooner or later and this deep trough in the psychological cycle will give way to a rebound just like the economic cycle does as they go hand in hand.
Good luck and never give up. I found that flooding the job market with hundreds of copies of your resume will get you a job out of chances.
I’ve been waiting to hear that salaries for college graduates are falling because most college graduates are now women. In the future we will see the rise of salaries in jobs that don’t require a college degree because they will be mostly held by men. Our concept of college as a job training program has always been the wrong focus. Education makes you a critical thinker. This is perhaps why so many men support trump. They decided not to take advantage of education.
I value the workers who have decided to pursue vocational training, however, as this happens we must put more effort into K-12 to provide students with more critical thinking and less rote learning such as that needed for standardized tests.
Yep, was wondering the same thing. However, this data covers unemployment, not wage disparity, and while it is fairly well documented that there is a pay gap, I just have no idea whether there is also a gender-based post graduate employment gap which I expect would need to be there for that to turn out to be true. Women are, after all, cheaper. Do employers take advantage of this?
Also, if overall college attendance was up long term, we really can't point to young men as the reason why Trump won, just why the demographic voted for him. Overall, we should imagine more college educated voters than in elections past which should more than compensate, if people weren't more excited over the price of eggs. As it was, the democratic candidate was uninspiring, the campaign went negative, turnout was lower than 2020, all things that keep liberals at home on Election Day until they finally smarten up. Also, cynically, having been one myself once, I have trouble imagining the young male demographic ever getting excited over another post menopausal woman in a pant suit. They, er, have other things on their mind. Ocasio-Cortez might have done well... So, there are other factors we might point to, beyond brain rot. There's the other brain rot.
But seriously, any of a dozen other people of both genders could have also done well if Biden had permitted an actual democratic process with a primary. In three of the last four presidential elections, the Democrats have not permitted a competitive primary election. (2016 was pretty rigged with super delegates, if you will recall.) It has just been dynastic turn taking. As long as they keep that up, I believe the Democrat leadership incompetence will continue and we may face still more dismal electoral results. While they rationalize that _anything_ is better than having progressives win, we might ponder the true meaning of _anything_, and whether they really mean that, because honestly, for the vast majority of Democrats, a Sanders/OAC ticket would have been far less disruptive than this man.
I can verify this through my son's experience of graduation in the aftermath of the Bush wreckage of the economy. He had a degree that should have given him the best opportunity in his field but instead he had to take what he could get job wise and through hard work and perseverance after 15 years he has finally arrived where he should have been a few short years after graduation. The political influences on the economy matter for everyone.
The only time I've actually seen Paul Krugman was during those years, soon after my graduation, when he gave a talk about his latest book at a bookstore in Washington, DC. And the bleakest point he made was that most college graduates were *never* going to recover from the damage that graduating in that economy was doing to them. The student loans, the years of unemployment and underemployment, the crappy choices in this economy, even if they finally got themselves situated the damage of those early years would stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Fifteen years later and looking back, that was entirely correct. I'm in the same spot as your kid, took a dozen years to end up in the place you're supposed to be at shortly after graduation. Even if everything in our life is smooth sailing from here, that's still over a decade lost.
I hear you. I graduated in 1990 into the teeth of a recession and counted myself fortunate to find a job after looking for 5 months. People who graduated 5 years later easily obtained jobs with good salaries right out of college.
I conservatively worked for the same company for 20 years, while some younger folks changed jobs every 4 years or so.
I did that same thing in the early 1990s graduated into the teeth of the Bush I recession and never recovered. After my divorce, I went back to school to re-skill and am graduating into the teeth of the Rump Slump.
And yes, it IS worse than it was 5 years ago and IS worse than it was under Biden. Under Biden it was "bad but improving" and now it's "fallen off a cliff and getting worse." Salaries on offer have fallen BY ALMOST HALF. Most jobs aren't actually available. And now I am 55 competing with people half my age for vanishingly few jobs. I have applied for over almost 200 in the last 2-3 months and I got two interviews and no offers. The only job I DID get came through a referral.
Make no mistake. There are fewer jobs. Fewer remote jobs. More people applying. You have to hit applications when there are under 75 people to reasonably have a prayer. At the 10 hr mark, most jobs in my field have over 200 applicants. Even AI does not help you break through.
As some have pointed out, the new grad gap chart has been heading downwards for some time. I suspect that some of this has demographic causes. There are more graduates now than previously, but older graduates are retiring later and in lower numbers than old tradesmen are. So the hot demand in the labour market is for skilled tradesmen, not graduates. I suspect this has happened in many other countries as well.
Of course Trump and also the austerity cult have made matters worse. We need teachers and scientists more than ever, but these are typical public sector jobs and conservative economics adherents don't want to pay for them, preferring to increase the number and wealth of the billionaire class.
Very true, Jim. Here in Australia, “tradies” could work 24/7 and still be swamped and it’s reflected in their hourly rates (there’s no minimum-wage pay- the rates reflect their scarcity). I entered the workforce in 1973 and the jobs market was MUCH worse than today (it was in the first OPEC oil shock). Things always recover.
I graduated in 1978 into the ranks of the unemployed…it was the recession. I remember how not fun that was. I was 40 before I had a decent salary, health insurance, loans paid off. I did not have the life I’d been brought up to expect just because I was a college graduate. I married late, never had kids, never had the nice house in the burbs. It’s ok now but for a long time it wasn’t. I feel for these new grads. Adversity builds character, you discover creativity and resourcefulness you never knew you had, and maybe I’m a better person for it, but I sure wouldn’t have chosen it.
It looks like the trend started around 2015 and continued unchanged through the Biden Presidency. How do you conclude then that Trump's admittedly awful actions are the primary driver here?
I'm sure that depriving an entire generation of meaningful opportunities in the American economy can have no adverse effects. From shutting millions out of the housing market to saddling graduates with massive debt and no realistic way to escape it, we're setting up a new indentured servitude that will not help anyone--not workers, not employers, not the country as a whole.
This is partly intentional. The oligarchs and theocrats now demolishing our government and civil society despise 'educated elites'; they want a rigidly hierarchical feudal society to cement their place on top. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile
I am as anti-Trump as anyone, but this frozen job market for college grads has been going on well before Trump re-entered office this year.
America’s class of 2024 graduates into an uncertain job market (5/19/2024):
https://www.ft.com/content/d0b9efd6-df30-4c22-9e96-386eb53777ae
‘It Feels Like I Am Screaming Into the Void With Each Application’ (5/8/2024):
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/opinion/college-graduates-job-market.html
For young people, the job search has never been so miserable (5/28/2024):
https://www.ft.com/content/4b16c325-8758-4b90-bdb5-15536b401606
One of the main issues is the actual applying for a job is so gameified by AI systems that new job posts are drawing hundreds of applicants that are impossible for HR managers to sort through. Employers have kept upping the ante, demanding work experience for entry level positions that is all but impossible for new grads to attain.
‘You’re Fighting AI With AI’: Bots Are Breaking the Hiring Process (5/10/2024):
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/ai-job-application-685f29f7
It is beyond demoralizing to spend months trying to apply for jobs you are more than qualified for, to simply be ghosted by the company.
This is happening to older people, as well, and there are very few stats kept on ageism and hiring, but it's real and getting worse.
All people. The fallout from USAID and DOGE has affected people of all ages who have mortgages, kids etc and are now looking at the same small pool of opportunities as everyone else who is out of work. This middle group is not being highlighted in the media.
For sure. It’s laughable that R’s want to delay the age for social security when the 50 something’s are the first to go in a layoff. And no one really wants greyhairs around so you keep getting RIF’ed until you do retire at the legal retirement age IF YOUR LUCKY to get back into the job market.
It would help knowing future job trends before picking majors in college.
Ha. I remember when I was in high school in the 70's, there were all kinds of articles about how physicists will be in very short supply. But when I graduated with my Ph.D, the Regan admin had just eviscerated scientific research and there wasn't a job to be found.
A majority of my college class in the early 1980s picked computer programming as a major based on the future job market trends. By the time we graduated four years later, the degrees were virtually worthless because COBOL was being replaced by other languages and there was a glut of programming majors which resulted from everyone choosing the same major at the same time.
On the other hand, I got my Master's in Computer Science in 1984 and had no problem finding a job. Everyone in my class found work at decent salaries. Of course, nearly all of us had to relocate.
Are you ready to pick strawberries or work in meat packing?
Trump is providing jobs for us there.
In fact, you can even work in dairy and see if you can be ground zero for bird flu jumping from cow to human to human.
Not that anyone would know who was #1 or able to develop a vaccine since Trump and Kennedy are gutting science and real verifiable data and our ability to respond by doing so.
Stock up on N95s.
I'm ok on a bit of strawberry picking :) but rather less so on meat-packing.
All joking aside, however, this madness that RFK Jr. is now engaged in, with dismantling vaccination programs in the country is going to cause incredible tragedy if it comes into practical effect.
Polio has now been eradicated in almost the entire world, although it is still apparent in parts of India and one or two places elsewhere.
There was a great article in the New Yorker (quite some years ago now I fear,) entitled "The Mop Up." It was all about how the World Health Organization responds when an outbreak of Polio is discovered.
It's a very informative read, describing how infectious disease specialists track the outbreak back to its source, and engage in 'ring containment' and so on.
The truly heart-breaking matter however, is just how very hard it is to get vaccines out into the field - particularly in the developing world situations in which polio is still apparent.
One issue is that the polio vaccine must be kept refrigerated if it is not to become useless, and this is very hard in the tropics and India.
But more upsetting, is that people who are in the areas where polio is spreading, are often terribly fearful about *accepting* the vaccine.
Owing to political divisions, as well as ignorance, people are fearful that these shots may be a plot by their political or cultural adversaries to kill them off.
I learned quite a lot from my reading that article, and so much of that was about the truly enormous *operational* challenges - both logistical and *social* that make it so damnably hard to curtail the spread of an outbreak, and the absolute tragedy imparted to the lives of all who end up being exposed to the disease.
I'm so sorry: This is not a happy thing to be talking about on a lovely sunny afternoon here in the PNW.
But our needing to cleave to our medical and scientific knowledge is absolutely critical to the quality of life in all of our social civilisations (not just on our insular island culture here in America.)
How can we possibly have come to have a person like Bobby Kennedy as our Director of National Health?
This will *never* do!
You touch on a number of important issues, but two are critical. When, and not if, H5N1 bird flu becomes transmissible from human to human we may be looking at more deaths worldwide than those from COVID. A degraded disease surveillance system and anti vaccine policies can only worsen this. The second issue is an old one; diseases stubbornly refuse to respect international borders. US Government policies attacking international health organizations, including the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders, will increase communicable disease deaths in all countries, notably including the US. RFK Jr. cannot even address measles outbreaks in this country and is clearly the wrong person to take on global health challenges.
Can’t we just put a high enough tariff on the viruses to keep them out??
These are both really important points Ben.
I'm not an infectious disease guy, so I'm not really keeping up with the consequences of the bird flu that you are so rightly drawing attention to.
This matter of taking down our *surveillance* on *all* of these matters is a really really harmful thing of course, and I simply can't believe how anyone could be such a complete fool (as the RFK folks appear that they are) as to
depredate those programs.
Finally, the WHO, Medecins sans Frontieres, and all such programs are incredibly important *operational* parts of dealing with critical medical issues around the globe.
The decimation of USAID plays greatly into this as well.
There is disease, for one thing, but there is also - *so* importantly the matter of food (proper nutrition,) as well as *sanitation* that the USAID funding addresses (I believe.)
Something that we take perfectly for granted in the developed world is the easy availability of clean water. It just runs from the taps in our homes for heaven's sake!
But in the developing world, this a really challenged thing.
It is totally non-trivial to establish and maintain this civil infrastructure, and if it's not in place, you get all *kinds* of disease.
Cholera is a big one, as are many things for which mosquitoes are one vector, and then there is amoebic dysentary (one of the world's top few causes of death,) plus things like worms (I think that's the 4th top cause of death and decimation of populi in the world,) owing to peoples wading into rivers (like the Nile and the Ganges, ...) and/or into lakes and ponds in order to procure water.
This latter thing about worms is what the Jimmy Carter Foundation have been primarily focused upon.
Anyway, now that I've depressed the heck out of all of us, let's think about what we can possibly do to stop the dang train wreck that this present set of idiots *not* running the US Health Program are going to cause.
Who has ideas?
Can we engage with the Gates, and Carter, and/or Rockefeller Foundations, as one possible axis for putting pressure on this broken administration?
I do have at least one friend at the Rockefeller Foundation I could call.
You don't need to be a specialist in anything but science in general and staying awake to realize the dangers of these policies. I'm a long retired EE, and they're obvious to me.
Global health related issues are a very low priority for the government, and the causes of this are obviously complex. To pick only one, our country has mostly lost its humanity. How can we expect our policymakers and politicians to care about underdeveloped countries or treat health issues globally when our own citizens and legal residents are preoccupied with things like lawless arrests and incarcerations? Our leaders no longer talk about the value of soft power or even presenting ourselves as a force for good in the world; modern day Marshall Plan anyone? Food, clean water and medicine for starving people are outlawed or ignored in places like Gaza, Sudan and to a lesser extent even in our own country. To counter these injustices we must stand together and fight using tools like the hugely successful No Kings marches, pushing our elected officials to actually support our system of government, and encouraging friends and neighbors to join in the fight. Any help we can get is welcome, including financial support from the foundations you mention.
And if anything, the Biden years made this problem worse, because now anybody over the age of 50 is assumed to be subject to "cognitive decline" at any moment.
I think trump has more to do with that than Biden.
The media is only trying to manufacture a scandal out of Biden's aging.
I voted Democrat in every election in my life. Even I think this is a scandal. The rat bastards who propped him up robbed the party of a proper primary election, left us with an uninspiring candidate with a short runway to the election. Mostly this is on Biden, who should have had the wisdom not to seek a second term. Retire already! Enjoy the last few years remaining to you. Spend time with your wife.
One of Trumps big downsides is the man is aged, out of shape and out of touch. What does party leader Biden do? Pitch an even older geezer who shuffles about to run against him. And they wonder why they lost the youth vote. Democratic Party leadership is out. of. control.
I’ve voted Democrat in every election in my life and I think you can fuck all the way off.
The conversation they don’t want to have is that nobody wants a new generation of leadership because the new generation entering politics have decided to be all complete dipshits.
quite honestly, i find your post rather silly...i'm past the 80 mark...a person's mental, cognitive.ability has nothing to do with age..of course, we all lose physical abilities as we age...but general good health is the deciding factor..imo, BIDENS erreor was in tryiing to do too much, without adequate rest, from my having lived so long...i find experience is also imperative..since there is nothing new under the sun..experience matters... Trumpf is nothing new..if you are past 40, you have seen his kind before...and really, whatever makes anyone think he will ever be any different...he is exactly what you see and hear..a vulgar, crude man with no filters, as he has been all his life.
What? Reality? Oh no, we can't have that now can we.
Thank you!
Add the obvious cognitive decline of Trump too! He is "only" 79 and I think he is much worse than Biden when Biden was 79.
Trumpkopf was worse at 59 than Biden at 79.
Older workers with more experience also cost more. Someone who's been in one field for 10 or 20 years has hopefully gotten raises over that time. If you decide to look for a new job anywhere in that range, new employers won't pay the same as your old job.
True, though the discrimination still exists even if you're willing to work for the same pay.
That's because new employers are certain (with good reason) that you will eventually be unhappy at a lower salary. If you were making, say, $45,000/yr and are trying for a job that pays only $41,000/yr, you will not get hired once the new boss finds out what your old salary was.
True, though younger workers are also eventually going to be unhappy with that salary.
People have been assuming that anyone older than 50 (or younger sometimes) is likely over the hill, in some way, shape or form, for a very, very long time.
I keep telling my cohorts who talk about "taking the keys away from grandpa" as some totally normal thing that this will, in fact, come back to bite them in the ass when they get old.
So true. And in some fields (e.g., software) 35 misconceived as the top of the hill.
lol i quit driving because of the other drivers on the road, driving ceased being fun..and since so many people have moved here [florida] from up north, they simply do not know how to drive and , god forbid, how to park, it became a nightmare just to go to the mall. , and it isn't grandpa or grandma who are the stupid drivers.
Yes it will, but if grandpa is incompetent, it will also be necessary.
Realistically, it is probably the case that self driving cars will reduce the need for the aged to drive, so your schadenfreude might be delayed indefinitely.
Nonsense. They seem to have weird accidents. The yard where Waymo charges cars in a residential part of Santa Monica is apparently so noisy (at night) that folks can't sleep. That will not encourage a push toward self driving taxis.
Realistically self driving cars aren’t going to be a thing so you all can have fun getting thrown in a home by your kids.
Bullshit
That has been going on for a long time.
yes, I'm agreeing with your comment and pointing out that there's now an even bigger backlash against older workers.
Got it. I'm tired and not seeing as much nuance these days.
that all depends on the company..many prefer the older workers simply because they have a strong work-ethic..they do,not take every friday and monday , off, for 'partytime'..so many young people seem to have never left their teeny years.
Yes. This is exactly my son’s experience and he graduated in 2022. He had to take a non degree job that pays barely enough to survive and has zero opportunities for advancement. We are helping him pay back his loans, which eats into what we could be saving for retirement. He’s applied to too many jobs to count, and heard back from 1. Very demoralizing.
Yes it is demoralizing. I hope your son finds a better job soon. One thing I learned the hard way when I was trying to find work was that I needed some coaching. I drew upon government-funded career counselors in my community, but I could have also paid for that help.
The most useful rule of thumb I learned was that if I kept on getting little or no responses to my job applications, that might be a sign that I should take a look under the hood. Did I need to structure my resume and cover letter differently? Was I shooting too high in the specific jobs I was applying for? Did I need to do more "informational interviews" to better understand the industry and gain some visibility? Were there ways that I could improve my skills in interviewing and negotiating with a potential employer?
What I've found over the years is that there is always something more I can learn about the job hunt. That attitude can help keep my morale up.
I also found that rule of thumb useful when I got laid off in 2002. I eventually went with a consulting firm who re-wrote my resume and got me a job. I still don't know what that resume looked like. Of course, as a consultant (AKA "contractor") I was paid less than my former salary, had no health insurance, no paid vacation, and no paid holidays. But I was working again.
doing all that you are doing is fine..i hope it works for you,, try to keep in mind, that sometimes it is easier to find a new job if you are already 'working' at some job.
Yes. He’s bc always had a full time job. It’s just dead end and lousy pay.
Of course it's easier to get a job when you have one. So if you are new to the job market, that puts more pressure on you to have decent job-hunting skills. Those skills were not taught in my undergrad major (although the college's career center could be somewhat helpful).
The main thing I would like to counteract is the idea that applying for a huge number of openings is somehow a badge of honor. If one is not getting any nibbles, that's a sign that one might want to investigate whether one needs to adjust one's approach.
I've been on quite a few hiring committees over the years and have been surprised by how many applicants made basic mistakes that undercut their prospects. That includes people with master's degrees and meaningful professional experience.
My older son graduated in 2022 and found work right away. He's now on his 3rd job, by choice, in another city. The vacations and spending of his friends from college suggest none are hurting for work.
You know what they say about anecdotes vs. data.
He was lucky.
The unemployment rate is well below 25%, so most graduates will have results like that.
just curious, did he major in a relevant/rigorous field?
I guess not. Art degree. He’s a very talented artist. He’s applying in graphic arts/illustration.
try telling your son that sometimes you have to take a;paying' job, while you are looking for your dream job. its cruel world out there
Yeah. He has a full time job. Lives on his own. Just wants something better.
Yeah. He has a job and supports himself. Just trying for something better.
My daughter graduated with a mechanical engineering degree, has not been able to be hired for all the resos cited here. Covid also shut down internship opportunities
Looking at the chart Krugman provided, it’s clear that this trend started around 2012.
Indeed. The data shows that this is NOT a recent Trump driven development.
Except for maybe the spike at the end of the series.
The data also shows a very sharp acceleration during Trump 1 (2018-2019), an even sharper Covid related acceleration, along with the Trump 2 acceleration. The data also shows a small post Covid improvement under Biden. This suggests that while an undescribed something else is underlying this phenomenon, periods of uncertainty (Trump 1, Covid, Trump 2) clearly exacerbate the problem.
My daughter graduated from college in 2012. It was really a difficult time and she is still cynical about the push to get a college degree . She ended up going to law school with tons of debt now but it was a really demoralizing time when she couldn’t find meaningful work. And I helped her financially thru it, which was also demoralizing for her. And not an option for many. I’m really worried about the unpredictable features of our economy now with seemingly no solutions coming forth from either party.
I'm really sorry to hear that, but sadly it makes me feel better about my son, BA, certification in cyber security and working nights at Home Depot.
529 plans soften the blow. It's a pile of money that can't be used for anything else. The market is also up around 100% since I finished contributing, so I guess we are getting the degree half price. Strongly recommend! Just spend it and don't feel guilty. College should be free to young people. The crime is when they have to work to support themselves while studying or end up saddled with a ton of debt later.
Except my daughter started college in 2008 during the financial crisis so when I withdrew my 529 it was at a loss. It’s a gamble.
Yes, this was not Krugman’s best work. Krugman’s source[1] shows that unemployment among recent college graduates increased from 4.8% to 5.8% between January 1 and March 1 of this year, while overall unemployment remained flat at 4.0%. This could be the result of Trump-caused uncertainty, but I’d like to see a few more months of data before ruling out the possibility that it is just noise in the data.
Krugman should have noted that the data series he is using ends on March 1. He should have acknowledged the existence of a larger trend that predates Trump. I would have liked him to link to his data sources.
[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market
Per the graph provided, unemployment for recent college graduates has generally fallen between unemployment rates for all college graduates and all workers, and was the case in 2012. Unemployment for recent college graduates did not trend higher than all workers until sometime around 2018/19 - again per the graph provided. Since 2018/19, however, unemployment for recent college graduates has exceeded the unemployment rate for all workers, whereas unemployment for all college graduates remains significantly lower than for all workers. Over time, there appears to have been a correlation in the up/down movement of unemployment amongst the 4 groups, but for recent college graduates, that correlation appears to have weakened since 2018/19.
Good point
Yeah, the economy was already a disaster for college grads when I was trying to enter it in the 2010s.
Part of the problem here is that one or two generations ago, we told everybody to go to college, as that was supposed to be the all-purpose solution to the way Reagan et al had decided to stomp on the working class - "sure, those lazy assholes who get paid too much for just tightening a widget on an assembly line all day are going to have it worse, but if you're smart and ambitious and hardworking enough, you can go to college and get a REAL job! YOU'RE not one of those lazy assholes. ARE you?" With the predictable result being that eventually, the market would get oversaturated with college grads, a college degree would become no more meaningful than a high school degree, and college graduates would end up in the same predicament of finding it hard to get a job and harder still to get a *good* job.
(Brace yourself: by 2040 or so, "the trades" are going to become similarly saturated, and all the people who are currently saying "you don't want to be one of those spoiled brats studying underwater basket weaving, go into the TRADES and get a REAL job!" are going to find a new set of stereotypes to dump on people in the trades, the same way they dumped on blue-collar workers in the eighties and college graduates today. And they'll have a new all-purpose panacea that we should all be trying to get into, which will inevitably end up the same way).
The other commonality, of course, is that much like unionized blue-collar work in the eighties, the college-educated professional world is now firmly in the right wing's sights as something that needs to be destroyed. It requires too much respect for intellect, science, objectivity, professionalism, to fit into the world they want - it's too inherently antithetical to their "what if Cultural Revolution but right wing" ideology. So expect things to continue getting worse for college grads.
And it will turn out just as well as destroying unionized blue collar work did, at least for the workers. Politics over everything with these guys, even if it destroys our universities, health care and entire classes of people.
Remember folks, it's all about shareholder primacy. Between customers, workers, and management, shareholders are the most important and most essential part of the process. The money should all flow to them, blessed as they are.
You are on to something. More specifically, most firms use AI to cull applicants that don't match job requirements exactly. Of course, that's not the way things worked when humans were more involved.
I suspect a large majority of well-educated Americans got at least one job they were not perfectly qualified for because they convinced a hiring manager that they could do the work. Now, they don't even get to that interview. The real losers here are the enterprises that don't get the hires that don't check all the boxes in the job description but would have turned out to be outstanding employees after a little coaching.
We're still learning how to use AI effectively, and I think this glitch will pass as we get better with using AI applicant-screening tools.
Your remark that tariff-uncertainty is not the cause of the bad job market for graduates is also confirmed by the graph in the article which suggests that the, more or less linear, downhill trend already started around 2012.
"Employers have kept upping the ante, demanding work experience for entry level positions that is all but impossible for new grads to attain."
What I saw in the job market in the early 2000s was employers making unrealistic demands because they actually wanted to hire a cut-rate H1 visa guy. They had to advertise for some period of time and needed an excuse to refuse to hire a US citizen. One ad I saw demanded seven years experience with Java (a programming language) when Java had only been created five years prior to the ad. This sort of thing was rampant in the New York metro area at the time.
Looking at the graph, this problem seem to have started before 2016, long before AI became an issue. That does not mean that AI cannot cause trouble , but something else has caused the current decline in employment in the educated young.
Regardless of graphs, thousands of graduates were declaring bankruptcy because the couldn't make headway on their college loans. That was early in the last Bush administration, which "solved" the problem by making it impossible to avoid these loans by bankruptcy.
It could be many things. In 2022, for example, the ability of companies to deduct R&D expenses was nerfed due to a problem with the (I think) TCJA which were put in as a poison pill to prevent early passage and they forgot to remove them. That was behind the tech layoffs that year while CEOs "predicted" recessions that never arrived. Really they were just looking at paper losses due to changes in tax policy. It sure didn't help young people get jobs. It's the recession's fault!! They never fixed it.
The Grad Gap plot also is the difference between two economic data points, so you'd want to make sure that the problem wasn't that in 2016 the value of tradesmen went up.
For any of you sending students to college these days, you might have noticed the male-female ratio at colleges has basically flipped, more women than men, sometimes 2:1. While I guess we shouldn't feel too bad for these guys who are still attending college -- may they ever be so popular! -- one wonders how much of this just inherits from any differences between the historical post graduate experiences of women vs. men. Male college enrollment took a notable drop in 2016 vs female enrollment which held roughly constant.
Finally total college enrollment dropped off rather severely in 2010 for 2 year institutions and has kept going down since by an astonishing 40%. So same story for 4 year degrees vs. two year degrees. Would a larger fraction of 4 year degree holders mean longer job searches?
It is probably worth looking at the Atlantic article that Krugman cites to see if they dug up anything.
It’s fascinating to see the comments with all of the variations on a theme of this idea. I 100% agree that today’s online hiring process is aggravating whatever real life problems exist. It kind of doesn’t matter whether you’re a recent grad or a seasoned worker. If you have to pad your resume with keywords and submit hundreds of apps “into the void” the job hunting process feels lousy.
Actually, and I have no facts to support this, but to what degree might this lousy environment have contributed to the negative “vibes” that offset good economic statistics and may have swung the election? Everyone knows someone either looking for a job or feeling vulnerable in their current job, knowing that it’s awful out there.
We had similar problems with the bug reporter system while I worked at Apple. Within Apple, the bug database is the life blood of engineering. Every single thing that got done had to have a bug report to go with it. Filing a bug was like being able to directly tap into the hive brain and do a bit of mind control!
Yet, it was nearly impossible to convince outside developers to ever file a bug, because (since they couldn't see the bug database) from their perspective it was like throwing time and effort down a black hole. If they got anything back, it was only after months had gone by and the fix finally percolated out to customers and by then they'd worked around it if it was a real problem, or didn't care anymore if it wasn't. "Totally useless!"
How things would have been different if we had been allowed to strike up an e-mail conversation with them when a bug crossed our desk. But, security... privacy...
I agree. I’m skeptical of Paul Krugman’s explanation. There’s something else going on.
Paul,
One thing that happened after the CoVid explosion in 2020, was that the Fed not only lowered interest rates, but the Treasury *also* introduced about $700 billion of *liquidity* into the banking system.
I remember when Mo (Mohammed El Erian) was talking about the macroeconomic consequences of *that* in particular, and how he was pretty confident that the capital markets (stock prices) were going to rise accordingly.
Now this was indeed highly effective at getting the US economy up and going again, as it made money nearly *free* for commercial interests to borrow and develop whatever it was they wanted to. Oh, and there was also this thing where the government gave money directly to individual households to help them keep going.
The former thing was probably the most important though, because companies then could employ people to work for them on these new projects. There was just a ton of building going on - as one of the things I most clearly observed round where I live.
Now, let's get to part 'deux' :)
Come 2022, the economy is looking pretty tickety-boo again, and Jerome Powell observes: "Hey, I think we better manage the throttle a bit here."
And I think that this is when Powell started lifting the Fed Overnight Rate back up from effectively *zero* to what now is something like 4.25% or whatever it is (sorry, I'm being lazy, but you can look.)
And so yes: Borrowing money is no longer *free*, and this of course, is what helps to keep inflation under control. Remember that this is one of the two key things that the Fed is supposed to be doing. Powell wants to get that down closer to 2 to 3% per annum or so.
Mortgage rates are now back up around 6.8% or whatever they are, and peoples' spending has not been so fast and loose since the Fed began this tightening.
Punch line: Corporations have therefore become much more careful about their own spending since this began, and as we 'all' know: the number one way to control spending is to "manage" head-count (employees.)
In some cases this has meant lay-offs, but more broadly, it means that employers become much more reluctant to do new hiring.
I think that this is what Paul's graphs do actually reflect.
As with every recession that was caused by the false “trickle down economy” of Republicans, Democrats had to clean up the destruction wrought by both President Bushes and Trump, which takes many years, thus the slow recovery of jobs.
Clinton’s economy provided the uptick in jobs, so did Obama’s and Biden’s. Biden’s in particular surpassed his predecessor’s economies’ growth by a mile, but 4 years is not enough time to recover from the pandemic in terms of jobs.
These recoveries take time, and trajectories/forecasts were already showing that jobs were forthcoming, laid in place by Biden’s infrastructure law, the Chips Act, etc. But the incompetent tariff roller coaster, the gutting of expertise in the federal government (science, law, military) has once again, devastated the progress in jobs that Dems have put in place.
Now, Trump wants unemployed Americans to work in manufacturing factories to build his golden cell phones. And by kicking out hardworking immigrants (at the same time depriving them of constitutional due process), Trump has made sure prices go up on groceries (eggs!), housing, etc. because of scarcity of workers willing to take those jobs (10-12 hours under the sun, on the ground handpicking vegetables, paid minimum wage).
So yes, these jobs were hard to come by prior to Trump 2.0, but it was Trump 1.0 and his Republican predecessors before him that caused jobs to dwindle, as he’s doing now for future grads.
To not blame Trump because of the lag in repercussions is what Republicans want to happen, that’s why they’re timing the enforcement of their Big Ugly Bill after 2026 & 2028, so that people forget who really made workers suffer and keep themselves, the greedy politicians in power: gutting healthcare & jobs for everyone to put more money into the pockets of rich people who don’t need them.
If you think it's bad for grads - try applying for anything above minimum wage menial labor without a degree. Trust me, you won't get hired - even if you have significant experience.
What i’m seeing (just anecdotal) is that college students are having hard time getting summer internships this year. These are the folks still to graduate, which will likely make harder for them to secure positions in following years unless economy shifts positive. Stated reason from employers is that they dont want to invest in internships if theyre unlikely to have FT positions for them the following year. This mostly the big tech, larger employers.
I do not know why the author would discount AI due to recency, but then proceed to lay the blame at Trump, who is even more recent than AI. Also, Trump’s policies have a much more immediate and drastic effect on blue collar labor than white collar labor.
I also hate Trump, and I think he may end up torpedoing the economy before he leaves office. But I don’t think this particular phenomenon is caused by him.
This is what my son found when he graduated with a software engineering degree. It was gamified. He made the huge mistake of not doing an internship which should be mandatory. He’s still working at his old job in food service which he likes.
Oh, the irony of needing work experience. That used to be the only advantage to not having a college education.
It is nearly unfathomable to comprehend the scope of the damage being done by this whole Trump cataclysm. I cannot escape deeming as evil all those who are bought into Trump and any and all Republicans who go along with it. I insist that no reasonable person can approve of any of Trump's predations.
I'd just replace "reasonable" with "reasonable and decent". A lot of Trump supporters think they're good people even though their "goodness" only extends to family, friends and people just like them.
It’s narcissism, with a small extension wing.
Kool-Aid can have that effect.
i dislike Trump, too, but something else is going on, and it would be good to check if this is a problems in the EU and in Canada.
This has very little to do with Trump. In fact those recruiting policies became the standard under Obama
They were common under Bush the younger.
i am no Trump fan, but this problem seems to have its roots deeper than him.
As a retired scientist, I am especially concerned about the fate of young people who have a burning desire to do scientific research. T's policies are destroying the fabric of American science. Young scientists will probably wither on the vine unless they leave the country. I think we are going to lose an entire generation of scientists. I wish them well!!
As a retired scientist with a physics PhD from [ university of SATANIC DOOM in Massachusetts], I can state that science as a career has sucked for several decades, going back to at least Reagan times.
Would that be Harvard, MIT, or both?
AND, the loss of R&D funding through DOGE & Trump cancellations is making grad school a less available and less reasonable option for science majors, adding them to the group of college students looking for work and not finding it.
If I was a young scientist, I would minor in the language of the most aggressive of the foreign recruiters.
T's policies are destroying the fabric of American >everything<.
I'm not sure that there's a life in academia waiting for anyone today, whether elsewhere or in the US. I mean, a life in academia is possible all right, but probably not like a young idealistic person would imagine it to be. Some time ago, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder posted a YouTube video about why she left the field. IMO it's really worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8
That is a terrifying graph.
Betraying the best and brightest of our youth is a sure way to create angry, adept revolutionaries.
What a disaster.
Another alternative is that the US will soon start to "export" highly educated and trained young people, who will then "Make Other Countries Great Again." Assuming capital soon follows, you could see a sort of revival of the British Empire as the "refugees" from the US move to other English speaking countries to work.
Britain suffers from the same anti-immigrant bias as the US and the capital they attract since Brexit is mostly financial. The US will follow suit as Trumpxit works its way into the real sector.
1 dead and 1 dying empire clinging to old glory like 2 geezers in a bar.
I'm pinning my hopes on former British colonies holding out against the rising world tide of self-inflicted stupidity and democratic backsliding. Now if Canada could just annex Washington, Oregon, and California, it would really help.
I hope that bet works out for you but I wouldn't make that bet.
Curiously, one thing Canada and Trump have in common is they both have a deeply un-American fondness for monarchy as a curious and "harmless" institution. Maybe it's why he wanted to annex them. True Americans (US) still actively protest such things, as we learned recently. No Kings! This little incompatibility makes me less bullish about any Pacific Coast / Canada mergers.
There is also the francophone problem. If the 10 million Canadians who speak French as a first language need special treatment, wait until they find out that 10.4 million Californians speak Spanish as a first language, or that the population of California (39.4M) is about equal to all of Canada (40.1M). Let's see the Quebecois forced to learn Spanish. There's some irony there! Besides, once you toss in the population of Oregon (4.2M), Washington (8M) and probably tagalong Nevada* (3.2M), It would be more proper to say the West Coast (54.8M) annexes Canada (40.1M), giving the left coast a near 60:40 supermajority. I wonder what BC wants?
As you can see, any such deal would be immediately dismissed as <french_accent>impossible!</french_accent>
*What, after all, does Nevada share culturally with Utah or Arizona? It is California's playground and tax haven.
Am not convinced of the superiority of US education. Actually, I think on average Europe is probably better.
Europe is probably better at K-12, and maybe even on bachelor's degree-level education.
The superiority of US education is specifically to do with anything beyond a bachelor's degree, which is why graduate programs are swarmed with international students.
Nah. Many students just want an English language degree to open the doors for an international career.
There are many countries other than the US where they can get an English language degree (usually at much lower tuition cost). I agree with Thomas that US primarily differentiates itself with graduate programs.
Look to valid Published studies and papers. America has taken a nose dive on publishing good studies and papers. If you follow papers from Japan... the derived algorithms function. I'm concerned about the ability to express valid studies and papers. The studies are out there and the facts are brutal. Defending a paper is healthy. Published studies are the metric of advanced studies. This clown fish IQ incharge with his sycophants is fracturing our abilities to provide relevant sciience.
And cheaper. In fact zero cost and in some countries you will get a stipend as well. Good reason to change your citizenship.
Graduate education in the US sciences is usually free and they will usually pay you a stipend.
We playing with fnumbers there. Let me share an slice of personal live. 40 years ago I was finishig physics. Silicon Valley was a new thing then. Me and a lot of my colleagues wanted to do the postdoc in an University at U.S. Two main reasons 1 we did had a better education which translated in higher scores 2 U.S. was investing at importing talent. My live went in another direction but at least 50% of my course went to US.
US has been a pilar of science all those years.
Now even Europe is willing to import already pre-selected and educated students from US universities.
Europe, Hong Kong, etc. will skim off the top 5 percent. The rest can just go [do something anatomically impossible].
Great euphemism there 😂
China too my be successful in luring American talent.
This is a key point. If China picks up on Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore development approach, especially the adoption of English, and non-politicized enforcement of contract law, the US will be in very deep trouble. China already has Hong Kong as a small scale demonstration project for this. If instead of cracking down on HK, they emulate it more widely, they will be a magnet for talent worldwide. Xi does not seem to be moving this direction.
Xi shows no inclination to copy Singapore.
Yes, he's showing Mao like tendencies.
Canada has been so flooded with legal immigrants that there is now a massive housing crisis. The government has been forced to cut migrant numbers way back as the electorate is furious.
Always partial to Ireland, myself. English speaking, yet EU, not filled with Tories.
I understand the arguments but I think this is a wider Western demographic problem, rather than a Trump specific one. As a recent grad from the UK from a good university, I found myself completely unable to get a job requiring more qualifications than 5 GCSEs (or a high school diploma in the US).
What was so astonishing is the levels of underemployment in the workforce. As individuals work longer and longer into their old age, the ability for a workplace to regenerate its workforce declines. So the result: management are getting older and older with few places for highly qualified, skilled workers to move into. They are stuck with entry level jobs for longer, and combines with market forces companies are unable to accept graduates without the work experience to compete for jobs.
In short, underemployment is so chronic that workplaces are unable to hire anybody without prior experience and the qualifications can’t possibly compete.
And the worse thing is if this is right, this problem will only get worse. As we live longer and longer, and have a continually ageing population, Nobody will retire at 65 any more, it will become 67, then 70, and so on. Space’s won’t be freed up to welcome individuals new to the workforce, and this trend of unemployed graduates will continue.
What I hope is that this doesnt put people off higher education - it may seem now that you need to have a job straight out of kindergarten to stand a chance, but embracing the freedom and opportunities you can only get at a university is such a privilege. And I hope that society finds a creative solution to this issue, as it has done for so many situations in the past.
You touch on an important issue with an ageing workforce. It also likely means that there will be less innovation and dynamism, as young talent isn't allowed to advance. I hope your job search improves. I graduated in 2004 and with hindsight we had it very easy compared to today.
Thank you very much :) luckily I’ve got a stable job with our NHS, but moving out and finding greener pastures is hard. And it’s a great point - tech is moving so quickly that embracing the skills digital natives bring can produce so many benefits for workplaces…if they can get in
There is no inelastic lump of skill jobs
The states macro policy
And certain elements
of industrial policy plus R&D policy
Can expand demand till supply is matched
Full employment for all however
Should follw a market determined pattern of job types
Choice of higher ed
Should have both
free courses and tuitioned courses
Not just a free swim
any path for all
That views chosen credentials
In themselves entitled
State action validation
by state interventions
I disagree with the idea that the quantity of skilled jobs should be market led as I feel that inevitably will lead to mechanisation of all “skilled” roles when AI starts to develop further. To future proof this issue, we should start to legislate against and limit the uses of AI in companies and instead be human focussed.
Although this may slow the flexibility of where the skilled jobs are, it guarantees their existence rather than putting it in the hands of corporations who will always choose a cheaper machine over a human.
What it does need is really strong government policy to open up opportunities in a variety of sectors ready for graduates to move into. Innovation in state-led departments often bring more jobs than the private sector, and they don’t need as strong an ROI to give these opportunities a go. Combines concepts of increasing skilled job availability, publicly accessible services and future-proofing our jobs
Owen, I'm an old sparring partner from Economistsview. I think one thing that is often forgotten is how the public sector used to be a training ground and proving ground for new graduates, and how this benefitted the private sector ( who both complain the market doesn't provide the skills they want and refuse to employ and train new entrants).
I was left high and dry after raygun's revolution, but managed to ride the Clinton wave. During my time the gop has given us recessions and excuses, while the dems have always managed the economy successfully.
The Raygun revolution left me high and high. 🦘
Good grief. The "New Grad Gap" started falling in the mid-2010s, yet Krugman blames everything on Trump -- who, though a maniac, has been in office only for five months.
Is there any question that Trump has made it worse? Everything he touches turns to s—t.
On this chart I see a decline starting in 45th's first term and then aggravated by the covid decline. It appears biden stabilized things a bit but now the rate of dropping again. (The biggest drop I remember after the dotcom recession after Y2K was the 2007 recession vs 2010s per se.) A LOT has changed in the u.s.a in 'only five months' starting in January-February 2025 to be blamed entirely on 47 and his appointees.
I would like to see a comparison against salaries for each of the groups. Starting salaries for new grads have changed significantly for some graduates depending on the sector, especially tech, where there have also been big changes in older employee discrimination.
Nice read of the chart. It appears thar be pirates in the executive branch harvesting profits on a marquee from another nation. The lag instead of waiting for galleons full of gold treking to Spain and Portugal is tariff percentage fluctuations based on the caprice of the elected one. Good post Jane.
Not to point out the obvious, but it is rather astonishing how many people forget that Trump was first elected president in 2016, was reelected in 2024 and claimed to still be president in the period in between.
You may think, "Yeah, but 2025 is sooo much worse!" but I remind you that 2017 was bad and it kept getting worse year by year, through lies, grift, an endless train of batman villains serving as his cabinet, culminating in the end with election interference, COVID and the seditious sacking of the halls of Congress! That is truly a tough act to follow, inconceivable really, but I guess we have the man for the job. Again!
We are going to go through some things.
Agree but I think Trump will make it even worse.
It’s not his first try at poisoning the well.
The employment situation for new graduates has been similar in terms of job availability in the past, but for different reasons. I graduated in the early 70s when the job market was really bad. I ultimately went to graduate school after failing to find a job other than pumping gas, which I did to support going to college. That may not be an option for many new graduates now, particularly in the sciences due to the Trump administration's cuts to research funding and attacks on universities. I say that because, even back in the 70s, most science grad students received teaching assistant or research assistant support to cover the cost of grad school. It was of course different in the humanities and social sciences where a lot more people were paying their own way. Despite that a lot of my friends "hid out" in grad school until the job market improved.
I advised my grad school applying child to add a Canadian school or two to her list.
There are some negatives for an American going to Canada for grad school. Basically you disappear as far as US jobs are concerned. At least that was my experience getting a Ph.D. at the University of Alberta. That issue might be less at McGill or the U of Toronto, but it was certainly real for me. The only US job interviews I got happened when I was a post-doc at U of Illinois. Of course that was nearly 50 years ago.
I remember that era well. Boomers hitting the job market after university.
Overall, Trump's behavior is causing psychotic and depressive ideation. Even children's minds have been harmed, and they are the most resilient.
Get that education no matter what. The economy and the ridiculous state of politics cycles affording better opportunity ultimately.
It is important to at least graduate High School because no diploma means no jobs and a life of crime just to survive.
Thankfully, although unsuccessful, Sanders idea of free Community college was important and will later occur and Biden's forgiveness of student loan debt was terrific that will help offset the hiring problem you outlined.
Never give up. You know what you learned. You will get a job sooner or later and this deep trough in the psychological cycle will give way to a rebound just like the economic cycle does as they go hand in hand.
Good luck and never give up. I found that flooding the job market with hundreds of copies of your resume will get you a job out of chances.
I’ve been waiting to hear that salaries for college graduates are falling because most college graduates are now women. In the future we will see the rise of salaries in jobs that don’t require a college degree because they will be mostly held by men. Our concept of college as a job training program has always been the wrong focus. Education makes you a critical thinker. This is perhaps why so many men support trump. They decided not to take advantage of education.
I value the workers who have decided to pursue vocational training, however, as this happens we must put more effort into K-12 to provide students with more critical thinking and less rote learning such as that needed for standardized tests.
Yep, was wondering the same thing. However, this data covers unemployment, not wage disparity, and while it is fairly well documented that there is a pay gap, I just have no idea whether there is also a gender-based post graduate employment gap which I expect would need to be there for that to turn out to be true. Women are, after all, cheaper. Do employers take advantage of this?
Also, if overall college attendance was up long term, we really can't point to young men as the reason why Trump won, just why the demographic voted for him. Overall, we should imagine more college educated voters than in elections past which should more than compensate, if people weren't more excited over the price of eggs. As it was, the democratic candidate was uninspiring, the campaign went negative, turnout was lower than 2020, all things that keep liberals at home on Election Day until they finally smarten up. Also, cynically, having been one myself once, I have trouble imagining the young male demographic ever getting excited over another post menopausal woman in a pant suit. They, er, have other things on their mind. Ocasio-Cortez might have done well... So, there are other factors we might point to, beyond brain rot. There's the other brain rot.
But seriously, any of a dozen other people of both genders could have also done well if Biden had permitted an actual democratic process with a primary. In three of the last four presidential elections, the Democrats have not permitted a competitive primary election. (2016 was pretty rigged with super delegates, if you will recall.) It has just been dynastic turn taking. As long as they keep that up, I believe the Democrat leadership incompetence will continue and we may face still more dismal electoral results. While they rationalize that _anything_ is better than having progressives win, we might ponder the true meaning of _anything_, and whether they really mean that, because honestly, for the vast majority of Democrats, a Sanders/OAC ticket would have been far less disruptive than this man.
Innelecshuals are anti-Murrikan!
“I LOVE the poorly educated!”
Welcome to Pol Pot’s killing fields.
I can verify this through my son's experience of graduation in the aftermath of the Bush wreckage of the economy. He had a degree that should have given him the best opportunity in his field but instead he had to take what he could get job wise and through hard work and perseverance after 15 years he has finally arrived where he should have been a few short years after graduation. The political influences on the economy matter for everyone.
Sounds familiar.
The only time I've actually seen Paul Krugman was during those years, soon after my graduation, when he gave a talk about his latest book at a bookstore in Washington, DC. And the bleakest point he made was that most college graduates were *never* going to recover from the damage that graduating in that economy was doing to them. The student loans, the years of unemployment and underemployment, the crappy choices in this economy, even if they finally got themselves situated the damage of those early years would stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Fifteen years later and looking back, that was entirely correct. I'm in the same spot as your kid, took a dozen years to end up in the place you're supposed to be at shortly after graduation. Even if everything in our life is smooth sailing from here, that's still over a decade lost.
I hear you. I graduated in 1990 into the teeth of a recession and counted myself fortunate to find a job after looking for 5 months. People who graduated 5 years later easily obtained jobs with good salaries right out of college.
I conservatively worked for the same company for 20 years, while some younger folks changed jobs every 4 years or so.
I did that same thing in the early 1990s graduated into the teeth of the Bush I recession and never recovered. After my divorce, I went back to school to re-skill and am graduating into the teeth of the Rump Slump.
And yes, it IS worse than it was 5 years ago and IS worse than it was under Biden. Under Biden it was "bad but improving" and now it's "fallen off a cliff and getting worse." Salaries on offer have fallen BY ALMOST HALF. Most jobs aren't actually available. And now I am 55 competing with people half my age for vanishingly few jobs. I have applied for over almost 200 in the last 2-3 months and I got two interviews and no offers. The only job I DID get came through a referral.
Make no mistake. There are fewer jobs. Fewer remote jobs. More people applying. You have to hit applications when there are under 75 people to reasonably have a prayer. At the 10 hr mark, most jobs in my field have over 200 applicants. Even AI does not help you break through.
As some have pointed out, the new grad gap chart has been heading downwards for some time. I suspect that some of this has demographic causes. There are more graduates now than previously, but older graduates are retiring later and in lower numbers than old tradesmen are. So the hot demand in the labour market is for skilled tradesmen, not graduates. I suspect this has happened in many other countries as well.
Of course Trump and also the austerity cult have made matters worse. We need teachers and scientists more than ever, but these are typical public sector jobs and conservative economics adherents don't want to pay for them, preferring to increase the number and wealth of the billionaire class.
Very true, Jim. Here in Australia, “tradies” could work 24/7 and still be swamped and it’s reflected in their hourly rates (there’s no minimum-wage pay- the rates reflect their scarcity). I entered the workforce in 1973 and the jobs market was MUCH worse than today (it was in the first OPEC oil shock). Things always recover.
I graduated in 1978 into the ranks of the unemployed…it was the recession. I remember how not fun that was. I was 40 before I had a decent salary, health insurance, loans paid off. I did not have the life I’d been brought up to expect just because I was a college graduate. I married late, never had kids, never had the nice house in the burbs. It’s ok now but for a long time it wasn’t. I feel for these new grads. Adversity builds character, you discover creativity and resourcefulness you never knew you had, and maybe I’m a better person for it, but I sure wouldn’t have chosen it.
It looks like the trend started around 2015 and continued unchanged through the Biden Presidency. How do you conclude then that Trump's admittedly awful actions are the primary driver here?
I'm sure that depriving an entire generation of meaningful opportunities in the American economy can have no adverse effects. From shutting millions out of the housing market to saddling graduates with massive debt and no realistic way to escape it, we're setting up a new indentured servitude that will not help anyone--not workers, not employers, not the country as a whole.
This is partly intentional. The oligarchs and theocrats now demolishing our government and civil society despise 'educated elites'; they want a rigidly hierarchical feudal society to cement their place on top. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile
I think that’s too broad an assertion. Depressing career opportunities for average Americans benefits oligarchs and the middlingly talented children.