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New graduates discover a dismal job market

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9 months ago

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Graduates listen as actor Sean Astin delivers the keynote speech during the commencement ceremony for the College of Arts and Sciences at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion on June 14, 2024.

Christina House | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images

Recent graduates looking to enter an increasingly shaky labor market are painting a dire picture of their job search: “A black hole,” one said. “I’m disheartened,” said another. “I almost feel like it wasn’t worth going to school,” said a third.

NBC News asked people who recently finished technical school, college or graduate school how their job application process was going, and in more than 100 responses, the graduates described months spent searching for a job, hundreds of applications and zero responses from employers — even with degrees once thought to be in high demand, like computer science or engineering. Some said they struggled to get an hourly retail position or are making salaries well below what they had been expecting in fields they hadn’t planned to work in.

“It was very frustrating,” said Jensen Kornfeind, who graduated this spring from Temple University with a degree in international trade. “Out of 70-plus job applications, I had three job interviews, and out of those three, I got ghosted from two of them.”

The national economic data backs up their experience. The unemployment rate among recent graduates has been increasing this year to an average of 5.3%, compared to around 4% for the labor force as a whole, making it one of the toughest job markets for recent graduates since 2015, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released Friday.

“Recent college graduates are on the margin of the labor market, and so they’re the first to feel when the labor market slows and hiring slows,” said Jaison Abel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Across the economy, hiring in recent months has ground to its slowest pace since the start of the pandemic, with employers adding just 73,000 jobs in July, according to data released Friday. The number of longer-term unemployed people who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks increased last month by 179,000 to 1.8 million.

In short, it’s a pretty stable market for those who have a job, but a much more challenging one for those who are trying to get one, economists said.

Driving that trend is hesitation among employers to hire new workers amid wider economic uncertainty in the midst of President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policies and federal spending cuts, economists have said. Then there is the emergence of AI, which some companies have said they are using to replace certain entry-level jobs, like those in customer support or basic software development.

“This is going to be an environment for recent college grads, as well as many workers, which is going to require more patience, more time and perhaps more diligence as they seek to attain employment,” said Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst for Bankrate.

Here is how several recent graduates described their job search:

Adam Mitchell

23

Atlanta

Bachelor’s degree, computer science

Unemployed

Adam Mitchell thought he was doing everything right. He majored in computer science at Georgia State University and interned at State Farm doing web development. He’d been told since he was a teenager that a degree in computer science was a guaranteed path to a high-paying job right out of college.

“I was under the impression that since I’ve got three years of internship experience under my belt, this will be a cakewalk,” Mitchell said. “I was pretty quickly humbled. There’s nothing available.”

More than seven months after graduating, he’s applied for more than 100 jobs and gotten two interviews and only one job offer — for the 4 a.m. shift at Starbucks, which he didn’t take because the hours would make it too hard to pursue other opportunities. Among the jobs that turned him down: an hourly role at Costco and a customer service job in the call center at State Farm.

“The very few openings that there were would be so competitive that you would pretty much get a rejection notice as soon as you apply,” said Mitchell, who’s been living at home with his parents in the Atlanta area and spending down his savings.

“I can’t be doing this forever, just waiting for the dust to settle and things to kind of normalize again — I need a job,” said Mitchell, who worries about paying back his student loans.

Tech workers have been some of the hardest hit in a slowing job market, with more than 400 employers including Meta, Intel and Cisco announcing more than 130,000 jobs cut in 2025, according to tech job site TrueUp.

Those cuts mark a retrenchment after the hiring spree those companies went on after the pandemic, while an abundance of workers are vying for the remaining jobs, said Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab. Early adoption of AI is also likely driving some of the cuts and leading employers to rethink hiring plans in anticipation of AI’s future role, Shrivastava said. Mitchell worries that could hurt his prospects long term, so he isn’t limiting his search to tech jobs.

“I’m just kind of looking for anything,” he said. “I don’t know if the tech-side economy is ever going to be the same again.”

Anthony Young

26

Emporia, Kansas

Associate’s degree, power plant management

Unemployed

After Anthony Young graduated last year from Flint Hills Technical College in Emporia, Kansas, he planned to use the degree to get a job at a nearby nuclear power plant where his wife also works. But after more than a year, he hasn’t succeeded.

“It is essentially a useless degree,” Young said. “I wasted two years of my life, and I can’t do anything with it.”

Looking for work beyond the power plant industry has also been a struggle, as other employers in Emporia, about an hour from Wichita, have been cutting jobs. Tyson closed a meat processing plant there at the start of the year, eliminating over 800 jobs, and the Michelin tire company cut 80 jobs last year, nearly 40% of its workforce. The town had an unemployment rate of 5.8% in June, when not adjusted for seasonal employment, which was the highest in the state, where the overall unemployment rate was 4.1%, according to the state’s Department of Labor.

Young recently went back to school to get a technical certificate to work as a household electrician. But when he started looking for a job, he learned that he would need to go through a five-year apprenticeship program with the local electrical workers union and travel up to two hours away for work, which would be a financial strain because he and his wife only have one car.

“I just have to figure out a way to get a car and make peace with the fact that there’s a chance I may be put somewhere really far from home and I never get to see my family very much for five years, but I don’t know what else to do really,” Young said.

His wife makes more than $90,000 a year — a salary he would have thought would be enough in a small town in Kansas. But not anymore, he said. An apartment that would have cost $600 a month in 2019 is now $1,000. His weekly trip to the grocery store has gone from costing $80 to $180. Then there are his $20,000 in student loans, and the rising cost of insurance, gas and utilities.

“We still live paycheck to paycheck,” he said, “and we shouldn’t be.”

Sabrina Highfield

25

Snyder, Texas

Master’s degree, design with a focus on user experience

Eligibility adviser for SNAP and Medicaid benefits

Sabrina Highfield, 25, was making more than $70,000 a year as a project manager and analyst before she returned to school in 2024 in hopes of boosting her salary. But since she graduated in the spring from the University of Texas at Austin with a master’s, the opposite has happened.

After applying to more than 1,000 jobs and getting only two interviews, she’s living back in her hometown of Snyder, Texas, with her grandmother, making $35,000 a year working in an entry-level position helping administer food assistance benefits — something unrelated to her field of study and a job she suspects she got, in part, because the hiring manager knew her grandmother.

“It’s kind of like a black hole out there,” she said on a recent morning when she was babysitting her sister’s two children. “I’ve tailored my resume based on the job posts, I’ve created cover letters for each role as well, based on the company’s values and everything. I would say it’s a little discouraging. I did find a job, though it’s not at all in the industry that I thought I’d be in.”

She hopes to move up to a more senior position with her current employer, Texas Health and Human Services, but so far she’s had no luck.

It’s a vastly different job market than several years ago, which she doesn’t think the recent economic data is capturing.

“Things look good on the surface, I guess, but when you dig a little deeper, it’s concerning for Gen Z,” she said.

Oliver Dolabany

22

Miami

Bachelor’s degree, operations and information management

Unemployed, starting his own business

After applying to hundreds of positions, working his friend and family connections and reaching out to his school’s alumni network, Oliver Dolabany has landed just one interview and zero job offers over the past six months. Like most of his classmates, he’s back home living with his parents.

Getting a job feels more like luck than anything having to do with his major or academic qualifications. When a job is posted on LinkedIn, he said he can see it has received more than 100 resumes in the first hour. The one interview he got came through an alumni connection who knew the CEO of the company and put in a good word. But even then, he didn’t get the position.

“It’s not necessarily even like being more qualified than the guy next to you,” he said. “It’s like just getting luckier than the guy next to you.”

While at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Dolabany worked as a teaching assistant, overseeing 500 students a semester, got A’s in nearly all of his classes, and chose a major — operations and information management — that he believed would set him up for success.

“It was kind of presented to me as, this is the major that every company needs, every company wants,” Dolbany said. “It was presented as, you’re pretty safe compared to all the other majors at the school.”

He plans to launch a skin care business with a friend while applying for jobs and living with his parents. He still hopes to find a job in New York City and move into a place of his own.

Jaylah Dorman

22

Durham, North Carolina

Bachelor’s degree, health education

Clinical researcher

Jaylah Dorman landed a job doing clinical research at a private physician’s practice in her hometown of Durham, North Carolina, shortly after graduating from Howard University — a success she attributes to her strong professional network and her degree in a high-demand field.

Hiring in the health care sector has been driving much of the job growth nationally, with around half of the 2.2 million jobs added to the economy last year in health care-related sectors, according to an analysis by S&P Global.

Still, she has a negative view of the job market overall and has seen a lot of her peers go to graduate school rather than head straight into the workforce.

“A lot of adults have confirmed that this is one of the worst times to come out of college,” she said. “I think that is the narrative that is being confirmed by people who’ve been in the job market.”

Dorman, who hopes to go to medical school, is also concerned about the sweeping tax cut and spending bill passed by Congress in July, which will cap how much students can borrow for graduate and professional programs.

The Trump administration has also been cutting research spending and public health jobs. Dorman had considered trying to get a job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but ruled that out as the administration started firing workers.

Saida Lopez-Rosales

26

Summit, Illinois

Bachelor’s degree, education

Elementary school teacher

Saida Lopez-Rosales considers herself one of the lucky ones. She was able to get an elementary school teaching job in a suburb of Chicago after graduating in June when a position suddenly opened up at the school where she was student teaching. But she said she’s seen her classmates at National Louis University in Chicago struggle despite a national shortage of teachers.

Last year, there were more than 400,000 teaching jobs that went unfilled or were filled by teachers not fully certified for their position, according to the Learning Policy Institute. But that shortage can vary by school district and teaching discipline. There are also indications that shortages are easing in Illinois, where Lopez-Rosales and her classmates have been looking.

Lopez-Rosales is expecting the local teaching job market to get increasingly competitive after Chicago Public Schools announced in July it was laying off around 1,400 employees, including around 400 teachers.

“When I was in school, everyone was like, ‘You’ll get a job right after graduation, you’ll get a job.’ That’s how they were selling it,” said Lopez-Rosales, who decided to go into education because she had heard there was a teacher shortage. “Luckily, that’s how I got it, but I have a friend who’s still looking.”

Lopez-Rosales isn’t particularly optimistic about the economy or her financial outlook. She will be making $55,000 — a higher salary than other teaching positions she’d looked at. But with rent in the area costing well over $1,000 a month, she won’t be able to afford to move out of her parents’ house.

“It’s more like a paycheck-to-paycheck kind of thing, because you do have to pay bills and feed yourself,” Lopez-Rosales said.

While she said she’s content living with her parents, it isn’t what she envisioned for herself in her mid-20s.

“I told myself, by 26, I’d have my own house, I’d have my own family, I’d have my nice little luxury car. That hasn’t happened,” Lopez-Rosales said. “At first, I did kind of beat myself up for it, but it’s like the world’s changing. Everything’s changing. Everything I feel like is a little bit harder. So now it’s OK.”

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Personal Finance

What that means for consumer loans

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4 days ago

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April 30, 2026

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Fed in 'neutral' as consumers are feeling okay but not great: The Conference Board CEO Steve Odland

The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady at the conclusion of its policy meeting on Wednesday. 

In what could be Jerome Powell’s last as chair before President Donald Trump’s yet-to-be-confirmed nominee Kevin Warsh takes the helm, central bankers maintained the federal funds rate in a target range of 3.5% to 3.75%. 

Inflation has surged since the war with Iran began, leaving policymakers with limited room to act, according to Sean Snaith, the director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Forecasting. “We’re in a kind of suspended animation — between Iran and the Fed transition,” Snaith said.

Read more CNBC personal finance coverage

Before the oil shock, inflation was holding above the Fed’s 2% target but not worsening. Now the jump in energy costs could have longer-term inflationary effects, economists say.

For Americans struggling in the face of higher gas prices and overall affordability challenges, the central bank’s decision to keep interest rates unchanged does little to ease budgetary pressures. “The cavalry isn’t coming anytime soon,” Snaith said.

How the Fed decision impacts you

The Fed’s benchmark sets what banks charge each other for overnight lending, but also has a trickle-down effect on many consumer borrowing and savings rates.

Short-term rates are more closely pegged to the prime rate, which is typically 3 percentage points above the federal funds rate. Longer-term rates, such as home loans, are more influenced by inflation and other economic factors.

Credit cards

Most credit cards have a short-term rate, so they track the Fed’s benchmark.

After the Fed cut rates three times in the second half of 2025, the average annual percentage rate has stayed just under 20%, according to Bankrate.

“Without Fed rate cuts, there’s not much reason to expect meaningful declines anytime soon, so carrying a balance will remain very expensive,” said Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree. 

Mortgage rates

Fixed mortgage rates, on the other hand, don’t directly track the Fed but typically follow the lead of long-term Treasury rates. 

Concerns about how the Iran war will impact the U.S. economy have already pushed the average rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage up to 6.38% as of Tuesday, from 5.99% at the end of February, according to Mortgage News Daily.

That leaves homeowners with existing low mortgage rates “feeling stuck,” said Michele Raneri, vice president and head of U.S. research and consulting at TransUnion. “Mortgages, more than any other credit type, work on a churn,” she said, referring to how a dip in rates can boost borrowing activity.

Student loans

Federal student loan rates are also fixed and based in part on the 10-year Treasury note, so most borrowers are somewhat shielded from Fed moves and recent economic uncertainty.

Current interest rates on undergraduate federal student loans made through June 30 are 6.39%, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Interest rates for the upcoming school year will be based in part on the May auction of the 10-year note.

Car loans

Auto loan rates are tied to several factors, including the Fed’s benchmark. Because financing costs remain elevated, new car buyers are taking on longer loans to keep their monthly payments manageable, according to the latest data from Edmunds.

Even so, with the rate on a five-year new car loan near 7%, the average monthly payment on a new car rose to $773 in the first quarter of 2026, an all-time high.

“Car buyers are in a tough spot right now because they’re getting squeezed from both ends: high sticker prices and high interest rates, with neither showing any signs of letting up,” said Joseph Yoon, consumer insights analyst at Edmunds.

“Until the rate picture shifts, buyers will keep stretching loan terms to make payments work, which only adds to the total cost of ownership down the road,” Yoon said.

Savings rates

While the Fed has no direct influence on deposit rates, the yields tend to be correlated with changes in the target federal funds rate. So, although rates on certificates of deposit and high-yield savings accounts have fallen from recent highs, they are holding above the annual rate of inflation.

For now, top-yielding online savings accounts and one-year CD rates pay around 4%, according to Bankrate.

“Yields on high-yield savings accounts and certificates of deposit are down from their peaks of a few years ago, but they’re still strong compared to what we’ve seen for most of the past decade,” Schulz said.

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Personal Finance

Average tax refund is 11.2% higher, latest IRS filing data shows

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2 weeks ago

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April 18, 2026

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Milan Markovic | E+ | Getty Images

The average tax refund is 11.2% higher this season, compared with about the same period in 2025, according to the latest IRS filing data.

As of April 10, the average refund amount for individual filers was $3,397, up from $3,055 about one year ago, the IRS reported on Friday.

The IRS data reflects about 114 million individual returns received, out of about 164 million expected through Tax Day. Next week’s filing update is expected to include data through the April 15 deadline.

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President Donald Trump‘s 2025 legislation, rebranded to the “working families tax cuts,” was a key talking point for Republicans on Tax Day.

With the November midterm elections approaching and Republicans defending slim majorities in Congress, many GOP lawmakers have highlighted Trump’s tax breaks and higher average refunds.

Meanwhile, affordability has been top of mind for many Americans amid rising costs of gas, electricity, food and other living expenses.

For filers who expected a refund this season, nearly one-quarter, or 23%, planned to use the funds to pay down credit card debt, and the same share said they would save the payment, according to the CNBC and SurveyMonkey Quarterly Money Survey, released in April. It polled 3,494 U.S. adults at the end of March.

Who benefited from Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’ 

“It’s been a great tax season for the American people,” many of whom have benefited from Trump’s tax breaks, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during a White House press briefing on Wednesday. 

More than 53 million filers claimed at least one of Trump’s “signature new tax cuts” — the deductions for tip income, overtime earnings, seniors and auto loan interest — the Department of the Treasury also announced on Wednesday.

Those filers, who claimed the deductions on Schedule 1-A, have seen an average tax cut of over $800, according to the Treasury. Tax cuts can trigger a higher refund or reduce taxes owed, depending on the filer’s situation. 

Tax refunds are higher on average this year than last, according to the IRS: Here's what to know

Some filers who itemize tax breaks have also seen benefits from the bigger federal deduction limit for state and local taxes, known as SALT. Trump’s legislation raised that cap to $40,000, up from $10,000, for 2025.

The latest SALT deduction limit change is expected to primarily benefit higher earners, according to a May 2025 analysis of various proposals from the Tax Foundation.

The Treasury has not released data on how many filers have claimed the SALT deduction during the 2026 filing season. 

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Personal Finance

Stocks have touched record highs despite Iran war. Here’s why

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2 weeks ago

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April 17, 2026

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Traders work at the New York Stock Exchange on April 16, 2026.

NYSE

U.S. stocks climbed to record highs on Thursday against a backdrop of war, an oil supply shock and economic forecasts warning of stunted growth amid a protracted conflict.

Many investors may be thinking: Why?

Largely, it’s because the stock market is a barometer of what investors think will happen in the future, rather than an assessment of the present day, according to economists and market analysts.

Investors are essentially shrugging off the Middle East conflict as a blip that will be resolved relatively quickly, they said.

“The stock market isn’t trying to price what’s happening today,” said Joe Seydl, a senior markets economist at J.P. Morgan Private Bank. “The stock market is always trying to price what the world is going to look like six to 12 months from now.”

Why stocks have been ‘resilient’

The S&P 500, a U.S. stock index, fell about 8% in the initial weeks of the Iran war, from the start of the conflict on Feb. 28 to a recent low on March 30.

But stocks have rebounded since then, erasing all losses since the beginning of the war. The S&P 500 closed at an all-time high on Thursday — about 11% higher than its nadir at the end of March. That followed a record close on Wednesday.

“The market has remained very resilient in the face of the war and has rallied strongly on the prospect that it will be resolved,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s.

Tom Lee: Stock market is in better position now than the all-time highs earlier this year

A ship waits to pass through the Strait of Hormuz following the two-week temporary ceasefire between the US and Iran, which is conditional on the opening of the strait, in Oman on April 8, 2026.

Shady Alassar | Anadolu | Getty Images

And while investors cheered the possibility of a diplomatic off-ramp to the conflict, the temporary ceasefire has appeared tenuous, with the U.S. and Iran each accusing the other of breaking the agreement.

Nations haven’t been able to reach a peace deal ahead of the ceasefire’s end. Vice President JD Vance said ​U.S. officials ⁠left peace talks in Pakistan over the weekend after the Iranian delegation refused to agree to American demands not to develop a nuclear weapon.

The markets ‘have memory’

Ultimately, the stock market is signaling a collective belief that tensions will ratchet down, the war will end in the near term and oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz will normalize, economists said.

That’s largely because investors have been conditioned to believe that President Donald Trump will back off if the economic pain becomes too intense, economists said — the so-called “TACO” trade, shorthand for “Trump always chickens out.”

“Investors strongly believe — and have been conditioned to believe — he’s going to stand down, find a way to pivot, declare victory and move on,” Zandi said.

Trump has pushed back on the notion of backing down, framing his brinkmanship as a savvy negotiating tactic.

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Economists pointed to a recent example of this dynamic: in April 2025 during so-called liberation day, when the Trump administration levied a host of tariffs on U.S. trading partners.

Within days — after the stock market had cratered more than 12% — Trump announced a 90-day pause on those tariffs. Stocks then saw one of their biggest daily rallies in history following Trump’s reversal.

Investors remember that Trump often de-escalates geopolitical shocks — which is why they’ve seized on positive headlines that hint at progress in peace talks, for example, Seydl said.

“The markets have memory,” Seydl said.

AI stocks and the ‘tech boom’

Traders celebrating at the New York Stock Exchange on April 15, 2026, as the S&P 500 closed above the 7,000 level for the first time.

NYSE

There are other factors underpinning market resilience during wartime, economists said.

One is the investors’ enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and technology stocks, which account for almost half of the S&P 500’s market capitalization, Zandi said.

“Those stocks run on their own dynamic independent of anything, including the war in Iran,” Zandi said. “I think we would have been down a lot more and it would have been harder for us to recover had it not been for the very, very optimistic perspectives on AI.”

We’re in the middle of a “tech boom” — and investors are likely to remain optimistic until they think the tech cycle has run its course, Seydl said.

How to build an investing playbook at record highs

More broadly, stock investors are essentially making a bet on the future earnings growth of a company — and the earnings backdrop has been “pretty solid,” Seydl said.

Consumer spending appears to be stable, for example, economists said. And companies are getting a boost to their after-tax earnings from the GOP’s so-called “big beautiful bill,” which, among other things, made it easier to write off investments upfront and therefore reduce their tax liability, Zandi said.

Going forward

Experts said there will be an economic hit from the Iran war, though.

“Despite the recent news of a temporary ceasefire, some damage is already done, and the downside risks remain elevated,” Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, director of research at the International Monetary Fund, wrote Tuesday.

A protracted conflict risks deep and global economic pain, he wrote.

Even if the conflict is short-lived — as the broad market expects — stocks are unlikely to march much higher until it’s clear the U.S. is on the other side of the war and its economic fallout, Zandi said.

If investors are incorrect, and President Trump doesn’t back down or quickly extricate the U.S. from the war, the stock market may see a “full-blown correction” or worse, Zandi said. A stock market correction is a decline of at least 10% from recent highs.

“Everyone thinks they know what the script is,” Zandi said. “Now they just need to follow the script. If they don’t, the market will have some real problems.”

The uncertainty provides yet another example of why the average investor with a long time horizon should stick to their investment plan and ignore the noise, experts said.

“Trying to time the market is very difficult if not impossible for the average investor,” Seydl said. “It’s better to take a long-term perspective and ride out bouts of volatility.”

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