Will You Hire Me? College Graduates Confront a Tougher Job Market
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Going from college into the adult world can often be a rough transition as it is. But now, new graduates are bumping up against another hard reality.

We spoke to a student at Temple University who has a bachelor's degree in political science and a minor in music. He has begun looking for legal assistant and paralegal jobs, but after sending out dozens of applications with no success, he has decided to expand his search into the music industry.

We'll talk with Wall Street Journal reporter Oyen Adedoyen about how grads are being forced to shift their expectations for that first job. That's after the break. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort.

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getting an entry-level job. But it's turning out a lot harder than they expected. WSJ reporter Oyin Adedoyin joins me to explain. Oyin.

What's it like out there for new grads? It's pretty tough in the job market today for the class of 2025, which are students who are graduating from college this year. There were already the challenges that we were anticipating, right? There is AI, which is causing a lot of companies to pull back on hiring. It's taking some jobs. So how does that compare to what the graduates were actually expecting going into the job market? Cool.

According to the data, it looks like employers were actually expected to hire more graduates this year. There was a 7.3% increase that employers were projecting in the fall, but now employers are saying that they expect to hire the same number of graduates as they did last year. And this is according to a spring survey of more than 200 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

We're also seeing a similar trend with the federal government, which is a place that a lot of graduates see as a stable place to start their careers. Hiring freezes brought on by the Trump administration has meant that certain entry-level jobs in the federal government are no longer an option.

Are there any areas where companies are looking to at least ramp up their entry-level hiring or at the very least keep hiring at the same pace as before? There are. More companies in areas such as software products, energy and manufacturing, energy

said they plan to increase graduate hires this year compared to reducing them. And that's according to the Veris Insights Employer Survey. We're also seeing some openings in private companies as well. So a lot of students have said that they are pivoting. Maybe they were looking to work for the federal government or something like that. Now they're looking to state and local governments, which actually had more open positions than the federal government early this year. And that's according to data from Handshake.

And in your article, which is linked in the show notes, some graduates you spoke to were doing different kinds of things to try to stand out during the job hunting process. What were some of those strategies?

Wow.

Really wild to imagine. So some of these graduates are just blitzing it. They're trying to increase their chances by applying to as many jobs as possible. That doesn't seem to be helping this graduate. She only got three interviews so far and none of those have panned out.

Other graduates are pivoting and maybe trying to do their area of study, but in a different way. I spoke to a student at the University of Maryland College Park who is really passionate about working in the healthcare industry. And she really was looking forward to getting a job with the CDC. But in January...

She got an email from them saying that the program she had applied to had been canceled. So now she's looking into maybe working in some kind of analytical role, but she hasn't gotten any responses back from the 40 applications that she submitted. So I'm sure a lot of people listening are thinking about how hard it was to get that first job after they graduated. What makes this different?

Yeah, Jana, that's exactly right. I mean, when I was reporting this story, I even thought about how it felt when I was graduating. And I was wondering, was it this hard? But the data shows that it's pretty tough for this class of graduates. Though the overall unemployment rate hovers around 4%, unemployment among college grads between ages 22 and 27 has swelled to 5.8% from 4.8% since January. And that's data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

So that means that soon-to-be graduates are now joining an especially crowded private sector market. At these private companies, there is not a lot of room for new employees. So they're competing for jobs with entry-level workers from a previous graduating class. They're between a rock and a hard place right now. When I was reading your article, it made me think about my experience when I graduated from college. And that was in the early 2000s.

2000s after the dot-com crash. And well, first of all, I had no idea what I wanted to do. So it was very hard for me to figure out where I should go for my first adult job. Has this new environment changed expectations among the graduates that you spoke to? They're kind of

shifting their expectations down a bit. We spoke to a student at Temple University who has a bachelor's degree in political science and a minor in music. He has begun looking for legal assistant and paralegal jobs, but after sending out dozens of applications with no success, he has decided to expand his search into the music industry, including music journalism. A lot of people are thinking differently about what careers they could pursue, and career coaches and student advocates are saying that

Maybe that's what they need to do. Maybe they need to pivot a little bit for now to circle back to their ideal career later.

Are some graduates choosing to go back to school and just bypass this job environment altogether? That student that I was telling you about who I spoke with in Maryland is noticing that a lot of her friends who are graduating in the same class are doing just that. They're going to graduate school or pursuing PhDs. Some of them were already going to make those choices, but others maybe are thinking, let me buy myself some more time until the job market's a little bit more stable.

That's WSJ reporter Oyen Adedoyen. And that's it for Your Money Briefing. This episode was produced by Ariana Asparu with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Jana Herron for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.

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