“If you could teleport to another time period, which would it be?” A few weeks ago, we pondered this question in the Agostinelli advisory, prompting an almost-unanimous response: the ’90s.
When Skylar Hartshorn ’26 passed me the conversation ball, I recalled my AP Comparative Government and Politics class. Dr. Spring told us, “Back in my day, we only applied to five colleges. Either way, we knew we would have a job after four years.”
A job. The word elicits the same dread in college seniors that the word “applications” does to their high school counterparts. On a college tour this fall, Finn Konary ’26 and I heard our guide embody this maxim. “Finding a job’s not easy for anyone these days,” she said with a dry laugh, hinting that, indeed, “we’re cooked.”
The data agrees with our beleaguered guide. The federal August jobs report noted employers’ addition of 22,000 new jobs — far below predicted job growth rates. President Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer hours after, accusing that she’d manipulated the numbers. The slowing of job growth is so drastic that Trump refuses to admit it.
Young college grads have it tough at the moment. Per the Wall Street Journal, 30.4% of 20-29 year olds who’d graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2024 weren’t working. Two things are true here.
First, applying for a job has never been more competitive. You and other job seekers can submit hundreds of applications just to be read by some company’s sorting algorithm. Second, there’s a mismatch between the existing structure for jobs and the increasingly educated labor force applying for them. While it’s true that today’s employers scan for “credentials of value” in your CV, like a bachelor’s degree, this inspires a reorganization of the people in the labor force. The aforementioned WSJ op-ed writes that, while over seven million bachelor’s degree recipients have entered the workforce since 2020, the number of workers without college degrees has shrunk by 200,000, and those with associate degrees have fallen by 1.1 million.
Well, isn’t it a good thing that today’s workers are more educated? Not when they’re unwilling to work jobs “below” their college degrees. It’s not their fault, though.
While the college-educated subset of America grumbles over the lack of job openings, small business owners are hiring, and 500,000 manufacturing jobs remain unfilled. Even though there’s high demand among employers and consumers for these positions, especially given that AI can’t touch them, there is just a dearth in supply of people able and willing to work them.
Is there a fix? Modern cultural bias favors college education over vocational training for the positions that need filling. In the
meantime, foreign-born workers have played a large role in filling manufacturing and construction jobs, but that stopgap now faces threats. Reinforcing programs at trade schools and community colleges would be a logical first step.
There also exists a personal element to the issue. Those who gain acceptance to elite undergraduate institutions “inhale too deeply of their own success,” as Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel said. They accomplished what they did on their own and deserve the success that ought to follow. “Meritocratic hubris,” as Sandel dubs it, corrodes the amiability between the educated and non-educated, elite and non-elite, while also bolstering the cultural skew toward college degrees being the most desirable post-high school plan.
For “the most rejected generation,” as New York Times columnist David Brooks calls Gen-Z, perhaps getting a job in the ’90s was much easier. If you’re staring down the barrel of 400 job rejections, remember: There are always more options than you think.
