New graduates are having an especially tough time landing a job right now: The share of unemployed Americans that are new to the workforce is at a 37-year high.
Why it matters: It’s a sign of how reluctant companies have been to hire amid ongoing economic uncertainty over tariffs and policy.
By the numbers: 13.4% of unemployed Americans in July were “new labor force entrants,” those looking for jobs with no prior work experience, including new high school and college graduates.
It’s the highest number since 1988, as the Baby Boomer generation was flooding the job market.
In the minds of CEOs, people with no work experience perform jobs that can be replaced with AI.
Hard to tell if that’s true. What is certainly true is that without junior employees, there are not going to be senior employees forever. Of course, today’s CEO does not care about the problems of tomorrow’s company.
That sucks, but this feels like a fairly recent spike in youth unemployment. Everything I’ve read until last year seems to indicate that Gen Z was seeing a better job market than Millennials.
This is showing a pretty key issue here that is entirely the fault of the job-seekers rather than the fault of the current job market.
Way too many of these graduates expect they should be handed a well paying job despite having literally no resume. They did no work whatsoever through highschool. They did no work through college. What used to be 6 years of building experience at entry-level jobs while in school has become 6 years of fucking off for these kids. At best they did a work study job 2 hours at a time 3 days a week on campus. Thats not real experience.
Why would any company want to hire someone for a serious job who hasnt even proven that they can handle working a simpler one? Even if they make it to an interview, they have zero experience interviewing. Even if they somehow get the job, they probably have no idea how to behave professionally and will be obnoxious to work around.
This is the fault of parents, who should have pushed their kids to work to some degree in the 6 years before they finished a degree. Some parents even actively try to stop their kids from working when they want to do so.
Having work experience is literally never a bad thing, no matter the job. Having no work experience is literally always a bad thing
It’s the kids fault so it’s the parents faults so it’s their parents’ parents fault for not pushing their grandchildren to have 6 years of experience before graduating secondary school
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It’s even worse than that because my grandparents said it didn’t used to be like this from personal experience. That was way more than enough to be completely qualify in the past, and your purchasing power was much greater.
I think we should be asking ourselves how years of training and thousands of dollars ended up not being enough to get a job.
Im not even 30, I just am aware of the issue quite well. I started managing other people at 18. Ive dealt with the parents who wont let their kids work. I graduated college at 25, surrounded by the same people who are now graduating themselves. None of them worked jobs.
I could care less if this sounds like “old man yells at cloud”. Its literally the reality of the job market and is exactly what the article is talking about. “The share of people entering the workforce with no work experience”. Most people used to do that at 16. Now they do it at 22 and expect a six figure salary as a reward for their laziness
Good lordy loo that’s sad
OK, so say this year, every teen starts doing this 120 work/study week in the US. In 6 years, everyone coming out of school at 25 now has this suicidal, self-destructive work ethic. What will we find? I’ll tell you. We’ll find that the job market is still fucked.
You might be young, but you bit into the old man propaganda. It’s been decades since feasible career opportunities outnumbered the applicants. The market is flooded with overqualified candidates desperate for work and taking jobs with minimal growth opportunity. No, don’t tell me working the register at McDonald’s is an opportunity. The ratio of minimum wage entry level jobs is vastly disproportionate to the “growth” available in management. 40 burger flippers to 1 manager, over the time of their tenure, means the ladder is not stable for the majority of people. It’s not a ladder at all, the manager climbed a body pile.
Go to any place claiming teens don’t want to work anymore. They’re still in business, right? Because they have a workforce? Who’s working? A wide range of adults. Surely, they’re not taking a paycut to charitably keep McDonald’s in business. So then why are middle aged adults working entry jobs? I said it before: the job market is fucked. Asking why there’s fewer teens is the wrong question. Instead, ask why there’s apparently enough later adults ready to work these jobs. They’re not getting paid any better to do it.
So why is it fucked? Because America wasn’t super naturally great in the 1950s, it just had explosive industrial success because it was the only industrialized nation that wasn’t bombed in WWII. It filled the global void of production. Within 20 years, the other countries rebuilt their industries and retook their global market share. Germany, England, USSR, Japan - it’s no coincidence that the industrial giants were the ones with the production power to cause world-scale destruction in the first place. Sounds fine, that should just slow the US growth, not stop or reverse it. But the world didn’t stop there. Less-industrialized nations picked up production. The industrial giants outsourced to the cheap labor and looser regulations. China, Thailand, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam, etc. Look at the latest ramp-up of import tariffs. Americans are paying more and more to the US government to import foreign steel and it STILL is cheaper than anything domestic.
“Nobody wants to work anymore” Bullshit. Nobody ever wanted to work. We work because we have to. If we didn’t have to, we’d find more exciting puzzles to solve for fun, not be a corporate slave boosting earnings for C-level executives.
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Ok seriously, what the fuck are you talking about? You’re just spouting random exposition and unfounded, uncited, and kinda obviously inaccurate opinions that makes me think you are suffering from a deep generational disconnect and lack of understanding. Which furthermore makes me assume that you’re likely a boomer talking out of your ass.
Nothing about your comment is insightful or helpful - much less accurate.
Wait, why should we trust this data again?
Fair point. This administration has made clear that departments who accurately report unfavorable economic information are subject to firings and elimination.
That said, this particular data shows no evidence of manipulation.
Got zero sympathy for Gen Z as they gave majority support for TDTrump (TX means tiny dick).
