42% of America’s recent college grads are working jobs that don’t need a degree. From Kathmandu to Paris, young people are taking to the streets
Source: Fortune ·
The New York Fed data measures "underemployment." One historian calls this “elite overproduction” — a final stage before social upheaval.
From the source
America’s newest college graduates were sold the college premium. Four in 10 of them are working jobs that never needed the diploma. About 42% of recent college graduates, ages 22 to 27, were underemployed in June, working jobs that typically don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s tracker of the labor market for recent college graduates. That’s up from 41.8% in May but down from 42.4% in November 2025 and below the pandemic-era high of 43.4% in October 2020. Unemployment is the other half of the problem. Recent grads’ jobless rate hit 5.7% in June, well above the 4.1% rate for all workers. That’s a reversal. From 1990, when the Fed’s data begins, through 2018, recent grads were more likely to be unemployed than the average worker in just eight months. They have been more likely every month since January 2021. The gap hit a record 1.8 percentage points in April 2025 and is still near it. Some degrees fare much worse than others. Using…