Job market is turning chilly for recent US college graduates

In a cooling U.S. labor market, recent college graduates are among those feeling the chill most.

The gap between the unemployment rate for recent graduates and the overall rate for Americans with a college degree widened to 2.8 percentage points in September, according to data published Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That's the largest on record going back to 1990, aside from a few months early in the pandemic.

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The gap has increased from 2 percentage points in June, according to the New York Fed data. It averaged 1.6 percentage points over the period since 1990.

The numbers illustrate the growing difficulty for recent graduates — aged between 22 and 27 — of gaining a foothold in a labor market that only recently was reckoned to be tight.

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While there were still an estimated 7.4 million unfilled jobs in September, that's down from more than 12 million in March 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The hires rate — the share of new hires in overall employment — has been steadily declining in recent years and it's now below the long-term average.

The New York Fed analysis also shows that more than 4 in 10 recent college grads are underemployed, meaning they're working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree. That share has been ticking up from a post-pandemic low of 38%.