Skipped the college degree — landed the better job market.
That’s the twist playing out across America right now — and the numbers back it up.
A fresh analysis from labor-market think tank Burning Glass Institute finds unemployment among workers ages 22 to 34 without a college degree has rarely been this low in two decades.
Meanwhile their diploma-toting peers, especially those with advanced degrees or STEM backgrounds, are stuck in one of their roughest stretches on record.
For most of the past twenty years, these two groups moved in lockstep. Degree or no degree, when the job market boomed, everyone benefited, and when it tanked, everyone felt it. Not anymore.
“There’s a rapidly growing supply of people with a bachelor’s degree, and you have a rapid decline of people who don’t,” Gad Levanon, Burning Glass’s chief economist told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the study. “I don’t think it’s a temporary thing.”
Blame it on basic economics. Skilled tradespeople are aging out of the workforce faster than they can be replaced, and immigration has slowed the pipeline of new labor.
At the same time, more Americans than ever are graduating college, right as AI starts chewing through the entry-level tasks companies used to hand fresh grads.
But don’t burn the diploma just yet. In raw terms, a college degree still opens doors, the numbers showed.
Prime-age degree holders (25 to 54) posted a 2.7 percent unemployment rate over the year ending in July — compared to 3.6 percent for workers with some college and 4.7 percent for high school grads only. The difference now is the shrinking gap between the groups.
When Levanon measured each group against its own two-decade unemployment history, blue-collar and hands-on service jobs (construction, manufacturing, security, nursing, restaurants, retail) are suddenly riding historic highs, opportunity-wise.
College-educated twenty-somethings, on the other hand, have only seen it this bad during the pandemic — and the aftermath of the 2008 crash.
The August jobs report drove the point home. Restaurants and bars alone added 59,000 jobs, more than a third of the entire month’s 162,000 job gains nationwide.
And unemployment numbers only tell part of the story.
Millions of Americans aren’t counted because they’re not even looking, sidelined by illness, still in school, or worn down after a long fruitless search.
That dropout rate skews heavily by education. Nearly a quarter of young high school diploma holders are out of the labor force entirely, compared to roughly one in seven among college grads, according to Brookings Institution data.
Nobody knows if this role reversal sticks. Levanon says it’s still an open question whether the entry-level professional drought continues, or whether AI and robotics eventually start squeezing blue-collar and service jobs too.
His advice to new grads, including his own kid, he said — get flexible, fast.
“It may be very hard to find a job at top companies, but it’s easier if you’re willing to compromise,” he told the WSJ.
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