Somewhere outside of New York, a position in a sterile-processing department pays nearly $70,000 annually. A college degree is not necessary. All it takes is a few months of training, a steady hand, and a desire to understand how surgical instruments are cleaned and prepared for use in an operating room. A generation ago, there would have been a long line of applicants for this type of position. Many hospitals are currently unable to fill it.
That is the portion of the labor market story that isn’t covered by the evening news. The government’s most recent count revealed 7.6 million open positions, and the unemployment rate is 4.3%, well below the long-term average. It sounds like a worker’s paradise on paper. However, hiring during the same period was only about 5.1 million, leaving a gap of roughly 2.5 million jobs that were left unfilled—nearly one-third of all positions that employers were attempting to fill. That difference was a rounding error ten years ago, perhaps two to four percent. Since the pandemic, it has not closed, and there are no clear indications that it will.
It would be simple to assume that these are the jobs that no one wants: retail counters, warehouse shifts, and the typical suspects. A few are. However, a sizable portion of the open positions are actually excellent positions. radiotherapists. Nuclear technicians. controllers of air traffic. Again, without a four-year degree, data center technicians earn a median salary of more than $75,000. In 2024, about 72% of positions requiring less than an associate’s degree were found in industries that were already experiencing a labor shortage. These jobs don’t have a dead end. They are resilient to recessions, frequently unionized or nearly so, and becoming more difficult to hire.
What is really happening, then? The National Skills Coalition’s Robert Espinoza put it as succinctly as anyone has: a coordinated career-navigation system is what’s lacking. No logical matching process is used by people to select their careers. They stumble upon them—through an advertisement they happened to see at the perfect time, a guidance counselor who suggested one program over another, or a relative who just so happened to work in the field. Many excellent jobs are hidden from those who would truly be good at them by this disjointed, nearly accidental system.
Additionally, there is a structural component. Community colleges and high schools frequently don’t know what employers in the area really need three or five years from now. As a result, they continue to produce graduates who are qualified for jobs that are becoming fewer in number while positions become more plentiful elsewhere.
In the meantime, families have been spending a lot of money on four-year degrees—student debt has increased by 66% over the last ten years to $1.77 trillion—in an attempt to obtain credentials that, for an increasing number of advanced degree holders, no longer translate into quicker employment. It’s an odd inversion: jobs that require several months of focused training remain open for months, while those who overinvest in education are left waiting.
Programs like the one at LaGuardia Community College, which trains individuals for that sterile-processing role, give an idea of what it might look like to close the gap: quick, focused, and directly related to a local employer’s hiring needs rather than a general degree. It’s still unclear if that model can be applied nationally. The ability of schools, employers, and workforce agencies to communicate with one another in a timely manner is likely to be more important than any one policy solution. The jobs are there for the time being. And so is the salary. The gap between the two is what’s lacking, and the true cause of America’s stagnant hiring market is not a lack of willing workers.
