One feels a certain level of shame when they go to school for four years, sit through lectures, work late, and do a lot of internships, only to then take a job that pays less than a fast food management trainee. That’s where a lot of people in Singapore‘s class of 2026 are, and it would be too easy to think it’s just a problem in that area.
Lee Jia En, who is 25 years old and graduated from the Singapore University of Social Sciences, made it clear that she felt bad. She got two-class honors and did four internships, but she still ended up in a government stopgap program where she makes about S$1,800 a month. This is not because she failed, but because she succeeded by all the normal standards. For comparison, a management trainee at McDonald’s in Singapore makes about two-thirds of that. They only need a high school diploma. The math makes me feel bad.
In Singapore, the Ministry of Manpower created the Graduate Industry Traineeships (GRIT, which can make you feel inspired or ironic, depending on your mood) to help people get jobs after they graduate. The government pays for about 70% of each trainee’s allowance. The rest comes from employers who take part, who have a clear reason to hire cheap, subsidized workers. The problem that governments don’t want to admit is that the job market for graduates is shrinking faster than anyone thought. This is a practical way to fix the problem.
There is more than one thing that is making this happen. The use of AI has sped up. Hiring slowed down after the rush after the pandemic. Tensions in global trade have made companies wary. Singapore feels these pressures very strongly because it depends on trade and energy imports. In May, Manpower Minister Tan See Leng said that when there is more uncertainty, businesses are more careful about who they hire to work full-time. Even more direct is Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, who has said that some jobs will just go away.
Between 2023 and 2025, the number of full-time jobs for business, arts, and science graduates from Singapore’s six universities went down by about 10 percentage points. It’s not a blip. They are 22-year-olds with student loans who are being hit hard by this real-time structural shift. They have no power to negotiate.
Phang Jun, a 24-year-old communications graduate from Singapore Management University, applied to 100 jobs and only got three offers. All three were in her field but paid less than she was worth. She said her degree was “useless,” which is a terrible thing to think at age 24 and probably not entirely true, but it’s easy to see why she felt that way. Since then, she’s become more open to more options, partly because she has to and partly because waiting for the perfect role is a luxury that the market doesn’t allow right now.
It is built into GRIT that there is a stigma problem that the government seems to be working on in the background. Between October, when the program started, and February, when it ended, applications dropped by about 90%. Kelvin Seah, an associate professor of economics at the National University of Singapore, said that people looking for work might be put off by the idea that the scheme is only for recent college graduates who haven’t been able to find work elsewhere. That idea sticks, even if it’s not true. In a job market where future employers often base salary offers on the most recent paycheck, taking a wage below the median now could hurt your earnings for years to come.
26-year-old Ng Hui is a data engineer trainee who makes S$2,400 a month. He has a degree in information systems. He owes S$50,000 in college loans. He helps out by tutoring high school students on the side to make extra money, and he spends most of his free time at home practicing for interviews. He says that his weekends are “burned.” Pressure like that that doesn’t go away has a name: exhaustion dressed as hustle. It’s not just in Singapore.
Employers in the West may be further behind the curve on this than their graduates are aware. The structural forces that are changing the job market—AI taking over entry-level cognitive work, slower hiring, and the weakening of the traditional graduate recruitment pipeline—aren’t unique to Singapore. They are happening in London, New York, Toronto, and Sydney, too, though a little more slowly and without as much attention from the government. Singapore may not have meant to, but it has made a reality clear that other countries are still acting like is only temporary.
People in the West who are finishing college right now would do well to look east, but not with fear, but with clear eyes. It’s possible that the humble pie being eaten in Singapore will be served in other places sooner than planned.
