It’s likely that the person giving you a room key or scanning your groceries has a four-year college degree if you go into almost any hotel lobby, chain restaurant, or store floor in the United States right now. Not because they picked this path. Because, more and more, there was no other way to go. A recent analysis of Census Bureau data shows that more than 90% of cashiers, postal workers, and lifeguards now have college degrees. You might find that number shocking not because it means service workers can’t go to college, but because it makes you wonder where all those degrees are going.
Something tells me that this wasn’t meant to happen. They made a simple promise: go to school, get a degree, and get a professional job. It worked pretty well for decades. But somewhere between the financial crisis of 2008, the slow loss of middle management, and the rise of AI-powered hiring tools that send thousands of identical applications to employers, the ladder lost some important rungs. It took a while for the middle to go away. It stopped being there all of a sudden.
Lots of young people have been feeling this way, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York put a number on it. At the end of last year, 5.6% of college graduates aged 22 to 27 were not working, which is a lot more than the national rate of 4.2%. Even more telling is the fact that more than 40% of recent graduates who did get jobs got jobs that don’t require a degree at all. In fact, it’s the most since 2020. The graduate who doesn’t have a job makes an average of $45,000 a year. The person with the same degree makes about $65,000 a year. When that gap lasts for a career and includes student loans, it’s not a small problem. It looks like a personal issue but is really a structural issue.
It’s easy to miss what this looks like in real life when you look at the numbers. It looks like a 25-year-old with a degree in marketing is working at a hotel front desk, not because she failed, but because the entry-level marketing jobs she applied for got 800 applications in 48 hours, and many of them were thrown out before they were even seen by a person. Job search tools that use AI have made it easier to apply, which has buried employers. One career researcher said that this means that roles that should go to entry-level workers are being filled by people who are too qualified for the job, which moves real entry-level workers further down the list or out of the running altogether. The wave goes in one direction.
It’s still not clear if colleges and universities are really thinking about this or just hoping it goes away on its own. People have lost a lot of faith in college degrees. According to a Gallup poll, only 35% of adults thought a degree was “very important” last year, down from 75% in 2010. The offices in charge of admission are already preparing for a 15% drop in applicants. Part of the drop is due to demographics—birth rates have been going down since 2008—but it also shows something harder to measure: a growing fear that the investment might not pay off as much as it used to.
For years, some economists have said that degree requirements turned into an easy way for employers to screen applicants without having to do the hard work of figuring out who actually has the right skills. The Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University says that until 2031, almost a third of all job openings will require credentials but not degrees. That’s a very important difference. It means the system isn’t really broken; it’s just not working right, making one kind of output when the market wants something else.
There isn’t a clean answer, and anyone who says there is isn’t looking closely enough. These ideas—apprenticeships, credentials that can be stacked, and hiring based on skills—are talked about with great interest in think tanks and sometimes in congressional hearings, but they don’t become policy. The graduates keep coming in, though. The desks are still hard to find. The math of a generation is being done to see if what they were promised was ever quite what it seemed.
