New York City lost nearly 30,000 entry-level jobs between 2022 and 2024. That’s a 37% decline in available positions for young workers in the city that was supposed to be the land of opportunity. Not a hiring slowdown or a dip. A collapse.
And if you think this is a New York problem, you’re not paying attention. The UK’s graduate job market has fallen to its lowest level relative to all other postings since 2018. More than half of U.S. employers rated their hiring outlook for the Class of 2026 as “poor” or “fair” — the most pessimistic forecast since the pandemic. This isn’t about lazy Gen Z graduates who don’t want to work. This is a structural failure that’s locking an entire generation out of the economy. And almost nobody with the power to fix it is talking about it honestly.
The Numbers Are Brutal
Focusing on what’s actually happening. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates aged 22-27 has risen to approximately 5.6% — the highest in three years and well above the overall unemployment rate of 4.2%. That gap matters. It means new graduates are being disproportionately shut out of a labor market that’s technically still functioning for everyone else. But unemployment doesn’t tell the full story. The real gut-punch is underemployment.
Over 40% of employed recent graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree — the highest share since 2020. These aren’t people who can’t find work. They’re people with degrees pouring lattes and answering phones, wondering what exactly that $100,000+ in student debt was for. Meanwhile, the competition for the jobs that do exist has become absurd. Full-time job postings dropped 16% year-over-year in August, while applications per job spiked 26%. Fewer openings. More applicants. Do the math.
The New York Times called it the grimmest job market for graduates in years. Goldman Sachs issued a warning that college-educated workers are being hit hardest by unemployment shifts. These aren’t fringe publications pushing a narrative. These are the institutions that define mainstream economic thinking, and they’re all saying the same thing.
It’s Not a Recession — It’s Worse
Here’s the thing that makes this crisis different from a normal economic downturn: companies aren’t laying people off. They’re just not hiring anyone new. Economists call it a “low-hire, low-fire” environment. If you already have a job, you’re probably fine. If you’re trying to get your first one? Good luck. This is arguably worse than a recession for new graduates. In a recession, everyone suffers and recovery eventually comes for all. In a low-hire environment, the pain concentrates on one group — people entering the workforce for the first time — while everyone else barely notices.
Your parents don’t feel it. Your employed friends don’t see it. The headline unemployment numbers don’t reflect it. But if you graduated in the last two years and you’re still sending out applications into the void, you’re living it every day.
The cruelty of the “low-hire, low-fire” dynamic is its invisibility. There are no mass layoffs making headlines. No iconic companies collapsing. The economy looks fine from the outside — GDP is growing, the stock market is chugging along, and everyone with a job feels secure. But underneath that surface, an entire generation is being quietly locked out. The door didn’t slam shut. It just stopped opening.
New York and London: The Canaries in the Coal Mine
New York City
NYC has always been the promised land for ambitious graduates. Move to the city, hustle, get your shot. That narrative is falling apart.
The Center for an Urban Future found that entry-level jobs in the city plummeted 37% between 2022 and 2024. Paid internships — the traditional on-ramp to a career — dropped from nearly 11,000 in 2019 to just under 7,000 in 2024. That’s 36% fewer chances to even get a foot in the door. The most expensive city in the country is simultaneously offering fewer entry-level jobs than at any point in recent memory. Think about what that means for a 22-year-old trying to justify a $2,500/month rent with a job that might not exist.
United Kingdom
Across the Atlantic, same story. Advertised graduate roles in the UK fell 12% year-over-year as of June 2025. The sharpest declines hit HR, accountancy, and marketing — exactly the kinds of industries that used to absorb new graduates by the thousands.
Reuters wrote a headline about the “graduate job cull” spelling doom for college degrees. The share of graduate roles relative to all other postings hit its lowest level since 2018 — meaning the problem isn’t just that there are fewer grad jobs. It’s that the entire labor market is deprioritizing new talent.
This isn’t regional. It’s systemic. And it’s happening in every major economy simultaneously.
AI Isn’t Coming for Entry-Level Jobs. It Already Took Them.
Here are some figures that are not so friendly. A November 2025 study from Stanford University — titled, ominously, “Canaries in the Coal Mine?” — provided the first large-scale empirical evidence that generative AI is disproportionately eliminating entry-level positions. The study used high-frequency payroll data from ADP, making it one of the most rigorous analyses of AI’s labor market impact to date.
The headline finding: in AI-exposed occupations like software development, employment for workers aged 22-25 declined by nearly 20% between late 2022 and September 2025. During the same period, employment for developers over 26 was stable or grew.
Read that again. The same jobs are growing for experienced workers and shrinking for new ones.
The researchers found that these adjustments are happening primarily through reductions in employment rather than cuts to compensation. Companies aren’t paying junior workers less — they’re eliminating junior positions entirely while increasing the leverage and productivity of their senior staff. The researchers explain it with a framework is haunting every college senior.
In other words, AI is brilliant at doing exactly the kind of work that companies used to hire 22-year-olds to do. The routine, codifiable tasks — writing basic code, drafting documents, processing data — that formed the first rung of the career ladder? AI handles that now.
Companies aren’t eliminating entry-level roles out of malice. They’re doing it because a senior developer with AI tools can now do what used to require a senior developer and two juniors. The career ladder didn’t just get harder to climb. The bottom rungs got removed.
“Entry-Level” Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means
As if a shrinking market and AI displacement weren’t enough, there’s a structural absurdity baked into the hiring process itself: experience creep.A LinkedIn analysis found that 35% of postings for “entry-level” jobs required three or more years of experience. In tech, it’s even worse — over 60% of entry-level software and IT positions demanded three-plus years of experience.
Think about that for a second. The job titled “entry-level” requires you to have already done it for three years. That’s not a paradox. That’s a system designed to filter you out.
The reasons behind experience creep are a mix of laziness and market dynamics. Employers in a buyer’s market have gotten used to demanding the moon — why train someone when you can find a candidate who already knows the job? AI has raised the complexity of remaining junior roles, pushing hiring managers to seek candidates with pre-existing skills. And in a market flooded with applicants, inflated experience requirements serve as a crude filtering mechanism to shrink the candidate pool.
And then there are the ghost jobs — postings that exist to give the appearance of hiring without any intention of filling the role. One analysis found that more than one in three “entry-level” positions are falsely advertised. They stay online to collect resumes for future use, to project company growth to investors, or simply because nobody bothered to take them down. So a new graduate is competing against hundreds of applicants for a job that either requires experience they can’t have or doesn’t actually exist. And we wonder why they’re frustrated.
The “Lazy Gen Z” Narrative Is a Lie
Killing this one right now. Every generation gets told they “don’t want to work.” Boomers said it about Gen X. Gen X said it about Millennials. And now the comfortable class is saying it about Gen Z. Those who tell us not to generalize, are generalizing our whole generation. But the data tells a completely different story:
- Applications per opening are up 26%. These people are applying. Aggressively.
- Underemployment is at its highest since 2020. They’re taking whatever they can get.
- Youth unemployment is 5.6% while overall unemployment is 4.2%. The system is failing them specifically.
New grads aren’t lazy. They’re trapped in an economy that eliminated their entry point, automated their starter tasks, and then posted “entry-level” jobs requiring three years of experience they have no way to get.
That’s not a work ethic problem. That’s a rigged game.
What Actually Needs to Change
The uncomfortable truth is that the traditional path — degree → entry-level job → career — is broken. Not bending. Broken.
Fixes aren’t going to come from telling graduates to “network harder” or “learn to code” (AI is already coding). They need to come from the systems that created the problem:
- Companies need to invest in training again. The expectation that every new hire arrives fully formed is a fantasy enabled by a buyer’s market. It’s also short-sighted — you can’t build a pipeline of senior talent if you never hire juniors. Every company complaining about a “talent shortage” in five years will have created that shortage by refusing to develop talent today.
- “Entry-level” needs to mean entry-level. If your job requires three years of experience, call it what it is. Mislabeling roles doesn’t just waste applicants’ time — it erodes trust in the entire hiring ecosystem.
- Skills-based hiring needs to replace credential worship. There’s some movement here, with companies starting to prioritize demonstrable skills over years-of-experience checkboxes. It needs to move faster. A portfolio of real work should matter more than a line on a resume that says “3-5 years.”
- Governments need to acknowledge the AI displacement. The Stanford data isn’t ambiguous. AI is eliminating entry-level jobs in measurable, documented ways. Pretending this isn’t happening helps nobody. Policy responses — whether apprenticeship programs, tax incentives for companies that invest in junior talent, or rethinking how we credential workers — need to catch up to the reality the data is screaming.
The Bottom Rung Is Missing
A 37% drop in entry-level jobs in New York City. A 20% decline in young developer employment. Over 40% of graduates underemployed. 35% of “entry-level” jobs requiring years of experience they don’t have. Graduate roles in the UK at their lowest share since 2018. This isn’t a cycle. It’s a structural collapse. And the people caught in it didn’t do anything wrong — they did exactly what they were told. Got the degree. Built the resume. Applied to everything.
The Stanford researchers called their study “Canaries in the Coal Mine” for a reason. Software development might be where the impact is most visible right now, but the same forces — AI automation of codified tasks, experience creep, corporate reluctance to invest in training — are coming for every white-collar entry point. Marketing. Finance. Legal. HR. If the task can be described in a manual, AI can learn to do it. And if AI can learn to do it, the entry-level job that used to teach it to humans disappears.
The economy just moved the finish line while they were still running the race. And unless the systems that built this mess — corporate hiring practices, educational institutions, and government policy — start treating it like the emergency it is, an entire generation will spend the most critical years of their career development locked out of the very economy they were promised.
Leave A Comment