Something Alarming Is Happening to the Job Market

Something strange, and potentially alarming, is happening to the job market for young, educated workers. According to the New York Federal Reserve, labor conditions for recent college graduates have “deteriorated noticeably” in the past few months, and the unemployment rate now stands at an unusually high 5.8 percent. Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work. Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging—an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis. What’s going on? I see three plausible explanations, and each might be a little bit true. The first theory is that the labor market for young people never fully recovered from the coronavirus pandemic—or even, arguably, from the Great Recession. “Young people are having a harder time finding a job than they used to, and it’s been going on for a while, at least 10 years,” David Deming, an economist at Harvard, told me. The Great Recession led n ... Read full article.