The percentage of unemployed Americans with four-year college degrees hit a record in January, at 36.6% of those 25 and older.1 In part this is because people with college degrees make up a much larger share of the US labor force than they used to — the 45.4% of employed 25-and-older Americans with bachelors’ degrees or higher in January was also near an all-time high. But observe the two lines together in a chart and the picture is not exactly reassuring for college graduates, with the gap between them almost halving since mid-2023.

There has been a lot of talk over this same period about generative artificial intelligence’s potential to wipe out tens of millions of white-collar jobs. A study last year by Stanford University economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen with the attention-getting title “Canaries in the Coal Mine?” found that employment for early career workers began falling in the most AI-sensitive occupations, most of which are heavy on holders of college degrees, around the time of the initial release of ChatGPT in November 2022. These findings inspired some pushback, but it was mainly along the lines that employment in those occupations, and among college graduates in general, was already under pressure before November 2022. Again, that’s not exactly reassuring for college graduates, especially younger ones.

© Bloomberg