Colton Masi checked off every box in his quest to land a good job in the computer science industry after college.

The 23-year-old attended Drexel University, a Philadelphia school distinguished by its focus on real-life job experience. And he majored in software engineering, a discipline he had been hearing his whole life was synonymous with stable, high-paying work. It was all part of his plan to avoid the fate that befell so many millennials after the Great Recession.

“When I was 13, I was online all the time.” Colton told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “I was on Tumblr, and I was seeing a lot of these currently graduating young adults kind of talk about their struggles with the job market and getting themselves established…I was always like, ‘Oh no, I need to do something that’s going to get me a job.’”

So Masi took the advice offered by everyone from Joe Biden to Chris Bosh to Ashton Kutcher in that era: he learned to code.

But Masi graduated from Drexel this past June into a historically bad job market for entry-level computer science positions. Since then he’s applied to about 100 jobs — none have even offered an interview.

“It’s like, you do everything right. You follow the instructions, but the field changes,” Colton said. “There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just: keep it pushing until you find something.”

Masi’s situation is increasingly common for recent college graduates and others seeking to break into white-collar industries like computer science and marketing.

“I hear about a lot of rejection from job seekers,” Lindsay Ellis, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who has been crunching the numbers on the entry-level job decline, told Noel King. “[The] market feels kind of stuck to a lot of people.”

Ellis talked to King about why big companies are planning on a future with far fewer entry-level employees, the wild lengths people are going to to find a job, and what career advice executives are giving their own kids.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever........

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