The promise that a college degree leads to employment is proving hollow for many recent graduates, who are finding themselves trapped in a job market where thousands of applicants compete for single positions and artificial intelligence-fueled algorithms filter out resumes before human eyes ever see them.

Skylar Weiland did everything right: Graduated with honors, completed internships and networked extensively. Yet the Northern Illinois University economics graduate spent months unemployed, applying to as many as 50 jobs per day before landing a job outside his field.

“It’s exhausting and it’s dehumanizing and it’s been a nightmare, to be honest,” Weiland said. “My entire life, I’ve been told you’ve got to graduate high school, then you graduate college, then you’ll get a job. It feels like all my hard work was for nothing. I feel almost like I was lied to.”

After graduating in May 2024, the Rockford native applied to more than 1,000 jobs. Thousands of applications, followed by thousands of rejections, take a toll, a sentiment echoed by new graduates across the country.

“You get all these rejections and it hurts you as a person,” Weiland said. “It just feels like I’m not good enough.”

Weiland had an internship after graduating, but the company he interned with did not offer full-time employment after the internship ended.

Economic uncertainty, combined with advancements in technology, has led to the highest unemployment rate for new graduates in recent history.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the last time unemployment for new graduates was at a similar level was in October 2013.

A report published by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank says that young college graduates are bearing the brunt of recent labor market shifts. Graduates between 23 and 27 are experiencing unemployment rates that average 4.59%, compared to an average of 3.7% in 2019.

In early September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a revised job gains report for the year ending in March, which showed that U.S. employers added 911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported, The Associated Press reported. The BLS also reported that the economy generated just 22,000 jobs in August, far below the 80,000 that economists were expecting.

“It’s particularly surprising because a college education usually provides some employment protection,” said Serdar Ozkan, senior economic policy advisor at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. “Traditionally, college graduates maintain job stability even during recessions. What’s surprising this time is that it’s occurring during relatively strong economic conditions.”

A report from The Burning Glass Institute noted that the sharpest increases in unemployment were in tech, business operations, and finance, roles that traditionally have offered new graduates career entry points.

Students competing for those jobs include computer science, math and economics majors, fields of study seen as lucrative after the tech boom in the 2000s.

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits for the week ending Sept. 6 rose by 27,000 to 263,000, according to The AP.

After graduating from NIU with a Bachelor’s in Mathematics in May 2025, Nathan Lee moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Lee, originally from Northbrook, applied to more than 150 jobs and took a job as a team member at Target to pay expenses. He said that after being inundated with rejection emails, he brushes them off.

“I’m unfazed at this point,” Lee said. “I just see the word ‘Sorry,’ I just read the first little bit. I’m like, ‘OK, delete.’ ”

Advice found on company websites tells candidates to tailor their resume to the posted job description or to have a resume that is friendly to applicant tracking systems (ATS).

“I tailor my resume to some of these, and I’ll do the most on the interview, I’ll even reach out and be like ‘Hey, I’m really excited’ and I still don’t get it,” Lee said. “Those are the ones I die a little bit because I put a lot more effort into it.”

Every May, around 3 million college graduates are absorbed into the economy, said Jeff Strohl, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

“What we’re seeing now with some of the hiring problems for recent college graduates, that absorption, how long it’s going to take for college graduates to be absorbed in the labor market, is probably going to go from what historically has been 7,8,9 months to probably extend outwards to a couple of years.”

Some economists say this creates a ‘scarring’ effect, where graduates entering the economy during a recession have lower lifetime earnings, and as a result, the economy as a whole is damaged. An example used in studies includes graduate outcomes following the Great Recession of 2008. However, economists disagree about this detail.

“The productivity growth is going to be slower because we have cohorts that won’t be able to accumulate experience and skill on the job,” Ozkan said.

As part of a group that attempted to replicate findings of other researchers that indicated a scarring effect, Strohl said, “we didn’t find it happening.”

Explanations for the recent unemployment trend for new graduates vary among economists. Some, like those at the Burning Glass Institute, point to structural issues as the cause. Some say the rise in AI is to blame for an expertise upheaval, with AI able to complete entry-level work historically given to new graduates.

While the unemployment rate for recent graduates is unusual, it’s important to note that every education group has higher unemployment rates during this period, Strohl said.

“Everybody wants to say ‘It’s AI,’ but I just don’t think we have enough evidence that it is or isn’t,” Strohl said.

Some students are bucking the trend, but only through relentless preparation and leveraging every campus resource available.

After applying to 10-15 jobs, Megan Brand, an NIU Marketing graduate from Frankfort, landed a position as a sales development representative at Stripe. She spent an entire week preparing for a third-round interview in April after making it past two rounds.

“The whole week I was so locked into that,” Brand said. “I would go to class and come back to my apartment and just take notes on Stripe and the company and figure out what answers I would say to possible questions they would throw at me.”

Brand said the connections she made through NIU’s sales program gave her a boost.

“I was beyond happy about getting the offer because that was something I really was stressed about going into graduation,” Brand said. “I didn’t know how long it might take. I saw people saying they got something right out of college, or it took them months and months to find something in their desired field.”

New graduates are also currently underemployed at higher rates than normal, according to recent reports from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. For some new graduates, taking a job in a different field provides a stepping stone.

Weiland decided to apply to the management training program at Menards after exerting efforts looking for analyst roles typically sought by economics majors.

“I was not expecting to enjoy this job as much as I have,” he said. “If you feel helpless, you’re not alone in that. You just have to keep going. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I found something that I really like and I wouldn’t have done that if I gave up.”