Americans with four-year college degrees now comprise a record 25% of total unemployment, underscoring a sharp slowdown in white-collar hiring this year.
Government-shutdown delayed monthly figures published Thursday by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics showed the unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree-holders rose to 2.8% in September, up a half-percentage point from a year earlier. Other levels of education, by contrast, registered little or no increase over the same period.
There were more than 1.9 million Americans aged 25 and over with at least a bachelor’s degree who were unemployed in September, one in four of the total number of unemployed. Before 2025, the ratio never reached such a high in data going back to 1992. Younger, recent college grads have also been struggling to find work.
Rising unemployment among the college-educated “should further fuel AI-related job loss fears,” Michael Feroli, the chief US economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co., said Thursday in a note following the release.
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The milestone comes amid a raft of high-profile layoff announcements from major corporations, including Amazon.com, Target Corp. and Starbucks Corp. A recent report by the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas indicated job-cut announcements last month were the highest for any October in more than 20 years, fueled by plans to replace positions with artificial intelligence.
Verizon Communications Inc. on Thursday became the latest to announce wide-ranging cuts, saying it would let go of more than 13,000 employees in a bid to shrink its non-union workforce by as much as 20%.
“For the new graduates from college, they did get hit by a bit of a perfect storm,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams said Friday. Normally, “college graduates are being swept into the labour market as they get out of college, and that has not happened as much this year,” he said in answering questions after a speech in Santiago, Chile.
Thursday’s BLS figures showed young Americans are bearing the brunt of the recent rise in joblessness. The unemployment rate for those between the ages of 20 and 24 was 9.2% in September, up 2.2 percentage points from a year earlier — an increase of a magnitude not seen historically outside recessions.
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Unemployment rates for older Americans, meanwhile, remain below 4% and have seen smaller increases in recent months. The report also revealed that just two sectors — health care and social assistance, and leisure and hospitality — have accounted for more than 100% of US job growth so far in 2025. They’ve added a combined 690,000 positions this year, while excluding those two, national employment has declined by about 6,000.
The professional and technical services sector — which includes industries like computer systems design, management and technical consulting and scientific research and development — also registered an outright decline in headcount over the first nine months of the year.
