In 2025, if you asked the average economist about the U.S. labor market, the answer might sound reassuring: the unemployment rate is holding steady around 4%, inflation is relatively under control, and job growth continues month after month. But ask a 23-year-old college graduate with a crisp new diploma and a browser full of unanswered job applications, and you’ll hear a different story.

A quiet crisis is unfolding in the United States that eludes headline economic metrics yet is painfully evident in overflowing inboxes, mounting loan statements and waning optimism among young Americans entering the workforce. In mid-2025 the unemployment rate for recent U.S. college graduates reached 5.8%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, its highest level in more than a decade apart from the pandemic spike. More strikingly, this graduate jobless rate now exceeds the national figure, overturning the long-standing pattern in which new degree-holders enjoyed lower unemployment than the wider labor market.