For the past couple of decades, the so-called "American Dream" has followed a pretty linear pathway. You finish high school, go to a four-year university, and then graduate straight into a corporate office that comes with a slick 401(k).
That bachelor's degree was the golden ticket that made everything possible, and your parents probably told you that earning a diploma was critical to your success, right? Well, new labor market data has turned that decades-old playbook upside down.
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According to research from a labor market think tank called the Burning Glass Institute, college graduates are currently struggling to stay afloat in one of the toughest entry-level job markets America has seen in 20 years. Meanwhile, the job outlook for young people without a degree is just about the best it's ever been.
Bearing that in mind, it might be time to rethink that linear path to success so many of us have been spoon-fed since birth. Are we finally reaching the end of the college-degree-or-bust era?
Let's crunch the numbers.
What the Numbers Really Tell Us
Since the turn of the century, job metrics for young workers with and without a degree have pretty much always moved in tandem. When the economy does well, both groups catch a tailwind. When recession rears its ugly head, everybody struggles.
According to new data from Burning Glass, those lines are starting to diverge.
The unemployment rate for workers aged 22 to 34 without a college degree is now sitting near a 20-year low. If you take a look at the most recent jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, you can see that a lot of this success boils down to a surge in demand across food services and drinking places.
But young adults aged 22 to 34 with at least a bachelor's degree are in the middle of a jobs slump. Employment in August was worse than roughly 70% of all months recorded since 2003, and that's only if you include the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis. Strip those outliers out, and young degree holders haven't had it this bad in over a generation.
There is a caveat here. On an absolute scale, workers with a degree still maintain overall lower unemployment rates than those with only a high school diploma. But this data tells us that the gap is starting to close.
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