The alumni sweatshirt advantage is eroding.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles.

Now, the terms of the following bargain are clear, right?

Put in the work for a college degree, and it'll be easier to get a job.

But new research out this week from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland says that the recent college grads may be losing

some of that advantage. Marketplace's Carla Javier reports.

There are still some advantages to being a college graduate, including better pay and job security,

says Barish Kymack at the Cleveland Fed. That said, a typical college graduate would take about in the past maybe two, two and a half

months to find a job, when a high school graduate would then take about four, four and a half months

to find a job. These days, he says, they're both taking about four and a half months to find that

first job. Kymak says the pandemic and AI aren't the only

causes. Some of it could just be a factor of the changing economic tides, says David Deming at

Harvard. And some of it, Deming says, could be a correction from post-pandemic hiring.

So you do often see that hiring of new college grads is like the first thing to go

when a company is having to make tough decisions. They'd rather just not hire this year and do a

freeze than lay people off. There are also way more people with college degrees than there used to be.

And some industries that would have given them an advantage aren't hiring like before, says Ali

Bustamante at the University of New Orleans.

Accounting, management, legal services, HR, you name it. Just this past September, we saw that

that sector lost 20,000 jobs. Instead of looking for a job, he says people graduating from

college will sometimes pursue more education in hopes

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