It's tough out there for new college grads
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
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Summary
We’re approaching graduation season for this year’s crop of college seniors. But along with all the celebrations, there’s an extra dose of uncertainty hanging in the air around new grads, as they face an extra-tough job market and the rise of AI. On today’s show, Kimberly talks to New York Times labor and workforce reporter Noam Scheiber, whose new book “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class” digs into the historical context for the environment today’s seniors are graduating into.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- ”Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class” by Noam Scheiber
- ”Young Graduates Face the Grimmest Job Market in Years” from The New York Times
- ”The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates” from The Federal Reserve Bank of New York
- ”College Graduates Are Struggling to Find Jobs. AI is Partly to Blame.” from CNBC
- ”U.S. Worker Thriving Declines as Job Market Pessimism Grows” from Gallup
We love hearing from you. Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email makemesmart@marketplace.org.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:12.2 | Graduation season is approaching, and this year seniors are facing one of the toughest job markets in years. |
| 0:19.6 | Companies are struggling to figure out how to balance |
| 0:21.6 | staffing needs with the rise of AI, and there are plenty of other things going on in the world, |
| 0:27.9 | creating a lot of economic uncertainty. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, |
| 0:32.9 | the unemployment rate for recent college grads climbed to 5.7% towards the end of 25, significantly |
| 0:39.9 | higher than the overall unemployment rate of 4.2%. Meanwhile, the underemployment rate for recent |
| 0:46.8 | grads is up to 42.5%, the highest level since 2020. So for more on what the labor market looks |
| 0:54.0 | like for those |
| 0:54.6 | fresh out of college, I'm joined by Noam Scheiber. He's a labor reporter at the New York Times, |
| 0:59.8 | and his new book is called Mutiny, The Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. |
| 1:05.7 | Welcome, Noam. |
| 1:06.8 | Hey, thanks for having me. Great to be here. |
| 1:09.1 | That's quite a title, The Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. What's behind that? |
| 1:15.2 | Yeah, so my book is really about how enraged college grads get when good-paying, satisfying jobs disappear. |
| 1:24.4 | And so that's the revolt part of it. It's obviously something that's very friend of |
| 1:29.6 | mine for a lot of people with AI looming. As you mentioned, I think a lot of people are wondering |
| 1:35.2 | what's going to happen when AI cannibalizes millions of white-collar jobs. And the point of my book |
| 1:41.7 | is that we actually don't have to wonder. Those jobs have kind of been quietly disappearing for several years now. |
| 1:47.9 | Really, the last 15, 20 years have not been great for recent college grads. |
| 1:52.8 | So that's kind of the rise part. |
| 1:55.3 | And yeah, we've just seen that the rate of hiring for recent college grads, it starts to kind of soften even before |
... |
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