For the First Time on Record, College Graduates Are More Pessimistic About the Job Market Than Non-Graduates

For most of the past two decades, a clear pattern held: the more education you had, the more confident you felt about finding a job.

That relationship just flipped.

A new Gallup survey published this week found that college-educated workers are now the most pessimistic group in the entire U.S. workforce about the state of the job market. Workers without a college degree are nearly twice as optimistic. The gap between the two groups is the widest it has been since Gallup first started asking the question in 2001.

This isn’t a mood story. It’s a structural story. And the data behind it helps explain why the current job market feels so much harder than the official unemployment number suggests.

The Gallup Numbers, Laid Out Plainly

The survey covered 22,368 U.S. adults working full- and part-time. The headline finding: 72% of all workers say it’s a bad time to find a quality job. Only 28% say it’s a good time.

For context, in mid-2022, 70% of workers said it was a good time. The reversal took less than three years.

But the education breakdown is where it gets genuinely surprising:

• College-educated workers: 19% say now is a good time to find a job
• Workers without a college degree: 35% say the same
• The gap: 16 percentage points — the largest ever recorded in this data series

Through every prior measurement period in Gallup’s history, workers with college degrees were slightly more optimistic about the job market than those without. That relationship held through recessions, recoveries, and boom cycles alike.

In 2025, it broke.

Interview Guys Take: College graduates aren’t pessimistic for no reason. The jobs that historically absorbed them — finance, tech, consulting, media, advertising — have all pulled back significantly. When the labor market weakens, it weakens unevenly. This cycle’s weak spot is almost precisely the white-collar, credential-valued work that a four-year degree was supposed to unlock.

Why the Unemployment Rate Isn’t Telling the Full Story

Here’s the thing that makes the current moment so confusing: unemployment is still relatively low. So how can the job market feel this bad?

The answer is a metric most people have never heard of.

The Hiring Rate Has Hit a 13-Year Low

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks something called the “hiring rate” — the share of employed workers who are newly hired each month. It’s a measure of market movement, not just who’s unemployed.

In November 2025, the hiring rate dropped to 3.2% — its lowest level since March 2013. When that rate was last this low, the unemployment rate was 7.5%. Today it’s sitting around 4.4%.

That disconnect is the whole story. Companies are holding onto their workers. Turnover is low. Layoffs are rare. But hiring is also nearly frozen — which means there are very few openings to move into.

More Unemployed People Than Available Jobs

For the first time in years, job seekers outnumber job openings. There are currently 7.4 million unemployed Americans and only 6.9 million available positions. During the post-pandemic boom, vacancies significantly outnumbered job seekers. That advantage is gone.

Economists call this a “low-hire, low-fire” labor market. The mechanics look like this:

• Companies hold onto existing workers, so unemployment stays low
• Those same companies barely hire anyone new, so opportunity flow dries up
• Established workers feel secure and don’t leave, removing openings from the market
• New entrants and career movers find very few doors to walk through

The labor market looks healthy in the headlines. It doesn’t feel that way if you’re actually trying to get into it.

Interview Guys Take: The unemployment rate is technically accurate — it counts who it counts. But it doesn’t count the person who applied to 80 jobs and got three interviews. It doesn’t count the graduate working a role that doesn’t require their degree. Gallup’s sentiment data reflects lived experience more honestly than a 4.4% unemployment headline does.

The Industries That Used to Absorb Graduates Have Stopped Hiring

To understand why college graduates specifically are feeling this so sharply, you have to look at where they historically found jobs — and what has happened to those industries.

College graduates have traditionally concentrated in a handful of sectors: finance, tech, consulting, advertising, media, and information services. Those are exactly the industries that have pulled back most aggressively over the past two years.

The Finance and Tech Hiring Collapse

Finance and information services shed an average of 9,000 jobs per month since 2023, according to Fortune’s analysis of BLS data. Before the pandemic, those same sectors were adding 44,000 jobs per month.

That’s not a slowdown. That’s a full reversal of the main hiring engine for degree holders.

Software developer job postings dropped more than twice as fast as white-collar roles overall. Business analyst and market researcher openings fell at nearly double the overall rate. The specific roles that college graduates have historically competed for are disappearing faster than the broader market numbers suggest.

Healthcare Is Hiring — But Not for These Graduates

Healthcare and social services have stepped in to fill some of the gap in raw job numbers, which is part of why the overall market hasn’t completely collapsed. But healthcare jobs aren’t primarily absorbing finance majors, communications graduates, or business school alumni.

The jobs being created and the jobs being sought by college-educated workers are largely not the same jobs.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York tracks this directly. The underemployment rate for recent college graduates rose to 42.5% by Q4 2025 — its highest level since 2020. Nearly half of employed college graduates are working in roles that don’t require their degree. The employment number looks acceptable. The quality of that employment is a different story.

Interview Guys Take: The “degree premium” still holds over a full career in terms of wages and lifetime earnings. But what’s happening at the entry point of that career right now is a different picture entirely. The industries that acted as career launchers for degree holders have stalled. That’s not a philosophical debate about whether college is worth it — it’s a specific, structural fact about where hiring is and isn’t happening at this moment.

The Generational Split in the Data

The Gallup survey also breaks down job market pessimism by age. The pattern is striking.

Group	% Who Say It’s a Good Time to Find a Job
Gen Z (under 28)	19%
Millennials	24%
Gen X	33%
Baby Boomers	42%

The older you are, the more optimistic you are. But that’s not because older workers have a rosier view of the economy. It’s because they already have jobs.

Baby Boomers and Gen X workers who are employed feel relatively secure because layoffs are historically low. Their optimism reflects confidence in the job they already have — not the market they’d have to re-enter if they left.

Younger workers are the ones who actually need to move. They need to get in for the first time, change roles, or build careers from scratch. And the door is barely open.

In 2025, the share of unemployed Americans who are new workforce entrants hit a 37-year high, peaking at 13.3% in July. That figure is still higher than at any point during the Great Recession. Entry-level hiring is down 23% compared to March 2020, outpacing the 18% decline in overall hiring.

Gen Z isn’t misreading the economy. They’re accurately reading the part of it that affects them most directly.

Interview Guys Take: The age gap in job market sentiment is really a mobility gap. Older workers have the luxury of being secure in place. Younger workers need the market to actually move — and right now it barely does. That asymmetry explains a lot of the tension we’re seeing between how different generations are experiencing the same economy.

What the Unemployment Rate Simply Doesn’t Capture

Official unemployment statistics were never designed to measure what most people mean when they say the job market is hard.

Unemployment counts people without jobs who are actively looking. It does not measure:

• How long it’s taking to find work
• Whether the jobs available match the qualifications of people looking
• How many applications it takes to get a single interview
• The psychological and financial toll of an extended search

The average job opening now receives 242 applications — a number that has climbed sharply as AI tools made it easier to apply to more jobs with less effort. The volume of competition has increased while the number of available roles has not.

Gallup’s life evaluation index adds one more layer. Workers now report a dimmer view of their current life and future prospects than at any point since 2009. That kind of long-range pessimism doesn’t show up in any unemployment figure.

The Trade Worker Signal That Changes the Narrative

Perhaps the most unexpected data point in the current labor market concerns the relationship between college degrees and skilled trade credentials.

For the first time since the federal government began tracking this data in the 1990s, workers with occupational associate’s degrees in skilled trades — plumbers, electricians, pipe fitters — posted better employment outcomes than college graduates for six consecutive months in 2025.

This isn’t an argument that college has become worthless. The long-run wage advantages associated with a four-year degree remain real. But the emergence of this stat at exactly the moment college graduates are registering historic pessimism is not a coincidence.

The trades are not suffering from the same hiring drought that has hollowed out white-collar entry points. A few reasons why:

• Skilled trade work cannot be automated at the same pace as knowledge work
• Labor shortages in the trades have been building for years
• Demand for electricians, HVAC technicians, and plumbers is supported by physical infrastructure needs that don’t respond to economic uncertainty the way corporate hiring does

The data isn’t saying college is failing. It’s saying this specific economic moment has broken the traditional pipeline from degree to professional employment far more severely than it has disrupted the path from trade credential to hands-on work.

What Comes Next

Job market sentiment is both a lagging signal and a leading one. Workers feel bad after conditions deteriorate. But they then respond by staying put, deferring moves, and accepting underemployment — which deepens the very dynamics driving the pessimism in the first place.

The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index sat at 91.2 in February 2026, close to pandemic-era lows. When workers lose confidence, they become reluctant to leave current roles even in difficult situations. That reduces turnover, tightens entry pathways, and discourages the mobility a healthy labor market depends on.

There’s also a long-term compounding effect that’s easy to overlook. Research consistently shows that poor early-career outcomes follow workers for years. Graduates who enter the market during a downturn or accept underemployment early tend to earn less not just at the start — but throughout their working lives. The wage effects of this moment will likely show up in data for a decade or more.

Worth noting: the Gallup survey was conducted in late 2025, before additional economic uncertainty arrived in early 2026. The conditions behind these numbers were likely still tightening at the time the data was collected.

The pessimism college graduates are reporting right now isn’t irrational. It’s an accurate read of a labor market that has, for this specific group, genuinely gotten harder — and the data is only starting to fully reflect how hard.

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