Recent college graduates’ unemployment has pulled further above the overall rate since 2024

Unemployment among recent college graduates was 5.7% in June 2026, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, up from 4.7% in June 2024. That put recent graduates 1.6 percentage points above the 4.1% rate for all workers, twice the 0.8-point gap of two years earlier.

Two measures, two answers

A CESifo working paper by Fairlie and Wu, published Sept. 16, reported that unemployment among 22- to 25-year-old bachelor's holders averaged 7.3% this summer, below 7.8% in the summer of 2024. Both findings can hold at once because the paper uses a narrower age band and raw June–August averages, while the New York Fed uses ages 22 to 27 and smooths seasonally adjusted data. Graduate samples in the monthly survey are small, so a half-point difference like 7.3% against 7.8% may be within sampling error. The same paper puts this summer above 2025 (7.2%) and 2023 (6.3%), and its broader measure, which counts graduates who want a job but aren't searching, reached 10.4%, the highest of the five summers it covers.

Graduates used to have the advantage

The chart shows how unusual the current gap is. From 1990 through late 2014, recent graduates had lower unemployment than the overall workforce in every month but one. They have been above it in every month since January 2021, and the widest gap in the series was 1.78 points in April 2025.

AI is a hypothesis, not yet a finding

The rise in graduate unemployment has fed worries that AI is replacing entry-level office work, but the evidence is thin so far. Fairlie and Wu found no statistically significant rise linked to AI when they compared recent graduates with older graduates and with young workers without degrees. Graduates still fare better than their peers without a degree, whose unemployment rate was 7.2% in June. The share of recent graduates working in jobs that don't require a degree has edged up, though, to 42.0% from 40.7% two years earlier.

What's next

The New York Fed's next update, covering July through September, is due around November. It will show whether the rate has risen above June's 5.7%.

How we counted: New York Fed unemployment rates for recent graduates (ages 22–27 with a bachelor's degree or higher, not enrolled in school) and all workers (16–65), seasonally adjusted, three-month moving average, from the Current Population Survey, January 1990 to June 2026. CESifo figures are from Working Paper No. 12994.