Those ages 35 to 44 with bachelor’s degrees had a 2.2% unemployment rate over the past 12 months, though that was up from 1.8% over the prior period.
This follows an April report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York saying labor-market conditions for recent college graduates “deteriorated noticeably” in the first quarter this year, even for young college graduates who have been in the workforce longer.
They found unemployment among college grads ages 22 to 27 averaged 5.8% in the first three months of this year, when President Trump’s on-again off-again tariff policies were just starting to rattle businesses and consumer confidence.
Moreover, the gap between the unemployment rate for these young graduates and the broader population became its widest in about 35 years of comparable New York Fed analysis.
The culprit, economists say, is a general slowdown in hiring. That hasn’t really hurt people who already have jobs, because layoffs, too, have remained low, but it has made it much harder for people who don’t have work to find employment. That includes everyone looking for work, but especially recent grads trying to land that first real job.