Colleges keep minting graduates the job market has no use for

A college degree no longer guarantees the job it used to promise. The labor market is running out of roles for an overinflated credentialed class

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The labor market doesn't want what millions of college graduates spent four years and tens of thousands of dollars acquiring. In the first quarter of 2026, 41.5% of recent college graduates were working in jobs that don't require a bachelor's degree, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the unemployment rate for the cohort stood at 5.7%.

Ron Hetrick, principal economist at the labor market data firm Lightcast and a former Bureau of Labor Statistics economist, points to "elite overproduction" as a driver of this squeeze. The term belongs to the complexity scientist Peter Turchin, who uses it to describe a society that mints more credentialed workers than its economy can employ. The Niskanen Center compared the dynamic to a game of musical chairs in which players keep getting added but nobody ever removes a chair.

The data backs up Hetrick on both sides........

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