College grads face a global squeeze on entry-level jobs

On a hot Sunday afternoon in London’s Hyde Park, Jack Fearnley-Whittingstall, from Reading, said he has been job hunting for three months since being laid off from his retail post.The struggle is wearing and has given him a new appreciation for the tough job market for young people.“I feel like we’re quite in a low,” he says. Why We Wrote This The slowdown in hiring in many developed nations has left young people struggling to find work. But some major U.S. firms are rethinking staffing strategies. The challenge he faces goes beyond one industry or nation.From Europe and Asia to Canada and the United States, young workers in many developed countries are struggling mightily to get hired. In the U.S., recent college graduates – aged 22 to 27 – have traditionally seen lower unemployment than the national average. By 2019, that began to change and, by this past March, joblessness for this group stood at 5.6%, compared with 4.2% for all workers, according to national data aggregated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.Many global corporations have adopted a low-fire, low-hire approach to personnel. Some are trying to use artificial intelligence to replace entry-level jobs as a first step in white-collar automation. Meanwhile, many young people lack the experience, skills, or even AI know-how that employers crave.“Young university graduates are ... at an increasingly high risk of unemployment compared to other workers,” concluded an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report on joblessness earlier this month. Joao Daniel Pereira/Sipa USA/AP Young people attend a "March Against the Machines" through King's Cross, London, demanding a global pause on advanced AI development, Feb. 28, 2026. The movement highlights concerns about job displacement. In the United Kingdom, for example, the unemployment rate for young workers rose to 16.4% this spring, up from 14.2% a year ago. A record number of young men – more than 1 in 3 – live at home with their parents because of unemployment and an expensive housing market. For the first time in more than a decade, 1 million people aged 16 to 24 are neither employed, in school, nor receiving training.“You’re literally competing with so many people. It’s actually so oversaturated,” says Olivia, a Londoner who declined to give her last name for privacy reasons. When she applied for new jobs via LinkedIn last year, she kept striking out. Finally, in December, a recruiter helped her find a marketing job.Jobs that college students might normally work are disappearing, says Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall in London. Roughly 930 pubs closed in London between 2004 and 2024, and hundreds of hospitality businesses, including cafés and restaurants, closed near the end of 2025.Still, he’s bullish. “You can only get so low before it starts to get higher again.”Others are also struggling.A yearslong hunt for a job in quantitative finance is causing Zhixuan Liu to leave the country altogether. She came to the U.K. from China to get her Ph.D. from Cambridge University more than four years ago. She’s now moving to Amsterdam for a job as a researcher for a financial firm. Graduates line up to apply for jobs at a job fair in Jinhua, China, May 30, 2026. When part-time isn’t enoughIn Japan, where demographic decline means fewer people in the workforce, the biggest challenge isn’t unemployment. (For those aged 15 to 24 years old, it stands at 4.5% – almost twice the overall jobless rate.) It’s underemployment, especially for women and young people.Kawanaka You has scraped by on several part-time jobs, such as working at a broiled-meat restaurant, making ballet costumes, and selling toothbrushes and honey. She’s now working part-time at a café in Tokyo. On a good day, she will earn 7,000 yen (about $43).Ms. You has avoided jobs at big corporations, she says, because she sees regular employees facing so much pressure and working long hours despite stagnant wages. Two of her relatives, who did go that route, “work until 1 a.m.” she says in disgust. Ms. You obtained a Microsoft Office Specialist certification, but so far, multiple job interviews haven’t led to anything.In Japan, many young people are pursuing a career path instead of just going after a “good job” at a big company, says Sato Yuto, a graduate student, musician, and poet in Tokyo, who specializes in Japan’s 31-syllable verse, known as tanka. More young people these days “identify what they love to do,” he says, and try to find work in that field.Still, life – or at least paying for food, transportation, and housing – has gotten more difficult. Despite attending classes, playing music, creating tanka poems, and working part-time at a music studio, Mr. Yuto has struggled with stagnant wages and rising prices. “I’ve had a hard life amid inflation,” he says.Some young American workers echo those feelings.“I definitely think our generation faces different challenges” than previous ones, says Lily DeOliveira, a 2025 graduate of Ohio State University, who landed an internship in merchandising in Los Angeles last summer.She restarted her job search in the fall as she wanted to move back to the Northeast, but it turned out to be a struggle. In January, she accepted an offer from Vince, a luxury clothing retailer based in Los Angeles, as a wholesale assistant. One modern tool that helped her, she says, is the rise of online professional social networking platforms, like LinkedIn. They “make jobs from across the country way more accessible to a variety of people, which obviously increases the influx of applicants.”Improving U.S. numbersThere are signs the picture might be brightening, at least in the U.S.Some big companies, including Booz Allen Hamilton and Alphabet (the parent company of Google), have announced plans to step up hiring. Others, such as railroad company CSX, Ford, and IBM, are reconsidering their strategies for entry-level jobs.“It is promising,” says Andrea Koncz, senior research manager for the National Association of Colleges and Employers. After two years of mostly lackluster hiring expectations, NACE’s latest survey of 185 companies found that employers expected to hire 5.6% more new college graduates than last year. The new hires were concentrated in large companies across sectors such as information, engineering services, and wholesale trade. “Based on the spring report and what employers were telling us then, I think it could go in a positive direction,” Ms. Koncz says. Nana Koranteng holds his diploma from Principia College before beginning his job as an economics teaching fellow there, in Elsah, Illinois, May 16, 2026. Even a modest hiring increase in entry- and junior-level positions would be welcome, as slow economies around the world have been especially hard on workers in their early 20s.In many ways, unemployment and underemployment among young people are age-old problems. Because these workers often have little to no experience, when economic conditions tighten, companies often first cut entry-level jobs, the very positions that young people can compete for.Struggles in Sweden and CanadaDespite various labor protections, Sweden has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the European Union. About 1 in 4 young workers is jobless.Government statistics make that rate look worse than it actually is by counting full-time students without jobs as unemployed. Still, Sweden illustrates a larger trend. Even though the country’s economy has been recovering since 2025, and unemployment for the overall population has fallen slightly from last year’s highs, joblessness among young people has risen, hitting 25.9% in June.A similar dynamic is playing out in Canada. Despite a slowdown in 2023 and 2024, a greater share of workers 55 and older is employed than in mid-2022, according to a May report by Indeed. But for young workers, aged 20 to 24, employment is down 2.9 percentage points. For those aged 15 to 19, it has plunged 8.7 percentage points.Though not as severe as in Sweden or Canada, the U.S. economy also presents tough hurdles for young workers, especially recent college graduates. After hitting a post-pandemic low of 3.4% in April 2023, the overall U.S. unemployment rate has crept up to 4.2%.“I feel like I have two part-time jobs,” says Emmet Anderson, a 2025 graduate of Denison University who now works part-time at a Chicago restaurant. “One is my actual part-time job, and the other is applying to full-time jobs.”Of the roughly 250 positions he’s applied for since the end of his senior year in college, Mr. Anderson estimates he’s gotten fewer than 10 first-round interviews and only a handful of second-round interviews. He hopes to get a job in journalism, communications, or media production.AI and jobsConcerns about AI’s impact run deep, not just for the jobs it might take away but also for its influence in the hiring process.“The job market is terrible for this graduating class of students, and I think a big part of that is because of AI,” says one new graduate of Colgate University who declined to give her name for privacy reasons. “It’s very hard to differentiate yourself if you’re just submitting that résumé, because a lot of companies now use a form of artificial intelligence to really quickly screen the résumés. ... Even if you’re a qualified applicant, you can easily fall through the cracks.”Fears that AI will take over entry-level jobs might be overblown at this point in the technology’s development, studies suggest. In the NACE report, for example, more than half of businesses contemplating cuts cited reduced business needs and projects, budget cuts, and an uncertain economy. Only 16% pointed to AI taking over entry-level jobs.Nana Koranteng has been unable to get a job in information technology or computer science after 10 months of searching.“I always felt like when it got to the point where I’d be applying for a job, it was going to be easy for me,” says the recently graduated double major in computer science and economics. Instead, he has accepted a teaching assistant job at Principia College, his alma mater, outside St. Louis. And he will continue his job search.Staff writers Olivia Fletcher, Donald Keough, and Emily Staunton in Boston contributed to this report.