I hear people “questioning the value of a college degree” in the media. Sure, education is getting more and more expensive at a time when wages seem to be stagnating and there is some uncertainty whether career prospects for today’s graduates will be similar to those of past generations. But the numbers say (paying to study and not work for four years and) getting a degree is still a much better investment than not getting a degree and going right to work after high school. Sure, you could borrow the cost of four years of college and bet it on cryptocurrency or the Super Bowl, and you might come out ahead, but you might also come out living a short life under a bridge somewhere. You could also train as, say, an electrician and probably have a decent income and successful career, but you would still probably do better in the long run as an electrical engineer.

Anyway, this is from the Financial Times, which I still seem to have residual access to from my own recent student career.

To determine whether recent graduates are having an especially tough time in 2025’s low-hiring environment, the comparison we should make instead is with others who recently entered the labour market for the first time, regardless of age. A newly job-seeking graduate might be in their mid-twenties, but someone entering the world of work straight from high school will be several years younger.

Once we do this, it turns out that those without a degree are actually having a much harder time of it. In the US, unemployment among recent college graduates is up 1.3 percentage points from its mid-2022 low, but by almost double that among recent labour market entrants without a degree, who have seen a 2.4 point rise. This is very different to the much more modest 0.7 point rise among the frequently — but inappropriately — cited group of non-grads in their mid-twenties who are sheltered from today’s harsh hiring conditions.

But evidence for the kind of large-scale AI-driven displacement of early-career knowledge-sector jobs that would explain broad-based graduate malaise remains conspicuous by its absence….When viewed instead as a broader cooling of the labour market, in which inexperienced workers of all stripes bear the brunt (and especially those with the least skills) we don’t need to reach for such exotic explanations. The unwinding of extremely tight post-pandemic labour markets, rising input costs from inflation, tax changes and tariffs, plus the broader economic uncertainty during Donald Trump’s second term, are sufficient to explain what we’re seeing.

AI-related changes to the job market and wider economy are almost certainly coming, in my view, but we may be perceiving a causation between today’s technology and economic/political headlines that is not quite happening in real time.