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How Much More Often Recent Graduates Are Unemployed
Recent college graduates’ unemployment rate minus all workers’, monthly, percentage points
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
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NY Fed, from the Current Population Survey: seasonally adjusted, three-month moving average, people enrolled in school excluded. Recent graduates are aged 22 to 27 with a bachelor’s degree or higher. October 2025 is estimated by the NY Fed. Above zero, recent graduates are more likely to be unemployed than the average worker. Palanor calculation.
The gap between the unemployment rate of new college graduates and that of all workers. Below zero was the norm for decades; above zero means a degree no longer protects new graduates from unemployment as it did, which is the pattern behind the debate over whether entry-level jobs are drying up.
What this chart reads
- U.S. Recent Graduates vs. All Workers · Unemployment Gapas “Recent graduates minus all workers”behindlatest 2026-06-01
Sources
U.S. Recent Graduates vs. All Workers · Unemployment Gap. Source: Palanor calculation from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates (newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market): labor.nyfed.recent_grads.unemployment_rate minus labor.nyfed.all_workers.unemployment_rate. Underlying data © Federal Reserve Bank of New York, from the Current Population Survey (IPUMS). Recomputed whenever the NY Fed updates.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.