The 'promised land' of stable, high-pay jobs for recent grads is falling apart | Hacker News Reader

The 'promised land' of stable, high-pay jobs for recent grads is falling apart

businessinsider.com

13 pointsrntn12 comments

I'm sorry - when did this supposed "promised land" ever exist? Back in the 80s I remember people lamenting that they couldn't get a job even with a degree because everybody wanted a minimum of two years of experience. For as long as I can remember there's been a disconnect between students' expectations and the realities of the job market. Graduates discover they're only qualified for junior-level positions, if that, and not making anywhere near the money they thought they were going to make. Like I said, this has been the case for decades. Not sure why all of a sudden everybody thinks everything is suddenly different.

Social media with people showing off how they landed a $350k job after graduating. Really common for the last few years if you're in the target demographic to get videos like "How I spent my $20k monthly salary as a 22 year old in FANG" or whatever. It was inbound marketing to leetcode courses (like neetcode) whose owner did just this, but I think it also caused a huge expectation that if you go to university and learn some puzzles you'll also earn a million before 30.

Examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7s1IYVfvSA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4h0A9mr6r4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnmM-0E2bx0

etc...

Don't FAANGs hire people for good salaries straight out of college? Accenture (or Anderson as it was known then) and some other big corporates used to do the same in the early 90s when I graduated - but then as now that was only a possibility for a few

Right. Some companies prefer college grads, so they can mold them and expect longer hours.

this is exactly the kind of middlebrow contrarian dismissal that would have been prevented by reading the first three paragraphs of the article. the quotes are from the employer side not the grad side.

There were certainly periods where it was easier to land internships than other periods. For example, in 2000, easy. 2002 hard. It probably correlates to the overall job market for that market sector.

But there is one difference between the 80s and now. If you got hired in the 80s, the company would train you in their processes and the systems you would work on. This is even if you had experience, only the training would be more intense. In some cases, you were not expected to be productive even after 1 month.

Now, no matter your experience, you are expected to know what to do the very second you walk in the door. I have seen this a lot over the past 20+ years. Plus if it seems you are not a quick learner, out the door you go.

edit: fixed spelling of walk :)

The biggest difference AFAICT is that the funnel for junior positions used to go through Universities. Companies posted junior positions at Universities so people who weren't new grads were screwed. For example if you graduated in 2002 and didn't get a job because of the tech recession and then tried to get a job in 2004 as a junior with no experience you were screwed because you didn't have access to University job postings.

Now of course all job postings are on the Internet.

The data doesn't seem to add much support for this, outside of a blip because of the pandemic.

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

sure it does its just subtle on that graph

if you click/turn-off 'all college' and 'young workers' and look at recent-grad and all-workers you can see that the historic trend of recent grads having lower unemployment than average inverted during covid and that recent grads are now worse off than the random average worker.

actually interesting enough it looks like it began juuust before covid, ~2018

Oh, you are right, I missed that inversion. Although it's worth noting, the absolute employment rate for graduates doesn't seem particularly out of line historically speaking. It might be more accurate to say that the current low employment rate is affecting primarily existing workers in the market.

I don't think looking at the date of the crossover point is particularly helpful though, probably better to look at the derivative of the ratio between the two to see when the trend began. At a glance it looks like it might have began in 2009 during the recession, which actually matches up really well with when labor participation rates saw a big drop off. My off-the-cuff hypothesis would be that this effect could be explained by existing workers leaving the labor market, which wouldn't necessarily affect recent grads. I wasn't able to find a historical labor participation rate for recent grads though, which would help support that hypothesis.

For general labor participation rate information: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

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