Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has sounded the alarm on what many recent graduates already know—getting a job right out of college is really hard right now. Speaking at his regular press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee meeting, Powell called it “an interesting labor market.” He said people “kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs.” Overall, the “job finding rate” is very low, Powell said, but then again, so is the layoff rate. “So you’ve got a low firing, low hiring environment.”
Recent labor reports indicate that, indeed, it’s hard out there. The Black unemployment rate climbed above 7% in August, while the rate for recent graduates has surged above the overall rate for the first time in recent history. Apollo Global Management Chief Economist Torsten Slok, famous on Wall Street for being first to notice a wrinkle in the data, noted that it’s actually falling for recent graduates who are female and rising for recent graduates who are men. More generally, Slok also noted shortly ahead of the FOMC meeting that America has more unemployed people than job openings: 7.4 million to 7.2 million.
The last few months of 2025, called “the summer AI turned ugly” by Deutsche Bank, were full of anecdotal evidence that AI adoption is not going smoothly at the corporate level, on the one hand, and that it’s destroying entry-level hiring, on the other.
