UCLA alumnus Kiana Bagheban-Rezvan took a gap year after graduating in 2025, hoping to get some work experience while studying for the LSAT.
But the job market was more competitive than Bagheban-Rezvan expected – she applied to nearly 400 jobs across two months before landing an assistant paralegal position.
“It’s quantity over quality at this point with job applications,” Bagheban-Rezvan said.
The unemployment rate for recent college graduates in the United States was 5.7% in June – greater than the 4.1% unemployment rate for the entire workforce and the 2.9% unemployment rate for all college graduates, according to data from the New York Federal Reserve.
While the current job market is not ideal, the unemployment rate for recent grads is not nearly as high it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it peaked at 13.4%, or the Great Recession, when it peaked at 7.2%, said Chris Tilly, an urban planning professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
“Older siblings … went through the Great Recession period of potentially years of looking for jobs and living in their parents’ basement,” said Tilly, who specializes in labor markets. “This is nothing like that, at least not yet.”
Students and recent graduates use job search websites such as LinkedIn, Indeed, Handshake and 12twenty, which the UCLA Career Center partnered with starting in July.
Eric Mai, a 2025 UCLA graduate, said he applied to more than 600 jobs before he was hired as a corporate restructuring associate. Hannah Radabaugh, who graduated the same year, said she has applied to 261 openings and is still looking for work.
However, many of these hundreds of applications never get a response, Radabaugh said. She added that she did not hear back from employers for about 60% of the resumes she sent off, and Mai said the chances were around 70% or 80% for him.
“It’s just really disheartening to try to do all the right things: trying to network, trying to use connections, reaching out to multiple people on a team,” Radabaugh said. “You don’t know if you need to keep your hopes up for it.”
The employment advantage for college graduates has narrowed. Recent graduates had a higher advantage than young people without college degrees in 2010, with an unemployment rate of 7.1% and 16.4%, respectively – a 9.3 percentage point gap, according to the New York Fed’s historical unemployment data. But today, that advantage has narrowed – the unemployment rate for recent graduates is 5.7% and 7.2% for people without college degrees, a gap of around 1.5 percentage points.
Some analysts believe the advantage for recent college graduates has narrowed because the job market is crowded, which would make an undergraduate degree alone less valuable, Tilly said. However, he added that he disagrees that this is the main reason for the narrowing gap.
“We will reach that point sometime. We’re heading toward it. I’m not sure we’ve reached it,” he said. “The advantage of college grads is still quite strong. It certainly is nowhere near disappearing.”
Tilly said he believes college graduates’ advantage has narrowed because of workers without college degrees, especially men, dropping out of the workforce. The trend was exacerbated by the 2008 recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, when people retired early or went on disability insurance, he added.
Despite the narrowing employment advantage, a June study by the UC’s Institutional Research and Academic Planning department found that University graduates have significantly higher earnings on average than workers without a college degree.
[Related: Are college degrees worth the cost? Study finds UC alumni earn higher wages on average]
The shift toward remote work has also made the job search more difficult for recent graduates, Tilly said.
“Hiring a mid-career worker for remote work is basically a win-win,” he said. “But for a new worker, that kind of in-person mentoring is an important element and so, in many situations, companies don’t want to bring in young workers without that kind of mentoring socialization.”
People fresh out of college also experience underemployment, often working jobs they are overqualified for, according to data from the New York Fed. Forty-two percent of recent graduates are currently underemployed compared with 33.7% of all college graduates, but that gap has stayed relatively steady over the past couple of decades, per the data.
Radabaugh, who graduated with a degree in sociology, said she is currently working at the gelato shop she has worked at since high school. She added that she is still overqualified for many of the positions she applies to, which often only require a high school diploma.
Although artificial intelligence could impact the job search experience, Tilly said he has not seen widespread job loss from automation himself. Instead, applicants are finding that AI often reads their applications and searches their resumes, Radabaugh said.
“If you didn’t have the buzzwords that they were looking for, essentially, you would automatically be rejected,” Bagheban-Rezvan said. “That just is another reason that you should just continue to apply because oftentimes people aren’t even reading your resume.”
Mai said he had to widen his job search toward broader fields related to his major and specialization.
“The more specialized companies typically will receive fewer applications, and a lot of times you’ll get interviews with them more easily,” he said.
Some students are also turning to more creative ways of finding work, Radabaugh said. One of her friends found a job posting on the neighborhood networking service Nextdoor, she added.
Bagheban-Rezvan said people had told her jobs would be waiting when she graduated because she went to UCLA. But that hasn’t been the case for her, she added, which makes applying to as many jobs as possible even more important.
“Consider applying like your 9-to-5 job before you have a job,” Bagheban-Rezvan said. “You wake up in the morning, you make your coffee and just get on Indeed, work on your resume, send in those applications.”
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