The credential was supposed to be the safe bet. Recent US graduates are now underemployed at 41.5 percent, working jobs that never asked for the diploma, and unemployed at 5.6 percent against 4.2 for everyone else, a gap that never used to run this way.
This is not layoffs; it is hiring that stopped, with quits frozen below 2 percent so nobody vacates a seat. Underneath sits a design problem: of the 800-plus occupations the BLS tracks, only 178 need a bachelor's, yet the country mints more than two million degrees a year. Elite overproduction. Musical chairs, except the players keep joining and nobody ever removes a chair.
