Saturday might be for the boys, but it’s only because their weekdays are looking pretty bleak. New data shows that young men who recently graduated from college are having a rough time finding a job, with the unemployment rate for men aged 23 to 30 hovering around 6%—higher than the 3.5% rate for young women and the 4.2% rate for the entire US last month.
Overall, the job market for new grads isn’t great…except in a few key areas. Healthcare, hospitality, and education—all dominated by women—were the few fields that showed job growth during the last six months. Meanwhile, male-dominated industries like business and tech have had mass layoffs and hiring freezes:
Young men with a college degree are now slightly more likely to be unemployed than those without one, reversing a decades-long trend.Even though young women might be locking down work in more stable industries, those fields typically pay less. The median entry-level salary for a nurse in 2023 was $65,000, for example, while the same for a computer scientist was $80,000, per NY Fed data.
More bad news…the sparse entry-level jobs that many men hunt for in consulting and coding are the same ones beginning to be replaced by AI.—MM