College grads are launching their careers in one of the worst job markets in years.
The unemployment rate for recent college grads reached 9.7% as of September 2025, the same as for 20- to 24-year-olds with only a high school diploma, according toFederal Reserve data.Businesses say they’re hiring fewer entry-level jobs because of economic uncertainty and AI developments, per research from the education tech company Cengage Group.
Despite the bad market, recent grads are adjusting their expectations, finding their footing and landing jobs faster than the class before them, according to ZipRecruiter’s 2026 grad report.
Seventy-seven percent of 2025 college grads said they landed their job within three months of earning their degree, per the report. That’s a jump from the year prior when 63% of 2024 grads said they got their job within three months of finishing school.
The 2025 grads most likely to have found work soon after college majored in agriculture and environmental science, nursing, history or philosophy, and education.
Overall, the ZipRecruiter data suggests new grads are putting in more work to get fewer opportunities, with 16% of students submitting 20-plus applications before landing just one offer, compared to 12% of 2024 grads, and fewer students report landing multiple offers before taking a role.
“Young people and recent grads are getting more in line with the reality of this job market,” where there are fewer opportunities than there were during the post-pandemic recovery, ZipRecruiter labor economist Nicole Bachaud tells CNBC Make It.
Meanwhile, more students are taking their first offer even if it doesn’t align with the path they consider to be their “dream career,” seeing it as a stepping stone or even a “bridge job” in order to cover expenses while they continue searching, according to ZipRecruiter.
About 1 in 5 employed graduates say they’re overqualified for their current position, and a similar share said they intentionally applied below their level just to get a foothold. Nearly 43% of U.S. college grads age 22 to 27 are “underemployed,” or working a job that doesn’t require the degree they earned, according to New York Federal Reserve Bank data as of December 2025.
While the ZipRecruiter report covers how 2025 grads have navigated the job market since leaving school, it offers a glimpse at what 2026 grads are facing as they receive their diplomas in the coming weeks, Bachaud says.
“Today’s grads are being more pragmatic, taking a job even if it’s not necessarily the best or the right job for their career prospects,” she says, rather than “waiting for something bigger and better to come along.”
Half of grads are worried about AI impacting their jobs and careers
About half 2025 grads say AI has already impacted hiring in their field, according to the ZipRecruiter report, and a similar share of students from the class of 2026 say they believe AI will reduce the number of entry-level roles available to them.
The report shows that students in health care and human services are least concerned about AI impacting their jobs. Those who think their field has fewer jobs now due to AI are concentrated in communications and media; computer science, information technology or data science; and finance, accounting or economics.
Students said they’re not being adequately trained on AI skills while in school, per the ZipRecruiter report: Just 29% of rising grads and 23% of recent grads said their school provided “extensive AI training” for their future careers.
The report also shows a gender gap, where women grads were less likely than men to say AI training was integrated into their learning curriculum, and more likely to say those lessons were focused on covering the risks of AI rather than learning practical skill sets.
Beyond AI concerns, nearly 10% of 2026 grads said they changed their major during school due to economic conditions. ZipRecruiter reported big gaps in the share of students who said they wish they’d studied nursing, health, medicine, pharmacy or dentistry, but didn’t.
Some businesses are boosting intern and new-grad hiring
One bright spot for current students is that internship postings on ZipRecruiter are up 32% year-over-year, primarily in white-collar fields, despite concerns that AI is eliminating entry-level jobs.
Employers say they expect to hire nearly 4% more interns and 5.6% new college grads in 2026 compared with the share they hired last year, according to new data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). More than one-third of responding employers said, as of March, that they plan to bring in additional hires this year, up from about one-quarter who predicted more headcount as of a survey completed in the fall.
Businesses planning to boost hiring are concentrated in information, engineering services, wholesale trade, construction and professional services, according to NACE.
Reprioritizing an early-career pipeline that includes learning AI skills could pay off in the future, Bachaud says. As businesses figure out what processes and tasks can be automated, she says, leaders will need to figure out “what still needs a human” and then how to “build up that expertise for human judgment within specialized roles.”
“There needs to be some sort of avenue or pipeline to train up early talent,” Bachaud says. “If there’s a complete lack of focus on entry-level talent, 20 years from now, there’s going to be nobody available to do any of those jobs.”
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