‘The overeducated unemployed’: Man says degree holders are being pushed into poverty despite qualifications

A post on Reddit’s r/recruitinghell has put a name to something that has been building across multiple threads in the job market conversation: the overeducated unemployed. They used one person’s story to ask what society does when the people it trained most carefully end up with nowhere to go.

The original poster’s friend apparently graduated from the University of California and is currently living in a van. More than a thousand job applications. Repeatedly told he is either underqualified or overqualified.

“As AI continues to advance, this class of unemployed is likely to grow,” the original poster wrote. “What happens when the overeducated, who were once considered assets to society, can’t find work? In the US, unemployment often leads to homelessness. It’s a harsh reality.”

What Reddit said

“Stay in school. Keep your grades up. Stay out of trouble. Get a degree to get a good job. Yeah, that whole schtick is wishful thinking,” one netizen wrote. “Got an IT degree cum laude and finding entry-level work is like trying to spot an ant with the naked eye in a field of grass.”

One commenter described spending the final 1.5 years of college working multiple internships simultaneously, completing an independent thesis, graduating with highest honours, serving as president of a student organisation they were revitalising, founding multiple other student organisations, and working as a teaching assistant for multiple classes. They did all of this remarkable work “thinking this would all be worth it in the end.” Apparently, it wasn’t.

One Redditor noted: “I know several PhDs who are out of work.” No elaboration needed.

And one offered a rational analysis of the status quo: “The lack of skilled people is largely a myth. What companies mean is there’s a lack of ready-to-hire ideal candidates. Tech is seeing it badly. But almost every industry wants to hire experienced people at entry-level prices and basically refuses to train. They just keep poaching experienced people from each other.”

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