Transcription
23% of Harvard MBA students were jobless 3 months after graduating. Graduates from one of the most prestigious business schools in the world with multiple degrees and supposed golden tickets to success are struggling to find employment for over a year.
You know it's bad when one out of four people graduating from Harvard with their MBAs can't get a job. If Harvard MBAs can't secure jobs, what does that mean for everyone else?
According to the Wall Street Journal, Gen Z graduates are facing the worst job market in over a decade. The 3-month moving average unemployment rate for recent graduates currently sits at around 5%, slightly above the national average of 4.2%. This represents a rare reversal, one of the few times in decades that unemployment among new grads has exceeded the general rate. For college graduates specifically, the unemployment rate has climbed to levels not seen since the pandemic.
Here's where it gets strange. While many employers say they're struggling to fill vacancies, the second highest rate in two decades, graduates can't seem to land interviews, let alone jobs. A 2022 study of over 300 job applications submitted by departing interns found that only 12% received any response from employers. 5% expressed interest in the applicant. Not a single application resulted in a hire. Employers were actually more likely to ghost candidates if the graduate met over 90% of the listed requirements.
The disconnect between available jobs and actual hiring reveals something more troubling. So-called ghost jobs have flooded the American labor market. Surveys conducted in 2024 found that roughly one-third of recruiters admitted their organization had posted job listings that weren't actively being filled, usually to build a talent pool or project growth. Analysts found that a significant share of US job postings, possibly one in four, were inactive at any given time. These aren't just outdated listings or clerical errors. In some cases, they're deliberate. More than half of companies posting ghost jobs said they did so to make employees believe relief was coming. Others said it helped maintain the appearance of company growth during uncertain times. Some even admitted to interviewing candidates for roles that didn't actually exist.
What's not talked about enough are ghost jobs because I probably spent more than half of my time applying to summer jobs and internships on LinkedIn, way up indeed, applying to ghost jobs. The practice has grown so widespread that a 2025 Congressional Research Service report analyzed it as an emerging labor issue. Yet, despite growing attention from lawmakers, there's still no federal regulation targeting ghost listings.
The manipulation doesn't end there. Almost every major company now uses applicant tracking systems that automatically reject most résumés before a human ever looks at them. These systems hunt for keywords and rank every resume like a search engine ranks web pages. If your CV doesn't include the exact words used in the job description, or if your formatting confuses the system, you're instantly dropped to the bottom of the pile, no matter how qualified you are. The human connection that once defined hiring has been reduced to algorithms and automation.
Out of 3.8 million jobs on LinkedIn, nearly 40% of entry-level positions required 3 to 5 years of experience. A study by Generation, a nonprofit network, found that 94% of employers surveyed across eight countries, including the US, required applicants for entry-level tech jobs to already have relevant experience. In the last 5 years alone, there's been a 20% increase in the number of skills required on job listings. Entry level no longer means entry level.
This impossible standard forces graduates into a devastating cycle. You need experience to get a job, but you need a job to gain experience.
More often than not, it's literally just rejection, rejection, rejection. Sorry, you need 3 years of experience. Actually, I was inquiring about the entry-level position. You need 3 years of experience for that job.
The only escape route is internships, and competition for these positions has intensified dramatically. Companies such as Service Now reported a 50% increase in internship applications, while Citadel saw applications rise by 65%, ultimately accepting just 300 of the 69,000 applications it received. The cruel twist, 47% of internships in 2022 were unpaid, creating a new form of economic stratification. Paid interns averaged 1.4 job offers post-graduation, while unpaid interns averaged less than one. This effectively proves that even if you go to college, land an internship, and graduate, your chances of securing a job are severely limited if the internship was unpaid. In the recruiter's eyes, an unpaid internship offers little more credibility than a short-term service job.
The hiring freeze extends beyond manipulative practices. Economic uncertainty has created what Deutsche Bank economist Brett Ryan calls a low hiring but low firing environment. Harvard economist David Deming explains that young workers are seen as investments and in uncertain times, investments are the first thing businesses cut back on. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, hiring in the United States has slowed to its weakest pace in years, and job cuts are up nearly 50% year-on-year.
Even MBA graduates from elite schools like Wharton and Stanford are struggling to land jobs. The career ladder that once offered upward mobility has been systematically dismantled. Unlike America's post-war economic expansion, where hard work truly did provide stable careers, only about a quarter of current vacancies are now filled with internal candidates, a steep decline over the last 50 years. Companies now rely more on outside hiring, often favoring those who already have years of work experience.
The United States spends less than 0.1% of GDP on active labor market programs like job training, employment incentives, and public hiring initiatives, far less than most developed nations. Artificial intelligence is accelerating this crisis. Anthropic CEO Daario Armod and other tech leaders have warned that rapid advances in automation could eliminate a large share of entry-level roles within the next 5 years. Goldman Sachs predicted in 2023 that AI could disrupt or displace up to 300 million jobs worldwide. Some tech companies aren't even bothering to hire junior developers anymore, choosing instead to focus on mid-level roles. Despite those estimates, AI and automation together are projected to reshape tens of millions of positions by 2030.
What's been in the spotlight recently is the H-1B visa program and Trump's new move to overhaul it. Just this past September, his administration proposed a $100,000 fee on every new H-1B application, one of the biggest shifts in US immigration and labor policy in decades. The policy is already facing legal challenges from industry groups.
Here's why this matters for American graduates. What began as a program designed to bring specialized foreign talent to fill genuine skill gaps gradually transformed into something else entirely. Companies discovered they could use H-1B workers for entry-level tech positions. The exact roles that used to be stepping stones for recent American graduates. Picture a computer science major, freshly out of university with student debt, hoping to start a career in tech, only to find that the junior developer positions they trained for have been outsourced or filled by imported labor willing to work for less.
Trump's policy could fundamentally change this dynamic. A six-figure visa fee makes hiring foreign workers far less attractive than developing homegrown talent. This should force tech companies to look at the pool of qualified American graduates they've been overlooking, offering them real opportunities with competitive wages.
But there's another possibility. If bringing talent to the US becomes prohibitively expensive, companies might simply move entire departments overseas. The same outsourcing that gutted manufacturing towns across America could now reach white-collar jobs. Instead of H-1B workers coming here, the jobs themselves could disappear abroad to India, Eastern Europe, Latin America, anywhere labor is cheaper and immigration policies are irrelevant.
So, we're left with a question that will define the next decade for American graduates. Will this policy restore balance, giving young Americans a fair shot at the careers they trained for? Or will it push opportunities further out of reach, replacing one form of displacement with another, offshoring instead of visa programs with the same result for graduates desperately trying to start their careers?
Despite growing concern and a Congressional Research Service report acknowledging ghost job listings, no comprehensive federal legislation has yet addressed the issue. Job scams and employment fraud grew from $90 million in reported losses in 2020 to more than $500 million in 2024. And several states, including New Jersey, Kentucky, and California, have proposed bills to tackle fake ads, but none have yet become law.
The job market has been systematically reshaped, leaving an entire generation overqualified, underpaid, and fighting for opportunities that increasingly don't exist. Want more videos like this? Subscribe to Mac Hard for weekly AI updates and leave your thoughts in the comments below.