A man in his 30s who earned a doctorate from a top U.S. university has been unable to find work for two years despite applying to more than 2,300 companies. In the United States, 42% of recently employed college graduates now work in jobs that do not typically require a degree, underscoring a worsening job market for the highly educated.
Parents Say They Never Imagined It — A Princeton PhD Without a Job
The Wall Street Journal reported on the 18th on the job search of Zach Weiss, a 30-year-old PhD living with his parents in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Weiss graduated summa cum laude from Rice University before entering Princeton University's doctoral program in 2018. He earned a PhD in chemical engineering in 2024, and his research on ice formation was cited as an example of the scientific application of machine learning when the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced that year.
Despite his credentials, the hurdles to employment were high. He applied for research positions at pharmaceutical companies and postdoctoral posts at national laboratories, but most did not even respond.
He then widened his search without regard to location or field. He applied for cooking and food preparation work at a company selling frozen crab cakes, but never heard back.
He asked Princeton and Rice alumni for help, only to be told to check the companies' hiring websites.
In January, he found temporary work at an artificial intelligence training startup paying $70 an hour (about 93,000 won). But the work gradually dried up, and his contract ended in mid-March.
His parents, both physicians, also did not expect their son's difficulties. His mother, Holly Carvers, said she reviewed his applications herself but found no particular problem. "It is truly unexpected. I don't know how to make sense of this situation," she said.
His father, John Weiss, said he never dreamed this child would struggle.
Weiss is now considering law school while also working on developing a drone that uses AI to remove invasive weeds.
42% of Employed Graduates Are in Jobs That Don't Require a Degree
Weiss's case reflects the broader employment squeeze facing young Americans. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates in the United States was 5.6% in the second quarter of this year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is higher than the overall U.S. unemployment rate of 4.2% in September.
The underemployment rate — the share of recently employed graduates working in jobs that do not typically require a college degree — reached 42%.
That means roughly four in 10 employed graduates are working in positions that do not call for a college education. The figure does not indicate the share working in low-wage or non-regular jobs.
The unemployment rate for recent graduates aged 22 to 27 also rose 2.0 percentage points, from 3.6% in March 2019 to 5.6% in March this year.
An analysis of U.S. census data by Business Insider found that the unemployment gap between college graduates and non-graduates has narrowed sharply in the New York metropolitan area. For parts of this year, the jobless rate for young people without degrees was actually lower.
Business Insider pointed to the possibility that the spread of AI is affecting entry-level white-collar jobs.
Companies Are Neither Hiring Nor Firing, Deepening the Squeeze on Young Workers
The Journal said a pattern of low hiring and low firing in the U.S. labor market is compounding the difficulties facing job seekers.
Because companies are holding on to existing employees while remaining reluctant to hire, opportunities are shrinking for young people entering the labor market for the first time.
New hires totaled 5.192 million in August, with a hiring rate of 3.3%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Even with low unemployment, job seekers experience something different. The Journal reported that the share of people unemployed for 27 weeks or longer this summer was at its highest level in more than a decade, excluding the COVID-19 pandemic and its immediate aftermath.
In a Gallup survey in August, just 34% of Americans said now is a good time to find a quality job. In a Pew Research Center survey last month, more than 70% of respondents expected AI to reduce the total number of jobs.
Lindsay Ellis, the Journal reporter, said Weiss's case stood out even after interviewing dozens of job seekers across all 50 states. She said many people are staying in their current jobs, leaving new job seekers unable to enter a growing economy.