Economic jitters and government cuts are pushing companies to pare back earlier hiring projections
Photo: Eric Thayer/Getty Images
Taylor de Sousa, a graduating senior from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has applied to nearly 300 roles over the past six months. She got three interviews. None panned out.
“It’s a little discouraging,” said the 22-year-old, who is majoring in marketing with a minor in psychology.
The class of 2025 is coming into a tough job market.
Companies have retreated from plans to boost college-graduate hiring this spring. The federal government is contracting, and consulting firms—a potential first employer for many college grads—are also retrenching.
Employers now expect to hire the same number of graduates they did last year, down from the 7.3% increase they projected in the fall, according to a spring survey of more than 200 employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
In a recent survey of 127 companies by research and analytics firm Veris Insights, nearly half of consulting firms said they planned to hire fewer graduates this spring.
Graduating seniors who wanted to go into government or policy work, meanwhile, say some of those opportunities have disappeared.
“I’m going to really need to pivot,” said Colleen Kane, a senior at the University of Maryland, College Park, who had hoped to launch a career in public health via a two-year paid training program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Shortly after submitting her application in January, she received an email saying the program had been canceled.
Since then, Kane has applied to roughly 40 jobs in the nonprofit and private sectors instead. She hasn’t heard back from most of them and has interviewed for a summer internship role at a clinical research organization. Many of her friends who are graduating are either going to graduate school or pursuing Ph.D.s, she said.
Job-market bottlenecks
Soon-to-be graduates are joining an especially crowded private-sector market, competing for jobs with entry-level workers from previous graduating classes.
Many of those 20-somethings are running into a bottleneck of entry-level openings as companies hold hiring levels steady and more-established professionals stay put in the jobs they have, recruiters say. Though the overall unemployment rate hovers around 4%, unemployment among college grads between ages 22 and 27 has swelled to 5.8% from 4.8% since January, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis of government data.
“This job market is rewarding the most proactive and motivated graduate, someone who has prepared themselves well with internships, jobs at school, jobs outside of school,” said Charlie Cain, managing director of staffing agency Beacon Hill Associates.
In Amherst, de Sousa said she has lately tweaked her job-search tactics. Now, after submitting an application, she messages the hiring manager or someone who works in the department where she has applied to learn more about the company and elaborate on what skills she can offer.
Her return rate so far has been 50/50. In any case, “the networking can definitely help with making me memorable,” she said.
Expectations gap
Many graduates had high hopes of finding jobs relatively quickly. More than 80% said they expected to start working within three months of graduating, according to a March survey of more than 3,000 seniors and recent graduates by ZipRecruiter. In reality, 77% of students from recent graduating classes started work that soon, and 5% were still searching for their first job.
Change in the number of graduates employers expect to hire
Since the Trump administration enacted a hiring freeze and conducted mass layoffs across the government, many who anticipated going into federal jobs are now pouring into the market for private-sector and state and local government jobs, said Christine Cruzvergara, chief education strategy officer at Handshake, a job-search platform for college students.
Applications from graduating seniors to federal jobs have dropped 40% year-over-year since January, according to Handshake’s data.
Not everyone is pulling back on hiring plans. More companies in areas such as software products, energy and manufacturing said they planned to increase graduate hires this year than to reduce them, according to the Veris Insights employer survey.
Beth Hendler-Grunt, president of Next Great Step, a career-coaching firm for college students and recent graduates, said she has been advising clients to consider shifting their search from government, universities or tariff-sensitive areas to more promising sectors, such as healthcare and finance.
“If you have great research or analytical skills, let’s take a look at other industries that may not be impacted in quite the same way that still need those skills,” she said.
Some recent graduates are ratcheting down their expectations. Antonio M. Mendoza graduated in December from Temple University in Philadelphia with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a minor in music studies. He began looking for legal-assistant and paralegal jobs.
After sending out dozens of applications with no success, he decided to expand his search to the music industry, including in music journalism. “But they are also as competitive as legal-system positions,” he said.
Now, as his August grace period for student-loan payments approaches, Mendoza is also applying for office-assistant positions, as a way to get his foot in the door.
After all, he said, “you’re still working in an office.”
