📈 The Two Lines That Stopped Moving Together

Tuesday Newsday | WorkLifeFuture | September 29, 2026

Happy Tuesday!

I met one of my best friends, Dewey, in the eighth grade. He was a tremendous athlete, but as he'd tell you himself, not much of a student. He skipped the four-year route, started at junior college, and went on to a long career in the fire service.

And on his days off, he built a thriving family business.

I admire Dewey for many reasons. He is one of the hardest workers I know. He simply gets things done. He's been a lifelong learner because he asks a ton of questions. And he's a tireless networker who connects all kinds of different people.

He's also started, stopped, and walked away from plenty of ambitious ideas, which is part of the point: the more things you try, the better the odds that one of them works.

He's one of many people in my life who prove every day that a degree isn't the only way to build a good life. That was true before AI, and still is today. What's new is that the labor market is beginning to reflect some of that too, and a piece of research this month shows the shift in the numbers.

What's Inside
📊 Two unemployment lines that used to travel together, and where they split
🧭 Why this is happening, and how far to trust the explanation
🧮 What an unemployment rate can't tell you
🎛️ One coaching conversation that works for any path

For most of the past two decades, unemployment among young workers with and without college degrees moved in roughly the same direction, whether the economy was booming or sagging. A degree reduced your chances of unemployment, but both groups experienced the same trend. Most of the advice we give our kids was built on that pattern.

A new analysis from the Burning Glass Institute says the wave has split. Gad Levanon, the institute's chief economist, checked where each group stands today against its own history going back to 2003.

Among 22-to-34-year-olds without a degree, unemployment is near its lowest level in 23 years. 

Among those with degrees, unemployment is near its highest level; only the pandemic and the prolonged recovery from the 2007–09 recession were more challenging.

Levanon sees the cause as supply: the number of degree holders is climbing quickly while the number of non-degree workers falls fast. "I don't think it's a temporary thing," he said.

Burning Glass points to two forces working at the same time.

The first is demographics. Boomers are retiring and smaller generations are replacing them, so the working-age population has barely grown since 2017 (under 0.2% a year, versus 1 to 2% for much of the last century). 

The catch is who is missing. The working-age population without degrees is shrinking in number, while the count of degree holders is projected to keep rising 1 to 1.5% a year through at least 2035. Younger generations are simply more formally educated.

Few degree holders go into trades, transportation, maintenance, or food service, so those jobs are drawing from a shrinking pool. Burning Glass reports that hiring difficulty and pay increases have recently been greater in those fields than in office work, a reversal from earlier decades.

The second force may be AI.

Employers are increasingly using AI for some entry-level tasks, adding another potential source of pressure on new graduates. The author Levanon told The Wall Street Journal that he can't say how long the slump in entry-level professional hiring will last, or how far AI and robotics will eventually reach into hands-on work.

I don't know either, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who says they do.

📌 Meaning: More degree holders are competing for a tighter market in entry-level office work, while employers are struggling to find enough workers for many hands-on jobs. AI may be widening that divide, but it's too early to know how much.

Before anyone in your house celebrates or panics, the absolute numbers still favor the diploma.

Over the 12 months through July, unemployment among workers ages 25 to 54 averaged 2.7% for college graduates, 3.6% for those with some college, and 4.7% for high school graduates. That's a broader age group than the young workers in the Burning Glass comparison, but it provides useful context.

A separate New York Fed comparison shows the narrowing advantage among younger workers. Recent graduates still have lower unemployment than young workers overall, but the gap has shrunk.

Unemployment among workers ages 22–27, January 2003–June 2026. “All young workers” includes graduates. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

There's also a caveat about who the unemployment rate counts. It measures people without jobs who are actively looking for work, as a share of the labor force. People who stop looking generally disappear from that measure.

A 2025 Goldman Sachs analysis reported by Fortune found that the unemployment gap between young graduates and non-graduates had narrowed, while their labor force participation rates had also fallen. Since 1997, participation had dropped about seven percentage points for young non-graduates, versus about two for graduates. Some people were staying in school. Some may have stopped searching because they were discouraged. Lower participation alone doesn't tell us why.

📌 Meaning: The narrowing gap doesn't tell the whole story. Some non-graduates are finding opportunity; others are outside the labor force altogether.

And this is the part I don't want parents to miss:

The lesson isn't "skip college." It's that the degree itself is becoming less of a career strategy. Whether your kid chooses college, a credential, an apprenticeship, or something else, the question is increasingly the same: What can they actually do that employers need?

There's another option between a four-year degree and "no credential."

Burning Glass found meaningful wage gains for workers earning non-degree credentials, particularly women and Black and Hispanic workers. But there's an important warning: employers that merely dropped degree requirements increased the share of hires with non-degree credentials by only about two percentage points.

📌 Meaning: Don't pay for a certificate because the school says employers value it. Find out whether employers actually hire people with that credential.

Levanon's advice to recent graduates was to broaden their options in three areas: location, occupation, and employer.

I’ve written about this before, and I like it as a conversation starter because it works for the 19-year-old in an apprenticeship and for the 23-year-old with a diploma and forty rejections.

Try this:

"If you could turn one dial a notch this month, which would it be: where you're willing to live, what kind of role you'd take, or what kind of employer you'd work for?"

Then ask what turning it would cost and what it might open up.

You're not asking them to move across the country or abandon what they trained for. You're asking which dial they could turn one click.

Sometimes one click is enough to get a job search moving again.

I think about Dewey whenever I read numbers like these. No chart ever told him what he could do. He found out by working, asking questions, and trying things. What our kids need from us is the room and the encouragement to do the same.

If this helped, please forward it to another parent who is having these conversations. Subscriptions are free at worklifefuture.com/subscribe.

Thanks for reading, and for having these conversations with them. I'd love to hear from you if you'd like to share your story.

Barry

WorkLifeFuture helps parents of emerging adults navigate the AI era together. Barry Kruse is the Head of Customer Success at Symbolic.ai, an AI writing and editorial platform for newsrooms and corporate communications teams. WorkLifeFuture is a personal project and does not represent Symbolic.ai's views.

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