Fwd: The End of the Higher Ed Benefit?
Cornelius Hamelberg
From: Philip Balboni, PhD from Philip Balboni, PhD <philip...@substack.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2025 at 20:59
Subject: The End of the Higher Ed Benefit?
The End of the Higher Ed Benefit?For Gen Z, a college degree isn't what it was once
Recently, a study appeared from the U.S. Current Population Survey indicating that the unemployment rate among male college grads in Generation Z (born 1995-2012) is effectively the same as for their male coevals who lack college degrees. In other words, young men with 4 year degrees have, on average, about the same chance of being unemployed as those who do not have such degrees. This is a stark departure from previous generations, when college educated men were much less likely to be unemployed. (A Fortune summary of the study’s findings can be found here, though behind a paywall). This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Of course, those with college degrees do, on average, earn more than their non grad peers. This is of no help, however, for those without a job. Moreover, looking solely at the nominally higher wages of college grads does not factor in how these wages are negatively offset by the enormous, compounding levels of debt with which most young grads are saddled (more on this below). From under this debt burden many grads worry they will never crawl, as even many of my recent students at Northeastern feared. They are right to worry. Struggling to keep up with both rapidly rising costs of living and student loan payments, twenty-something grads are being forced to take on credit card debt at obscenely high rates of interest, and/or to partake of predatory “buy now pay later” schemes. Barring some sort of debt “jubilee” (rather than the failed and highly misleading Biden-era loan “forgiveness” program), many of these young people may well be indebted for a very long time indeed.¹ On the surface, the rate of unemployment for young men with and without bachelor’s degrees hovers around 7%. This is, however, going off the “headline” unemployment number offered by the “U3” employment calculation which, as I wrote about last year, drastically undercounts the true ranks of the unemployed. When one includes broader unemployment estimates, which include “discouraged,” “marginally attached,” and “underemployed” workers, the unemployment rate for Gen Z men with college degrees would likely be between 10% and 15%.² Unemployment, variously defined, isn’t the only way to look at the problem. There is also something called “NEET,” which refers to people who are “not in employment, education, or training.” Generally speaking, “NEETS” are those who have fallen, or been cast off, the ladder of upward mobility entirely. Young men, including many college grads, have been entering “NEET” status at an accelerating rate in recent years, many of them descending into what we might call “involuntary idleness”: a condition often marked by addiction (to drugs, but also to video games, pornography, and other male-skewing afflictions, on which corporations profitably prey), as well as by a progressive, sometimes terminal diminishment of morale. While this problem seems to be affecting younger men in particular, it is not limited to them. As researchers such as Nicholas Eberstadt have documented, there are millions of men—likely over ten million as of 2022—who have abandoned the idea of working all together. To blame this condition on individual men themselves is both cruel and stupid. Yes, some may “choose” to blow up the possibility of material security, social prestige, and a sense of self-worth. Yet, in the vast majority of cases, society has simply left these men behind, offering them no avenues towards personal fulfillment, whether pecuniary, emotional, moral, or familial. How women are faring This focus on men should not blind us to the analogous problems facing young women. Yes, women now have better post-grad outcomes, as they have better grades in secondary school and college. Yet rates of unemployment among young women are rising also, and the vast majority of job applications from both young men and young women are going unanswered. Indeed, it is now not uncommon for young grads to submit hundreds of applications and receive zero response. In large part because of the socioeconomic conditions within which they have been forced to live (and regardless of the feel good “lean in” feminism of the upper classes) a majority of American women are very much not better off than they were two or three decades ago. That this is broadly ignored in our media and popular culture is a consequence of the prevalent tendency to conflate all American women with those who graduate from top 50 colleges and make it into the top 10% of wage earners. Unsurprisingly, this tendency has allowed for a more triumphantly telic narrative of female empowerment that, in reality, simply, does not apply to women in the bottom 50% of American society. These women remain on the hook for the brunt of domestic and emotional labor even as they are forced to work jobs that offer minimal pay and provide little sense of personal fulfillment or dignity. (On these points see, for instance, the works of Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, Barbara Ehrenreich, Alissa Quart, Joan C. Williams, and Ruth Milkman, among others). Moreover, while young women have lower rates of suicide, addiction, self-destructive behavior, their rates of mental health “disorders” have continued to climb in recent years, with marked jumps since the pandemic lockdowns. Despite the apparent “gains” for women in the workplace and society writ large, there is an epidemic of profound unhappiness and discontent among young women, just as there is for young men. Tragically, the mental anguish that young women increasingly face has been medicalized and individualized to an obscene degree: young women’s mental “conditions” and “disorders” are, as a rule, represented to them as wholly individual afflictions, consequent from the specificities of familial history (as always, blame the parents) and/or from the idiosyncrasies of their neuropsychology. Rarely are these afflictions attributed to their primary source: the “condition” of our society and socioeconomic (dis)order, and the myriad psychological, physiological, moral, and spiritual wounds that this (dis)order inflicts upon young people from birth. The students (mainly, but not uniformly, female) who have shared with me accounts of their chronic, sometimes crippling, mental pain seem never to have been told that this pain “is not their fault.” They seem never to have been told that, while they are indeed responsible for bearing it, their mental pain has been imposed upon them by a society that has become ever more inimical to the possibility of human flourishing: a society, still controlled by those long past youth, that seems to care nothing for what is being done to younger generations. It is not so surprising, then, that the students to whom I have suggested the above—that their pain is “not their fault,” that it is a reaction to a sick society, even if they must take responsibility for bearing and managing it—have broken instantly into tears. The distress, both personal and career wise, is of course exacerbated intensely by the aforementioned student debt “crisis,” which shows no sign of abating. While estimates vary, Gen Z college grads hold something in the neighborhood of $23,000 in student loan debt. (The figure is from 2024; it is almost certainly higher today). Other estimates put the average well above $30,000. Overall, as of the start of 2025, the total amount of student loan debt in the US was $1.63 trillion. Many people do not really understand that borrowers, whether of student, credit card, or any other kind of debt, end up paying far more than they originally borrowed. This ignorance is especially and understandably the case for 18 year olds, who sign onto the ensuing usury without quite comprehending what they are getting themselves into. Thus the genre of TikTok videos in which twenty-somethings weep on camera about how stupid they were when they signed away their futures to finance college. Of course, they weren’t stupid: they were children, and society told both them and their parents that college was the ticket to a good, materially secure, life. The only silver lining for young borrowers who feel that they are “drowning” under the weight of their loans (the payments for which have now restarted in full) is that they are in very good company. AI and Un(der)employment In a significant study from early 2024, some 52% of college graduates, both male and female, remain “underemployed” 1 year after graduation. (Reminder: “underemployment” refers to working a job below one’s education or skill level, often those with BAs working jobs that do not require such degrees). More worryingly, 73% of graduates who are underemployed in their first post-graduation job remain underemployed a decade later. In other words, being underemployed right out of college makes one vastly more likely of remaining so for years, if not for the entirety of one’s career. (The study didn’t have data on what happens twenty or thirty years out, but one can surmise). If, as this and other studies suggest, a large portion of new college grads are being forced to take jobs that do not require a 4-year degree, and if doing so gives one an almost 75% likelihood of remaining underemployed for at least a decade thereafter—if this is the case, then why then go to college, especially given the levels of debt incurred thereby? There is little reason to expect that the situation will improved. Increasingly, companies are abandoning 4-year degree requirements from their job searches—a trend fueled by, and likely to accelerate with, the continued adoption of AI. At the same time, the so-called “wage premium” commanded by bachelor’s holders vis-a-vis their non-grad peers has been, depending on demographics, either stagnating or declining in recent years, with a marked downturn since the pandemic. This is combined with broader trends since the 2008 financial crisis, indicating that wage growth, while stagnant in real terms across most industries, has been relatively less stagnant among those with only a high-school degree. (In other words, the wages of those with college degrees have performed worse than those of non-college educated workers since 2008, even if real wages, when compared to the true cost of living, have fallen across the board). AI, as already intimated, is making the employment problems of young people much worse. Many types of jobs, from programmers to copywriters to lawyers to accountants to even actors, now seemed destined for imminent discontinuation, especially at the entry and journeyman level. While no one can say for sure how bad it will get, it is by now a foregone conclusion that large numbers of jobs and job types will be eliminated in the coming years, affecting younger workers in particular. Making matters worse, almost no one in Washington, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or academia seems to have any idea about what to do about the seismic socioeconomic shifts that will thus occur. As for the abstract invocations of a “universal basic income,” occasionally trotted out as a panacea for the loss of jobs to AI—such invocations are so utterly divorced from contemporary socioeconomic and psychosocial conditions that their success would require a truly revolutionary reshaping of not only our jobs but our minds and personal lives for which most of us are wholly unprepared. To see how the replacement of human with machine labor has already begun—and is hitting young grads the most—consider the following example from when I was teaching at UC Berkeley from 2021-2023. At the time, the great majority of my students were studying computer science, software development, and the like, with the intention (nay, expectation) to find well-paid employment in Silicon Valley. This was the era (2021-2023) in which “tech” seemed the most fruitful career path, one almost guaranteed to result in a well-paying job by the age of 24. I warned students at the time about boom and bust cycles in professions, and that it might behoove them to double major in a field outside the tech realm, but I’m sure I sounded totally out of touch with the times. Sadly, the number of jobs openings in computer science and software development did indeed subsequently fall off a cliff, as this and related charts from the Federal Reserve show. While Berkeley grads may be in a better position given collegiate prestige, a great many young people who took on debt to major in tech-related sectors are now being forced into the “gig” and part-time economy—driving for Uber or working a few shifts at a gym or coffee shop. Many of them do not, as I can attest from talking to a good number of them, see any obvious way to get back on the expected track. As one young woman working at my gym told me recently, “Yeah, all my friends majored in tech. I think maybe one of them found a job. Most of us are just lucky if we can live with a relative or in someone’s basement while we figure out what to do next.” While this young woman had been studying for the LSAT, she had recently decided to postpone applying to law school on the grounds that she didn’t know how AI would effect the job market for young lawyers. Given how much law school costs, her decision is probably prudent. 1 The Biden-era efforts to wipe away student loan debt were, in addition to being seriously mismanaged and badly misrepresented, little more than tax payer bailout. In other words, the loans to be “forgiven” were simply to be paid off by tax payers. Those who profited from the loans were still to get their money, only this money would now be paid by Americans as a whole rather than just the student borrowers. Hence the—understandable—charge that this was granting a handout on the public’s dime to a demographic, college grads, who tend to vote Democrat. Worse still, it is rarely understood that the easy availability (if highly usurious) of college loans makes colleges more expensive, creating an overall inflationary effect on the entire higher ed experience, driving up costs to absurd levels that have no clear correlation with an improved educational experience. 2 I used AI to help me calculate the above, broader estimates for unemployment among Gen Z men. These AI estimates, drawing on available government and private data, seem reasonable to me—albeit very much on the conservative side. You're currently a free subscriber to Philip Balboni, PhD. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
© 2025 Philip Balboni
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