If I didn’t know better, the headlines would have me panicking. Twenty-two thousand jobs added. Slowest growth in years. Tech layoffs everywhere. It sounds like a crisis.
But when you look closer, things aren’t as extreme as they seem.
Layoffs grab attention when big tech firms announce cuts, but across the economy, they’re about the same as before the pandemic.
Wages are up 3.8 percent over the past year, while prices rose 3.2 percent, so most workers are slightly better off than they were a year ago.
Unemployment has ticked up to 4.3 percent, the highest since 2021, but still nowhere near the double-digit spikes of 2008 or 2020.
New grads are feeling the squeeze most. College graduates aged twenty to twenty-four face a 9.3 percent unemployment rate. For grads twenty-five and older, it’s about 2.5 percent.
Young grads have always had higher unemployment, usually about twice as high, but right now the gap is closer to four times. That lines up with what I keep hearing in Humans of GradSimple interviews, where people talk about how much harder it feels to land that first role.
Quitting has slowed too. Only 2 percent of workers left their jobs in July, down from 3 percent in 2022. When people stay put, fewer openings appear for new hires.
So while the headlines make it sound like a disaster, the truth is less dramatic. The market is cooling, not collapsing. And while some sectors are slowing, others are quietly hiring. I’ll share where in the first issue of Job Market Like I’m 5.
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