After wearing the cap and gown, snapping photos with family, and saying goodbye to college friends, new graduates will pivot to their first postgrad job.
Others will hope their degrees and newly acquired skills will soon lead to a job offer like those of their peers.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York analyzed 73 college majors, including miscellaneous groupings, using Census Bureau data from 2024 to examine unemployment for recent grads, defined as 22- to 27-year-olds with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Several art-related majors had high unemployment rates, but anthropology ranked highest at nearly 8%. Unemployment for early childhood education majors was also among the highest, but a few educational fields had the lowest unemployment rates.
The chart below shows the college majors with rates above 6.0%.
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Daniel Zhao, the chief economist at Glassdoor, told Business Insider that the majors with the highest rates are interesting because they don’t fit into a single group.
“You have some majors that have very restrictive job markets, like fine arts or performing arts, but then you also have other majors that have been very attractive and that offer high-paying jobs, like computer engineering or computer science,” Zhao said.
Zhao pointed to underemployment rates, or the share of grads getting a job that doesn’t usually need a degree. Computer engineering and computer science had underemployment rates below 20%, while anthropology, fine arts, and performing arts had rates above 50%.
“Say a computer science grad is having a hard time finding a job in tech in the current market, but they know that if they can land one, it’ll be worth their while because the pay in tech is so much higher than other industries,” Zhao said. “So they’re willing to sit it out and wait until a good role comes along.”
Zhao said grads with anthropology or fine arts degrees “don’t necessarily have the financial cushion to not look for a job right now” because these roles typically don’t pay as much as a tech role.
The US just had the lowest year of job growth since 2003 outside recessions. While layoffs haven’t ticked up much and unemployment remains low, hiring has tumbled from a few years ago, making it an especially rough market for people newly entering the workforce. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates was 5.6% in December, up from 4.8% at the start of 2025.
“This low-hire, low-fire trend has likely contributed to the rise in the unemployment rates of young workers,” a research note from Goldman Sachs said, and added that it “raises the risk that these workers might be increasingly locked out of the labor market.”
Zhao suggested that job seekers in the slower job market work on networking, including leveraging career services at their alma mater and talking to alums. He also suggested people broaden their job search because there could be roles that need their skills that job seekers haven’t considered applying for.
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, previously told Business Insider that good jobs for computer science graduates aren’t at “the usual suspects.”
“I have always contended that the most exciting applications of computer science are not at Facebook, Google, and Amazon, but at the intersection of computing and other fields,” Farid said.
That can include computational drug discovery, computational finance, digital humanities, and other roles.
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