After graduating college today, many young people are left asking “why can’t I find a job?” After being sold the “American dream” of going to college to get a better life, we’re instead going into tens of thousands in student loan debt for a job that is unlikely to pay it off. That is, if we can even land a job in the first place. 

Youth unemployment has been on the rise, reaching 9.5% in February. This includes young people both with and without college degrees, with over 40% of those with college degrees considered underemployed. The job prospects for young people these days seem about as stable as our mental health—and certainly exacerbates the feeling of existential dread as our world plunges into more imperialist war and climate destruction.

Why Is It So Hard To Find A Job?

Many companies right now are in a “low hire, low fire” environment, meaning they’re hiring fewer inexperienced applicants and they’re less willing to fire longer-standing employees. This is because the economy is weak and stagnating. Employers feel less inclined to take on hiring costs, and young people just entering the job market are getting hit the hardest. Another challenge is Trump’s unstable rule that sows uncertainty for corporations, meaning they don’t know how to plan as well for the future. With the volatility of war and fluctuation of Trump’s economic policies, businesses don’t feel as motivated to risk bringing on new hires.

The percentage of American workers with college degrees has skyrocketed over the decades, from 11% in 1970 to 38% in 2025, largely made possible by predatory student loans amounting to over $1.8 trillion. This has increased the number of qualified young people with college degrees, but the job openings have not increased at the same rate. In a recent poll by the Institute of Student Employers, college graduate hiring dropped by 8% in the last academic year, forcing young people to apply to more jobs for even the hope of an interview. 

AI is exacerbating these processes. In order to process the influx of job applications, more companies are using AI to sort, recruit, and make hiring decisions. As a result, applicants are increasingly using AI to send in resumes to keep up. This further oversaturates the hiring market with a deluge of applicants for each job opening—each job opening is getting an average of 60% more applicants since 2022. This leads to the endless cycle of putting out a wide net of applications in hopes of being able to pass through the AI scanners.

As the economy is in tumult and profits are getting squeezed, some companies, particularly in the tech and banking sectors, are in the process of replacing entry-level positions with AI. The cutting of entry-level jobs can have a catastrophic domino effect—many of these positions are used to train workers for higher-level positions, making it more challenging to gain needed experience in the workplace. For example, with AI replacing entry-level coding jobs, there will be fewer high-level software engineers. 

Recent high-profile mass layoffs at some companies, like Meta and Amazon, have added to the AI frenzy. At Amazon, over 30,000 employees (mostly white-collar employees) have been laid off since October, reportedly because the company is anticipating replacing these jobs with AI. Some reports however, suggest that these layoffs are actually used to increase the workload for those left, with one remaining Amazon employee saying, “[We’re] being asked to achieve the same goals with a third of the people.”

Capitalism Gives Us No Future

At its heart, the youth unemployment crisis flows from the logic of the capitalist system, which is both unable and unwilling to provide full employment for working people. Under capitalism, the bosses need unemployment to keep wages and conditions low for the whole working class. An unemployed person is more willing to take a job with a low wage and bad conditions out of desperation. Keeping an “army” of unemployed people in society makes employed workers easily replaceable. 

The capitalist system has no solutions for youth unemployment. We need to rebuild the labor movement and mass movements of young and working people for public sector jobs programs. We could start by reinstating the tens of thousands of federal workers that Trump fired last year, and expanding programs like WIC and SNAP. We need green union jobs to employ more workers while combatting the climate crisis. While Democrats have long run on the promise of cancelling the billions of dollars in student loan debt, this has far from come to fruition, further underscoring the need for a new workers’ party that fights to not just cancel debt, but also for free public college. We need a new party that calls to tax the rich and stands against Trump’s imperialist war.

Young people need to fight back. Unemployment has long spurred on youth rebellions, from the Arab Spring in the early 2010s to the more recent youth revolts in Nepal, Bangladesh, and across the African continent. This system is unable to provide us with any meaningful future, so young people everywhere need to fight against capitalism and for a socialist society.