The graduate job market is cooked.
We’re told a degree is our ticket to a secure future. It’s a big fat lie.
Ok the adults didn’t technically lie, this was probably true in their time. But the labour market has fundamentally changed. A degree now is just the bare minimum.
We’re facing a supply and demand crisis: too few open roles against too many applicants.
We simply have more graduates than entry-level jobs requiring a degree. In many countries, over 40% of young adults have higher education, compared to 20% two decades ago (yay!). But our markets have not evolved fast enough to absorb them all into graduate-level roles (sike).
China’s universities have expanded at breakneck speed - from 11.8 million in 2024 to 12.2 million graduates in 2025. But many of these graduates hold degree in fields with limited openings. China’s youth unemployment soars above 20% in 2023 before officials stopped publishing the statistic.
Figure 1: Rising number of graduates in China
In India, over 46,000 graduates applied for just a few hundreds low-level sanitation jobs in one Indian state in 2024. Nationwide more than 1 in 10 graduates (and 1 in 5 female graduates) remained unemployed last year.
The graduate job crisis in Europe is just as bad, driven by credential inflation. Europe’s credential arms race is like military expenditure during the Cold War: each side keeps adding more, not because it makes anyone safer, but because of FOMO and a collective belief in the pseudo power of credentials to land jobs (they won’t).
In England, 37% of employees over 25 hold qualifications higher than their jobs require. Across Europe, 25% of graduates are overqualified. Europe’s credential inflation means young adults chase papers that guarantee few genuine opportunities.