What Today’s College Students Need That Previous Generations Didn’t
College degrees don’t guarantee good jobs anymore, so students must build resumes and AI skills in high school and college, experts say.
;)
Education news and commentary, delivered right to your inbox.
Sign up for The 74 newsletter.
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
For high school graduates about to head off to college the news is alarming: The degree they’re about to pursue might not land them the job they want.
College grads are facing a tough job market, with headlines almost daily declaring their prospects or or call their a
High school students entering college need to think ahead and build work experience and skills as soon as they can, experts say. College is still key to long-term success. Just not on its own.
It’s now what some experts refer to as “college and”: and an internship; and training in at least Artificial Intelligence basics; and a career credential; and some project or passion that demonstrates a student can use the skills learned in class in the real world.
“Durable” or “soft” skills such as teamwork, reasoning and collaboration are also considered a must in the workplace.
“We’ve seen a transition into employers wanting a little bit more quantifiable evidence that students actually have skills,” said Scott Fleming, executive director of the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia.
“Employers who are looking at first hires out of college… they want to see that they already have work experience,” Fleming told a . “The degree is important. But did you also get work integrating the learning, or an internship, project based learning, undergraduate research, something else as part of that education enterprise? That, to an employer, signals as well that you have developed those skills along the way.”
AI which is automating tasks, is also disrupting the job market, experts noted, on top of the increasing demand from employers for more evidence than just a college degree that graduates have the skills they want.
Jeff Strohl, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, said he doesn’t envy students trying to chart a path toward a career with all the shifting demands of employers and the impact of AI on the economy.
“In the 1980s, you just got a BA, the employer would train you and everything would be nice,” Strohl said. “Now much more of that workforce preparation falls on the student.”
He still urges students to go to college, saying higher education degrees offers the best chance at long-term success. But he and several other career experts and researchers have a few key pieces of advice for young people as they prepare for a career:
- Learn how to use AI as a tool, not be replaced by it.
- Build resumes while in high school and college with jobs and internships. Internships are scarce, but students still need to seek them out to build skills, contacts and references.
- College majors can matter a lot, though AI is slashing the value of some once-certain degrees.
- Expect to be nimble and adapt as the job market changes.
- Consider how well a college provides AI training or work experiences when choosing a school.
- Find ways to show mastery of “soft” or “durable” skills through jobs, projects or new tests that are emerging that can certify mastery of them.
“Don’t get anxious,” Strohl said. “But be purposeful and deliberate… Engage, engage. Be deliberate. Don’t let stuff happen to you.”
The data on today’s job market is bleak, with college graduates finding fewer jobs to launch careers, and many having to take jobs below what their degree would usually allow. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates was 5.7% in the first quarter of 2026, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently reported, the highest rate since the pandemic.
A separate study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found the advantage a college degree has in finding a job over just a high school diploma — independent of the pandemic and AI. College graduates, researchers found, are now having to search for jobs longer than high school graduates do.
Between 1976 and 2000, high school graduates had to look for a job for 11 weeks before finding one, while college graduates found jobs faster, in just eight weeks. Today, high school graduates are still taking 11 weeks to find a job, but college graduates are now job hunting for 12 weeks.
“That… gap is now in favor of high school graduates,” said researcher Barış Kaymak.
It’s not clear how much the recent growth of Career Technical Education programs in high schools has affected the difference between high school and college graduates. Though students who earn career credentials in high school can have better job prospects after graduating and could draw some students away from college, the value of credentials varies greatly, and national data hasn’t shown enough students shifting to CTE to affect the trend.
The New York report also highlighted a larger problem: More than 40% of recent graduates were underemployed — doing jobs that don’t require a degree.
Underemployment is both costly to graduates and hard to overcome. A by the Strada Education Foundation and Burning Glass Institute found that underemployment gives graduates a “heavy financial cost.” Though college graduates earn 25% more than just having a high school diploma, even in jobs that don’t require a degree, that’s much less than the 88% more they would earn if they found a job that matched their degree.
“This leaves underemployed graduates on weaker financial footing as they start their careers, especially those with substantial student loan debt,” the report stated.
It’s also hard to recover if the first job out of college isn’t a good one. Strada reported that 73% of graduates who started out underemployed after college remained underemployed 10 years later.
Strada identified a few keys to improving odds of finding a good job, with the most important being picking the right major and having job experience before graduating. An internship or job, Strada found, reduces the risk of underemployment more than 49%.
Even STEM degrees, once thought of as a guarantee of success, aren’t created equal. Strada found that computer science, engineering or mathematics majors were much better off than those in fields like biology.
Degrees in nursing, engineering, architecture and math-intensive business fields such as accounting and finance had the best chances of avoiding underemployment.
A by the Center for an Urban Future offered a snapshot of what underemployment can look like by analyzing how graduates of the City University of New York system fared after leaving school:
That report found that:
- Job postings for applicants with little experience have fallen 37% since 2022
- Internship opportunities for college students are also down 37% since the pandemic.
- Ten percent of CUNY graduates were working in retail or food service five years after graduation, rising to 13% for graduates of CUNY’s community colleges.
- Surveys show that just 12% of CUNY graduates had a paid internship during college.
“In this challenging hiring environment, CUNY’s mostly low-income students will struggle to gain access to well-paying jobs unless CUNY develops far stronger connections with employers,” the report stated.
Merrill Pond, executive vice president of the Partnership for New York City, a leading business organization, also called out a need for more work-based learning.
“If students are not given the opportunity to put something on their resume that will make them stand out or start to develop that network, they’re often going to be at a disadvantage,” Pond said as the report was released.
Though CUNY was praised for progress in connecting students to work, including through partnerships with several nonprofits that train and mentor students and help them find internships, the report found efforts are still falling short.
Lauren Andersen, CUNY’s vice chancellor for career engagement and industry partnerships, said some of the report’s findings were “sobering.”
She said the university’s own data shows 22% of students have paid internships, data it just started tracking in the 2023-24 school year. The university also started a new effort, CUNY Beyond, in 2025 to improve career advising and make faculty more aware of how they can help students connect to jobs.
Students are three times more likely to have a job at graduation if they do a paid internship, Andersen said, and twice as likely to have an internship or job if they meet with a career advisor.
Many students come to college without family connections to business or clear ideas of how to seek jobs.
“CUNY has to take on the role, and higher education institutions have to take on the role, of building those relationships for their students, and that’s something that we’re not necessarily historically set up to do,” she said.
Western Governor’s University is another school that has made a deliberate effort to connect students to jobs. It’s also joining a push by some high schools and nonprofits to evaluate and rate students on their soft skills to validate those skills to employers.
Students need to be able to show employers what they have learned and how they can succeed at work, Western Governors President Scott Pulsipher said at the same panel as Fleming. Colleges need to help them do that, as well as help them try out jobs to see if they like them and find out which skills they might need to do them.
“Every rising high school graduate should be more intentional about developing their vocational identity — meaning, how do they see themselves contributing to the world?” Pulsipher said. “It feels to me like they defer this too long.”
The emergence of AI has created new complications for young people. Changes are happening so fast, it’s hard to plan what the job market might look like in a few years.
Georgetown’s Strohl said new high school graduates might be better off in four years than today’s college graduates.
“The shocks that we’re seeing to the labor market today, and are clearly impacting recent college grads… will be better understood,” he said. “The education system… will have had a chance to figure out some strategies of response, and actually, to what degree is AI going to be a problem. “
He also cautioned AI might not be as big a disruption as some fear. Automation had the “same kind of hype that we’re hearing about AI,” but worries 40 million jobs would be replaced by machines turned into eight million jobs at most just adapted to work with automation, not replaced by it.
Harvard’s McKittrick urged students entering college not to be caught up in the “noise” of a changing job market, with some firms hiring few people, but others hiring many. Along with working jobs while in college to build a resume, she said students need to learn to use AI.
“What we’re hearing from employers is that they do want young people with AI skills,” McKittrick said. “They might not exactly know what those skills are, but they want people who are kind of comfortable using the technology. Young people should be thinking about, ‘Does the college have an AI literacy strategy?’ ”
Others said it will be key to also develop “soft” or “durable” skills such as critical thinking and ingenuity to put AI to best use.
“AI still needs the humans to say, ‘Even as I’m using it, how should I be using it?’ ” said Pulsipher of Western Governors University. “Are the outcomes that it’s providing me useful and relevant to what we’re trying to do?”
Laura Ullrich, Director of Economic Research in North America of the job search website Indeed, is telling her three sons to find jobs while in school to explore what they want to do, while also making sure to build soft skills that are becoming more important in job applications.
“I think a few years ago, you would have seen very few computer science majors feel the need to call out that they were a good writer or maybe had more critical thinking skills, or had taken a bunch of philosophy classes,” Ulrich said. “But today… young job seekers are thinking about this quite differently.”
Did you use this article in your work?
We’d love to hear how The 74’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.
Patrick O’Donnell is a correspondent at The 74, covering the impact of the pandemic on America's education system
[email protected]