The No-Degree Job Market Is Booming While Grads Stall

For most of the last two decades, young workers with and without college degrees rode the same labor market. Hiring booms lifted both groups; recessions punished both. That lockstep pattern has now broken. A new analysis from the Burning Glass Institute finds that workers ages 22 to 34 without college degrees are in one of their strongest job markets in roughly two decades, while young college graduates are going through one of their weakest stretches in the same period.

The divergence is what makes the finding startling. Gad Levanon, the institute's chief economist, told The Wall Street Journal that the supply of bachelor's degree holders is growing rapidly while the supply of people without one keeps shrinking, and added that he does not see the shift fading: "I don't think it's a temporary thing," according to reporting by Mint on the analysis.

Why workers without degrees are in demand

The biggest reason is plain supply and demand. Skilled trades are facing a retirement wave: fewer young people have entered fields like electrical work, plumbing, HVAC and elevator repair, and older tradespeople are leaving the workforce. Slower immigration has shrunk the available labor pool further. At the same time, demand keeps climbing. Construction is strong, with data centers and infrastructure projects creating steady work for people who can do hands-on labor, and recent federal jobs data show demand has also surged across food services and drinking places. Put together, it is the engine of the No-Degree Job Market boom.

The paychecks can be real. The median electrician earned about sixty-three thousand dollars in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the occupation is projected to grow about nine percent through 2035, with roughly seventy-two thousand seven hundred openings a year. HVAC technicians sit near sixty-one thousand dollars in median pay with projected growth of about eleven percent over the same stretch. Elevator installers and repairers sit above six figures in median pay, ahead of many white-collar desk jobs.

Why graduates are struggling

The No-Degree Job Market boom has a mirror image: the graduate slump. Employers have grown reluctant to hire inexperienced workers, are running leaner staffs, and are choosing from a growing supply of degree holders. Artificial intelligence now handles more of the entry-level work that companies used to hand to recent graduates, a pattern measured in a recent Stanford payroll study, which lets experienced employees cover more ground without junior help. Burning Glass notes the slump for young graduates began before the current AI boom, suggesting the technology is accelerating an existing problem rather than creating it alone.

The data show how deep the graduate slump runs. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported unemployment of about five-point-six percent among recent college graduates in the second quarter of 2026, with underemployment near forty-two percent. Burning Glass found that just over half of bachelor's graduates were underemployed one year after graduation, working jobs that did not require a degree, and that nearly half were still underemployed a decade later. Once graduates start underemployed, the pattern tends to stick: close to three-quarters of them remained underemployed ten years on.

The degree still pays, with caveats

Before anyone cancels a college tour, the catch matters. Among prime-age workers, degree holders still face far lower unemployment: over the twelve months ending in July, the rate averaged about two-point-seven percent for bachelor's holders versus four-point-seven percent for workers with only a high-school diploma. What changed is not that non-graduates now have lower unemployment. It is that each group is doing unusually well or unusually poorly compared with its own history.

Pay gaps remain wide. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put median weekly earnings for workers 25 and older with bachelor's degrees at about one thousand five hundred seventy-eight dollars in 2025, versus roughly nine hundred sixty-six dollars for workers whose education ended with a high-school diploma. The bureau also projects that occupations typically requiring a bachelor's degree will grow faster through 2035 than those requiring only a diploma.

What you study matters as much as whether you go. Burning Glass found that graduates in engineering, computer science, mathematics, finance and accounting were more likely to land jobs that actually required a degree, and health and education graduates also fared well. Those who majored in public safety, recreation or wellness studies, or general business fields like marketing, management and human resources were much more likely to end up underemployed.

For anyone choosing a path now, the lesson is to price the specific route, not the credential in the abstract. Compare tuition against expected earnings in the target field, check whether the career actually requires a four-year degree, since employers have been slow to turn degree-optional hiring policies into practice, and weigh alternatives like registered apprenticeships, where participants earn while they learn and finish with a nationally recognized credential. The old rule that almost any degree was automatically a good investment is the part of the story that may be over.