According to the New York Federal Reserve, labor conditions for recent college graduates have 'deteriorated noticeably' in the past few months, and the unemployment rate now stands at an unusually high 5.8 percent. Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work. Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging'an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis. The first theory is that the labor market for young people never fully recovered from the coronavirus pandemic'or even, arguably, from the Great Recession. 'Young people are having a harder time finding a job than they used to, and it's been going on for a while, at least 10 years,' David Deming, an economist at Harvard, told me. The Great Recession led not only to mass layoffs but also to hiring freezes at many employers, and caused particular hardships for young people. After unemployment peaked in 2009, the labor market took time to heal,...
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