42% of America’s recent college grads are working jobs that don’t need a degree. From Kathmandu to Paris, young people are taking to the streets

About 42% of recent college graduates, ages 22 to 27, were underemployed in June, working jobs that typically don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s tracker of the labor market for recent college graduates. That’s up from 41.8% in May but down from 42.4% in November 2025 and below the pandemic-era high of 43.4% in October 2020.

Unemployment is the other half of the problem. Recent grads’ jobless rate hit 5.7% in June, well above the 4.1% rate for all workers. That’s a reversal. From 1990, when the Fed’s data begins, through 2018, recent grads were more likely to be unemployed than the average worker in just eight months. They have been more likely every month since January 2021. The gap hit a record 1.8 percentage points in April 2025 and is still near it.

Some degrees fare much worse than others. Using 2024 Census data, the Fed’s breakdown by college major found criminal justice had the most underemployment, at 65.8%, followed by performing arts at 63.9% and fine arts at 58.9%.

On unemployment, computer engineering was second-worst of any major at 7.8%, and computer science fourth at 7%. Education majors fared best: special education had a 0.7% jobless rate and elementary education 1.2%. Nursing was 2.1%.

Too many elites, too few seats

Turchin, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut and project leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, has a name for this, and a darker idea of where it leads.

He is known for the theory of “elite overproduction.” When a society produces more people aspiring to elite status than it has elite positions, the frustrated surplus turns on the system. In Turchin’s reading of history, it’s one of three pressures that build before a crack-up, along with falling living standards for ordinary people and governments that can’t pay their bills. (The U.S. national debt has soared to a record $40 trillion with no sign of slowing.)

Turchin has argued that the U.S. has reached a point seen repeatedly in past civilizations: too many products of elite education for the jobs the economy can generate. What tends to follow, in his telling, is “a wave of prolonged and intense sociopolitical instability.”

When Fortune asked him last year where he saw the pattern in everyday life, he started with the degree. “It’s actually everywhere you look,” Turchin said. “Look at the overproduction of university degrees.” He pointed to high recent-graduate unemployment as evidence that the value of a diploma “actually declines.”

At the time, he pointed to the crowded airport lounge as a symbol of an upper middle class with too many members. “The overproduction of lower-ranking elites results in decreased benefits for all,” he said.

A year later, the young have taken the theory into the streets, in countries where the lounge was never an option.

The sorting machine

In September 2025, Nepal banned 26 social media platforms. Within days, young protesters had set government buildings and politicians’ homes on fire, and Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli resigned. At least 76 people died. The ban was the spark, but the trend that set off the anger had a hashtag: “Nepo Kids,” the children of politicians posting their luxury lives online in a country where youth unemployment was about 21%.

In India this May, Chief Justice Surya Kant likened certain activists and unemployed young people to “cockroaches” and “parasites of society,” later saying he meant people with fraudulent degrees. The next day, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old Boston University graduate, posted on X: “What if all cockroaches came together?” The joke became the Cockroach Janta Party, a parody of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP, and then a protest movement. Its main target was leaks of national exams, including the test that sorts India’s would-be doctors. In July, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned.

In France, high schoolers have been walking out since mid-September over teacher shortages, classrooms that sometimes top 40 students. and Parcoursup—the national platform that decides who gets into which university. By October, roughly a third of France’s 3,700 lycées had been disrupted. On Oct. 17, the Interior Ministry counted 550,000 people in the streets as the protests widened into anger over the cost of living and turned violent in several cities. Protests have also spread to Belgium, Albania, Greece and Italy, part of a wave of youth unrest across Europe.

Among the students’ demands is 250,000 more university places. Higher Education Minister Philippe Baptiste has called the idea of scrapping Parcoursup “pure demagogy.” Turchin would recognize the standoff: young people demanding more seats, and a government that can’t easily pay for them, with France’s public debt projected to reach 121.7% of GDP next year.

The sparks are different but everywhere, young people who did what they were told turned on whoever runs the machine once they realized it was handing out a scarce number of good seats.

Becoming Italy?

The U.S. hasn’t burned anything down. But Rana Foroohar argued in the Financial Times this month that America is starting to look like Italy, where “older people are holding on to good jobs, and the young have trouble finding decent ones.”

The September U.S. jobs report had unemployment at 7.1% for workers ages 20 to 24, against 3.6% for those 25 to 54 and 3% for those over 55. Italy’s youth unemployment is far higher, about 20%. Foroohar’s point is the ratio: in both countries, young people’s unemployment runs roughly double that of middle-aged workers. She also argued that AI is favoring experienced older workers while squeezing entry-level jobs. She cited a Census Bureau paper published in September, also covered by Fortune, which found that graduates in the most AI-exposed fields faced a 5-percentage-point drop in the odds of landing a first job, and 13% lower earnings.

Turchin’s theory explains why there are too many credentialed young people. Foroohar’s explains why the door stays shut: The people inside aren’t leaving.

Underemployment for new grads has always been high. “When looking at recent college graduates with bachelors degrees, it’s been around 40% historically, going up and down within about 10 percentage points,” Andrew Hanson, senior director at the Strada Education Foundation, told PolitiFact this year. In the Fed’s data, the rate has run between about 38% and 47% since 2008.

What’s changed is the other side of the ledger. When a degree still guaranteed a lower jobless rate, a few years tending bar after graduation was a detour. Now it looks more like the destination, for more grads, in more countries. Nepal, India and France have shown what happens when enough of them decide the sorting is rigged.

Generative AI was used for research assistance and/or transcription of this article. The reporter independently reported and verified the factual claims in this article, and a human editor reviewed it before publication.