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Rutgers students question future after 2026 graduation
Rutgers students discussed their plans for the future after the 2026 graduation ceremony.
- Many graduates are opting for gap years or career pivots instead of taking traditional jobs in their fields of study.
- Employers have pulled back on hiring new entrants, creating a “low-hire, low-fire” economy.
- Businesses are reportedly prioritizing more experienced workers, making it difficult for young people to gain necessary experience.
Gap years and career pivots are replacing plans to move out and take a traditional job for newly minted college graduates, as Rutgers, Montclair State and other New Jersey universities celebrate commencement in May.
The impact of inflation, economic uncertainty and, to some degree, artificial intelligence on hiring are leaving many of New Jersey’s college students disillusioned.
Rutgers senior and Kearny native Larissa Szeremeta majored in animal science — a degree that would help her land positions in research labs. Even those were hard to find, despite having looked for internships since she was a sophomore, she said.
“I was having a really hard time finding jobs,” Szeremeta said. A friend of a friend helped her land a summer internship at a veterinarian practice in Denville at the end of junior year.
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Szeremeta wants to become a vet but is taking a gap year to consider her options and build some work experience before she applies to a four-year veterinary college program.
She said she was lucky to land a job for now as a nurse at a Princeton animal hospital.
“I’m feeling a little scared,” she said of life after graduation.
Factors like President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs and the war against Iran, which has pushed up gas prices to a four-year-high, have made for a challenging hiring landscape for college grads this spring.
Many employers say they’ve pulled back from hiring because of these economic factors, as well as other unknowns, such as how AI will affect the labor market, according to recent research from Cengage Group, an education technology company.
Cengage found that the number of college graduates who found a job related to their field of study dropped from 41% of graduates in 2024 to 30% in 2025. The number of unemployed graduates still looking for work jumped from 20% in 2024 to 33% in 2025.
“I don’t think I know anybody who is planning beyond the next year,” said Rutgers freshman Ansh Butani, who is majoring in business analytics and information technology. “Kids my age see that the idea of the middle class is very quickly disappearing.
“And when they look at the shrinking window of opportunity available to them, there’s nothing for them to say, ‘I can make something of myself,’ because they’ve seen institutions fail on them — political and others,” he said.
Making money in a high-status job that actually gives you a living wage is “so incredibly difficult” that many graduates feel “they can’t realistically make a difference and put food on the table,” he said.
A ‘low-hire, low-fire’ economy
New Jersey has a 5.2% unemployment rate — not quite the highest since the COVID-19 pandemic but higher than the lower range around 3% in 2022.
Numbers published by the New Jersey Department of Labor in early April show that the state added only 5,100 jobs in 2025, down from the previously estimated 9,000.
The new revisions come amid what experts including New York Federal Reserve President John Williams have characterized as a “low-hire, low-fire” economy.
“There’s been a hesitancy by businesses to hire too much, because you may wish you hadn’t, and also a hesitancy to lay off workers, because you may wish you needed those employees,” he said at a December banking event in Jersey City.
The revised 2025 job numbers suggest “that the local economy is even weaker than we assumed,” Joseph Foudy, an economics professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business in Manhattan, said in an email. “That’s been an issue for the last couple of years, and not just now.”
Last September, the unemployment rate for college graduates was actually the same as the unemployment rate for high school students without a college degree, federal data showed. Typically, high school graduates with no college degree have a higher unemployment rate than college graduates, according to federal data.
College students changing career plans
Tenafly native Andrew Zhang, a Rutgers junior majoring in political science, is already changing his plans to meet the challenges facing new graduates.
He wanted to get a job in finance. But he’s talking to a recruiter about joining the U.S. Navy. The military service would help pay for an MBA from an elite college and stand out on his resume, he said.
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Rutgers students compete with AI in the job market
Students at Rutgers University have an uncertain future as AI is taking up most entry level jobs in the market
He still has a year to graduate, but said it was “a little bit scary” to think of life after college. “Part of it is seeing some of your older friends graduating this week that you’re going to miss, but part of it is also that a lot of people don’t know what they want to do,” he said.
“It’s difficult to find a job or an internship right now because of AI, offshoring, and other competition,” he said.
He’s seen some “smart” students find jobs, and others join their parents’ businesses. “But the number of people who graduate and just don’t know what they are doing — that’s actually starting to become a good percentage of people nowadays,” Zhang told NorthJersey.com.
Liberal arts students at a state school like Rutgers will struggle to get hired, he said. He decided to join the services after a frustrating few summers trying to land internships on platforms like Indeed and Handshake.
More students relying on hiring platforms
Job profiles on Indeed created by recent college graduates have increased, according to the hiring platform’s economic research arm, Indeed Hiring Lab.
Meanwhile, there was a 7% year-over-year decrease in 2025 in junior level job postings on Indeed.
“The more recent surge in profile creation among soon-to-be or recent grads also reflects a change in the graduate hiring landscape,” wrote Arcenis Rojas, a data scientist at Indeed Hiring Lab, and Laura Ullrich, the company’s director of economic research in North America, in a blog post on the company’s website.
“Previous years, grads might have relied on campus recruiting, converted internships, and/or word of mouth to land a job,” they wrote. “But now, they are increasingly turning to a job search platform. The large jump in profile creation among 2024 and 2025 grads is not fully a platform trend; it’s a signal that something has changed in the labor market itself.”
And that “something,” the two have argued, is a much tougher job market for college graduates.
Looking for more experienced workers
Oxford Economics reported in May 2025 that new entrants in the labor market accounted for 85% of the total rise in unemployment.
“The rise in the recent graduate unemployment rate is largely part of a mismatch between an oversupply of recent graduates in fields where business demand has waned,” the report stated.
Even the stronger jobs numbers released earlier this May about the rising number of people on a payroll in April do not necessarily trickle down to recent college grads, according to analysts.
“Businesses are less willing to take risks on hiring young workers,” Thomas Simons, chief U.S. economist at capital markets firm Jefferies said in an email. “Losing experienced workers at this pace for such a long time leaves an experience vacuum and likely causes businesses to think that they need to target mid- to high-experience workers to replace their retirees.”
“This causes a huge problem for younger people since they cannot get the experience they need to get a good job,” he said.
One grad who landed a job
With companies using AI screeners to filter out the top candidates, even paid and unpaid internships have become difficult to secure.
After Siya Brahmbhatt, a computer science major at Rutgers-New Brunswick, applied for a job online in the financial services sector as a software engineer, she had to complete a programming assessment. That qualified her for a coding project where applicants competed over a 24-hour window to solve and present programmatic solutions to a problem.
A successful internship followed last summer, and now she has a job offer. “I think it’s hard for everyone,” she said, adding that she feels lucky to have a job.
“It’s a lot of applying, meeting people, going to career fairs, putting yourself out there,” Brahmbhatt said.
Butani, the Rutgers freshman, said the traditional idea of the American Dream now seems unattainable to many Gen Z youth. “The expected reward from the American Dream, that if you put your time and effort toward work, you are rewarded with a good life and social safety net, is just not there for many Gen Z youth,” he said.
“Making a good living seems to be such a difficult task,” he said, “but even more so with AI, it’s almost humiliating.”
Mary Ann Koruth covers K12, higher education, and culture in the states’ diverse communities for Northjersey.com and The Record. Email: koruthm@northjersey.com
Daniel Munoz covers business, consumer affairs, labor and the economy for NorthJersey.com and The Record. Email: munozd@northjersey.com; Twitter:@danielmunoz100, Facebook and Instagram