As students return, recent grads still struggle to find jobs

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - For many young adults, securing stable employment in one’s ideal field seems harder than it was a couple decades, or even years, ago.

While first years gear up for their first ever-day of classes, and fourth-years prepare for the final year of their undergraduate education, many newly grads remain at a standstill. Unemployed or settling for a job non relevant to their major.

Brandon Williams graduated from the University of Virginia in 2025. He considers himself one of the lucky ones, as he struggles to find temporary employment before heading to law school.

“It doesn’t take having to be a statistician to kind of tell that something’s a little bit different,” Williams said. “We might have it, you know, maybe a little bit harder than the generations before us.”

Williams is taking a gap year to study for his LSAT exam. A year off before law school was always the plan, he said. Struggling to find a temporary job after graduating with a politics degree and plenty of extracurriculars, he said, was not.

“There’s a ton to do in the political sphere right now because we have midterms coming up pretty fast approaching, and of course, the Virginia gubernatorial election as well,” Williams said.

Williams said this is the norm for his graduating class.

“I have multiple friends that have applied to like hundreds of jobs,” Williams said, “and the real struggle is that a lot of times they’re not hearing back.”

Maggie Collins is another 2025 UVA grad who just started a job after applying for the better part of a year.

“I was a little dismayed by the amount of job postings postgraduation,” Collins said. “Especially in the environmental department.”

Collins originally planned to work in environmental science.

Last December she officially accepted her dream job but never got to start.

“I was really excited about the job and the new beginning it could bring for me,” Collins said. “But then I did get bad news, I guess toward the beginning of February, I received a really vague email.”

That email rescinded Collins’ offer, citing cuts to federal funding.

Economists at UVA said government spending cuts might be making the job market more competitive.

“I think they are particularly effecting and delaying the entering of a lot of recent graduates,” Joao Ferreira, economist at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center, said.

The challenge, Ferreira said, is proving this trend with numbers.

“If you get a job as a barista, you are making less money than you were expecting,” Ferreira said. “You can probably not pay off your student loans with that money and still you do not count as unemployed.”

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