As Ryan Jenkins was finishing his last semester of college, all he could do was watch while the jobs he was hoping to apply for were being cut.
Jenkins, then a student at St. Louis University, always wanted to work in local government, but federal funding cuts and the shrinking of government agencies meant there were fewer jobs to apply for.
“We just feel like the door is being closed in front of us,” Jenkins said, describing cuts to agencies carried out this spring by the Department of Government Efficiency.
Graduation came, and, from the 16 applications he submitted, Jenkins got no offers.
The Midwest Newsroom spoke to a dozen recent college graduates in six states about their experiences in the job market. These would-be entry level workers described using elaborate spreadsheets to track dozens of job applications, lost opportunities from federal cuts and hiring processes that made them question their self-worth.
While most of the 2025 spring graduates who spoke with The Midwest Newsroom ended up finding full-time jobs, graduates described hiring processes with limited communication.
The lack of communication is a point of tension for Generation Z, who have heard of peers submitting hundreds of applications and hearing nothing back.
For the past year, recent college graduates have faced a job market flooded with more applicants and fewer jobs. For the months where data is available, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an estimated 685,000 jobs were created. During that same period last year, 1,384,000 jobs had been added to payrolls, which represents a decrease of 51%.
In normal economic conditions, it usually takes a college graduate about six months to find their first job, according to Iowa State University economics professor Peter Orazem. The graduates who spoke to The Midwest Newsroom described searches that lasted beyond that six-month mark, which for some, means a student loan bill coming due without a full-time salary. Most federal student loans include an automatic six-month grace period after graduation.
“Any group that has relatively less work experience or less education gets hurt more when you start moving into an economic slowdown,” Orazem said. “And we’ve certainly seen a slowdown in the demand for workers in the last year or so.”
As another cohort of students enters its last semester of college, most are trying to stay positive.
In December, aspiring newspaper columnist Caroline Siebels-Lindquist, was finishing up a podcast for her capstone project. She will graduate with a journalism degree from Drake University in spring 2026 and is about to begin searching for her first full time job.
From the headlines, LinkedIn posts and hearing from other recent grads, Siebels-Lindquist said she knows the job hunt won’t be easy.
“A lot of my senior peers are quite nervous,” she said.
To deal with that anxiety, Siebels-Lindquist plans on leaning on her mentors and peers — and, if all else fails, going back to a summer job managing canoes at a summer camp in the Boundary Waters.
“Miracles happen,” Siebels-Lindquist said. “Keep the faith.”
Shrinking public sector
In July, Jenkins had an interview for the AmeriCorps VISTA program that would have placed him with Delmar Main Street, an organization that supports economic development in the St. Louis neighborhood that has historically been a racial and economic divide in the city.
Jenkins said the hiring manager got a call and had to pause the interview, but she didn’t turn off her camera.
“I can still see everything going on that’s nonverbal and I could tell something was up, just from her expression, and just by the length of time that she put herself on mute,” Jenkins said. “I just knew something was up.”
After the call, the hiring manager apologized and told Jenkins why she had to pause the interview. The funding for the position had been cut.
AmeriCorps VISTA was among many of the government agencies hollowed out by the Department of Government Efficiency. While the department still exists, the cancellation of grants has limited the organization’s ability to fund positions.
Jenkins, whose family members were once city clerks and firefighters, said he found the experience disheartening, as he wanted to work in a government job to help his community.
He said he wasn’t mad at AmeriCorps, but the experience led him to pause his job search for a few weeks to recover from the setback.
“I feel like I’m being told I can’t, and not even that I can’t, but they don’t want me,” Jenkins said.
“It's almost like online dating, almost, of like, there's someone swiping left or right on you, and you just kind of have to pray that you look good to them.”William Simpson, a 2025 University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate with a degree in broadcasting, on applying for jobs. He currently has two part-time jobs, one as a research assistant at UNL and another as a test proctor.
A slowing job market
According to an August report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, college graduates between the ages of 23 and 27 are seeing higher unemployment rates — from 3.25% in 2024 to 4.59% in 2025.
“This 1.34 percentage point increase represents more than just a statistical noise; it reflects a significant shift in how the economy is absorbing newly educated workers,” Federal Reserve researchers Serdar Ozkan and Nicholas Sullivan wrote earlier this year.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE, surveyed employers and universities to gauge the labor market for recent graduates. While the class of 2024 was entering a stable job market for new workers, signs that the job market was tightening for the class of 2025 appeared earlier this year.
“However, once the spring came, those numbers dropped to about flat,” Shawn VanDerziel, the president and CEO of NACE, said. “We knew it was going to be a very tough job market for that class.”
According to NACE’s 2026 Job Outlook report, 51% of employers ranked the job market as “fair” or “poor,” a significant change from the 2023 report when only 37% said the same thing.
With fewer jobs available, competition increases.
Abigale Baines, a University of San Diego graduate from a northern Chicago suburb, estimated she applied for more than 50 jobs after she graduated in May of 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Originally hoping to become an immigration lawyer, her interests shifted to working in social work or in the nonprofit sector.
The many rejection emails she received, she said, all felt similar.
“Maybe they are all going to ChatGPT and are saying, like, ‘Hi, can you please give us a let-them-down-easy job application rejection email?’ and ChatGPT just has one format that it likes, and so it sends that to everybody, and nobody makes any tweaks to it,” she said.
Looking back on her search, Baines estimated that about a third of employers responded quickly with a rejection but said many potential employers didn’t respond at all.
While it wasn’t in her field, Baines found a job as an administrative assistant with Lodge Financial, a mortgage broker for corporations in Skokie, Illinois.
Baines said she was thankful her parents can empathize with her situation.They had graduated during a tight labor market in the 1980s. Her father worked at a dude ranch and her mother was a waitress.
“The economy was in a complete downturn, and then it just took a couple years, and then things turned around and, you know, they were able to build a career,” she said.
‘The you-shaped hole’
It took advice from peers, professors and a fourth-grade teacher for Jonah Zacks to figure out what he wanted his career to be after graduating from college.
Zacks, then a computer science and economics major at Washington University in St. Louis, said he always knew he wanted a career that would make other people’s lives better. Thanks to Civics Unplugged, he found a method for asking if a job would fulfill that desire.
“I need to find the ‘you-shaped hole’ in any given situation,” Zacks said. “And what that means is looking closely at myself and being really clear with myself about what assets, what abilities, I bring to the table.”
As graduation neared this year, the options for such jobs in the public sector began to dry up due to federal cuts. That’s when it became clear to Zacks: His place was still in the classroom — as a teacher instead of a student.
He applied to Teach for America and now teaches math in Spanish to middle schoolers at the George Washington Carver Dual Language School in Kansas City.
“You have to teach everything,” Zacks said. “You have to teach kids how to approach the world, how to confront challenges, how to keep themselves organized, how to take notes, and also how to see the content that you’re trying to teach in the context of a wider world.”
Zacks said he infuses civic ideals into his classroom, such as putting activities to a vote and encouraging students to focus on finding solutions rather than complaining.
While Zacks’ job search story was not as arduous as others shared with The Midwest Newsroom, he said the increase of automation and the lack of face-to-face communication concerned him.
“The more you can connect with your other humans, the happier, the more effective you are going to be, the better your quality of life is going to be,” Zacks said. “And that was really how I approached my job search.”
‘Hearing crickets’
The first clue of a souring job market that Maddi Cave noticed was seeing last year’s graduates announcing their first jobs months after graduation.
One student had won awards from the Public Relations Student Society of America, but her job search lasted months.
“She was top of her game, had all the accolades, and she didn’t get a job till February. And I was like: ‘Oh no, I’m kind of scared,’” Cave said.
Cave, then a Drake University student studying public relations and strategic political communications, decided to lean on networking to speed up the job search.
Over the course of more than 30 meetings with Drake alumni and people in her field, she heard similar advice:
- Tailor your resume to the job.
- Follow up with the hiring manager.
- Go in person and shake hands.
- Monitor the status of applications in a spreadsheet.
Cave said she did all of those things for months, and applied to more than 80 jobs. She heard back from only 12 employers.
“I’m sure that the advice that I was getting at one time would have really set me above my peers, but I had been doing that for these jobs and genuinely hearing crickets,” Cave said.
Job boards were often misleading, Cave said, such as listing a position as entry-level with entry-level pay but asking for years of experience.
“So it got harder and harder to listen to the advice with a straight face when, again, they meant well, but it was not even remotely working,” Cave said.
As her search went on, Cave began to question whether employers were posting jobs in good faith. In a tracking spreadsheet, she began noting if the job appeared in multiple places or if she got some sort of message telling her that her submission was accepted. In the rare instances when a person told her the application was on LinkedIn, she would follow up.
“For the record, none of those emails I ever got a response from,” Cave said.
The sheer lack of response from employers began to worry Cave, but friends, family and fellow alumni encouraged her to keep applying.
As graduation neared, she decided to hold off on applying and moved with her fiance to Green Bay, Wisconsin. There she landed a part-time social media internship with a grocery company during the summer, which allowed her the flexibility to keep searching.
In mid-September, Cave got the call she was waiting for. Prevea Health, a Wisconsin health care system, wanted to interview her for a public relations position.
Cave described the hiring process as night and day compared to the job search.
“In our conversations, they weren’t just asking me a list of super generic questions. They were asking about my work,” Cave said. “So they had obviously looked at it, which was totally new to me.”
After months of hearing crickets from employers, Cave said she felt respected by the organization.
On Oct. 7, her 10-month search for a job finally came to a close.
“The fact that they even just treated me like a good candidate would have been enough to, like, fuel my fire for another month or so of job searching,” Cave said. “But then I actually got the job, and I was like, this is even better.”
“When you’re going through it you feel very isolated. You feel very, like: 'What's wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? How am I messing this up? Why don't they want to hire me?'”Alexandra Bates, a 2025 Drake University graduate
‘Please empathize with me’
Job searching has always been difficult and emotionally taxing, the graduates told The Midwest Newsroom, but with the rising cost of living, the job search has a new sense of urgency. Nearly half of Americans said they find groceries, utility bills, health care, housing and transportation difficult to afford, according to a POLITICO Poll conducted in November by Public First.
Jenkins’ break came in September, more than 10 months after he started the search, when an economic development coordinator position opened up in Fairview Heights, Illinois, in the St. Louis metro area. His first day was Sept. 22.
Still, with job creation being low, Generation Z will continue to compete with itself and others as workers have fewer options.
“We’re doing the best with what we have,” Baines, the University of San Diego graduate, said. “Please empathize with me.”
Cave said that some of the cultural pushback her generation is facing as they start their careers could be connected to changes in the culture of work. Generation Z is vocal about pushing back on expectations around unpaid overtime or enduring harassment at the workplace.
“What would be the point of working all the time if you never get to use any of your time or money to actually enjoy life, the things that are enjoyable about being a human?”
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR.
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METHODOLOGY
To report this story, Daniel Wheaton published a call-out story in late October asking for recent graduates to talk about their experiences finding their first full-time jobs. From those responses, he conducted interviews asking graduates to recount their experiences and reflect on finding work in a tight labor market. He used the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data to compare the macroeconomic conditions with the individual experiences of recent graduates.
REFERENCES
Class of 2025: How’s the job search going? The Midwest Newsroom wants to know (Midwest Newsroom | October 2025)
Recent College Grads Bear Brunt of Labor Market Shifts | (St. Louis Federal Reserve Blog, Aug. 25, 2025)
DOGE Guts Agency That Organizes Community Service Programs | (The New York Times | April 17, 2025)
We Must Act Now to Save AmeriCorps | (The Corps Network | Oct. 16 2025)
2026 Job Outlook | (NACE | December 2025)
Minimum wage is not enough to afford to rent ‘decent’ housing in Midwest, report says | (KCUR | July 17, 2025)
New poll paints a grim picture of a nation under financial strain | (Politico | Dec. 10, 2025)
TYPE OF ARTICLE
Enterprise — in-depth examination of a subject requiring extensive research and sourcing.
