Well, they don't have to be mere baristas, they can always run for Congress

/

another proud BU graduate

Eighteen year olds who can’t legally buy a beer are signing six figure debt obligations to institutions that face zero accountability for outcomes. The loan is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

The university gets paid regardless of whether the student gets a job. The incentive structure is pure extraction. Get them in. Get the money. What happens after is their problem.

43% underemployment isn’t a failure of the students. These kids did exactly what they were told. Study hard. Get good grades. Go to college. Get the degree. They followed the script perfectly and the script was a lie. Not a lie that anyone intended maliciously at first. But a lie that became profitable enough that nobody corrected it even after the data made it obvious.

The people who designed this system, the administrators pulling $500k salaries, the tenured professors teaching subjects with zero market application, the loan servicers collecting interest on degrees in fields that haven’t produced a living wage in twenty years. None of them are underemployed. They’re doing fine. The 43% is subsidizing their comfort.

Now add AI. The entry level professional jobs that justified the debt are the first ones being compressed. Not blue collar work. Not trades. The exact white collar knowledge work positions that the degree was supposed to unlock. Legal research. Financial analysis. Consulting grunt work. Content production. The 43% who are already underemployed are about to be joined by a significant chunk of the 57% who thought they made it.

The people who will come through this are the ones who figured out early that the credential was a trap. The ones who built skills instead of collecting letters after their name. The ones who found asymmetric paths. The ones who created value directly instead of waiting for an institution to certify them as valuable.

The university system had a real function once. It produced genuine education and genuine opportunity. That function has been hollowed out by decades of misaligned incentives until what remains is mostly a financing operation that happens to have classrooms attached.

And 43% of its recent customers just confirmed with their own lives that the product doesn’t work.

(I checked: that 43% nuber is apparently accurate)

AI Overview

Yes, according to a Bloomberg news report published on April 13, 2026, roughly 43% of young U.S. college graduates (ages 22–27) are considered underemployed.

It is important to distinguish between "unemployed" (having no job) and "underemployed" (having a job that does not require a college degree).

Here are the key details from the report:

  • The Statistic: Nearly 43% of recent college graduates are working in jobs that do not require a degree, such as retail, service, or administrative positions.

  • Definition: Underemployment means these graduates are "stuck in jobs that don’t require degrees".

  • Causes: Bloomberg cites a "frozen hiring market" for entry-level roles and the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) automating white-collar entry-level work.

  • Context: While underemployment is high, this refers to those working in non-degreed jobs, not that 43% are completely without work.

    Bloomberg.com +3

The report notes that this is the highest rate of underemployment for this demographic since the 2020 pandemic, driven by a "low-hire, low-fire" environment where companies are not hiring new staff.