The market is rough for college grads, and especially rough for computer-related majors that the STEM-first mindset pushed as a guaranteed safe career track. According to a recent report, employment for journalism majors is not only better than CS and computer engineering, but also a notch or two better than the average employment rate for fresh grads.
As Newsweek reports, recent college graduates who majored in computer science are facing high unemployment rates alongside the increasing probability of being laid off or replaced by artificial intelligence if and when they do get hired.
In its latest labor market report, the New York Federal Reserve found that recent CS grads are dealing with a whopping 6.1 precent unemployment rate. Those who majored in computer engineering — which is similar, if not more specialized — are faring even worse, with 7.5 percent of recent graduates remaining jobless. Comparatively, the New York Fed found, per 2023 Census data and employment statistics, that recent grads overall have only a 5.8 percent unemployment rate.
While folks who majored in fields like anthropology and physics fared even worse, with unemployment rates of 9.4 and 7.8 percent respectively, computer engineering had the third-highest rate of unemployment on the New York Fed’s rankings, while computer science had the seventh — a precipitous fall from grace for a major once considered an iron-clad ticket to high earnings and job security.
(Those numbers, notably, are worse even than the outcomes for journalism grads. Despite being accurately advised that their chosen field is dying, recent grads who majored in journalism are only experiencing unemployment at a rate of 4.4 percent, per the NYFR’s analysis.) —Futurism
