U.S. college graduates "have historically found jobs more quickly than people with only a high school degree," writes Bloomberg. "But that advantage is becoming a thing of the past, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.""Recently, the job-finding rate for young college-educated workers has declined to be roughly in line with the rate for young high-school-educated workers, indicating that a long period of relatively easier job-finding prospects for college grads has ended," Cleveland Fed researchers Alexander Cline and BarıÅY Kaymak said in a blog post published Monday. The study follows the latest monthly employment data released on Nov. 20, which showed the unemployment rate for college-educated workers continued to rise in September amid an ongoing slowdown in white-collar hiring... The unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20 to 24 was 9.2% in September, up 2.2 percentage points from a year prior. There is a caveat. "Young college graduates maintain advantages in job stability and compensation once hired..." the researchers write. "The convergence we document concerns the initial step of securing employment rather than overall labor market outcomes." Their research includes a graph showing how the "unemployment gap" first increased dramatically after 2010 between college-educated and high school-educated workers, which the researchers attribute to "the prolonged jobless recovery after 2008". But that gap has been closing ever since, with that gap now smaller than at any time since the 1970s. "Young high school workers are riding the wave of the historically tight postpandemic labor market with well-below-average unemployment compared to that of past high school graduates, while young college workers are experiencing unemployment rates rarely observed among past college cohorts barring during recessions."The labor market advantages conferred by a college degree have historically justified individual investment in higher education and expanding support for college access. If the job-finding rate of college graduates continues to decline relative to the rate for high school graduates, we may see a reversal of these trends. The convergence we document concerns the initial step of securing employment rather than overall labor market outcomes. These details suggest a nuanced shift in employment dynamics, one in which college graduates face greater difficulty finding jobs than previously but maintain advantages compared with high school graduates in job stability and compensation once hired. Two key quotes:"Declining job prospects among young college graduates may reflect the continued growth in college attainment, adding ever larger cohorts of college graduates to the ranks of job seekers, even though technology no longer favors college-educated workers."Developments related to AI, which may be affecting job-finding prospects in some cases, cannot explain the decades-long decline in the college job-finding rate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.