The chipped ceramic of the dental tray felt cool against her fingertips. “General studies,” she said, the lie practiced and smooth. Three years out of college, with a $72,000 debt and an anthropology degree she rarely mentions, Sarah is one of a growing number of underemployed Americans whose education doesn’t match their employment.
According to a 2024 report by the Burning Glass Institute & Strada Education Foundation, 52% of recent four-year college graduates are underemployed – meaning they hold jobs that don’t require a college degree. The situation is even more pronounced for those with advanced degrees; a recent ResumeBuilder survey found that 61% of individuals with master’s degrees are underemployed two years after graduation. Sarah’s experience is not an anomaly, but a symptom of a system that has produced a surplus of qualified workers and a corresponding devaluation of credentials.
She applied for 180 positions after graduating with honors in 2021 – museum curator, research assistant, grant writer, cultural consultant. A spreadsheet, meticulously color-coded to track rejections, became a monument to her fruitless search. “The rejection emails stopped feeling personal around number sixty,” she said. “By one hundred I stopped reading them. By one-forty I stopped applying.”
The degree itself, now boxed and relegated to a closet shelf, represents a promise unfulfilled. It’s a physical reminder of a societal expectation – go to college, work hard and succeed – that has broken down for a significant portion of the population. Sarah isn’t alone. Physics majors are working restaurant lines, film school graduates are driving for ride-sharing services, and music masters are now accountants. A Bureau of Labor Statistics report from January 2026 indicates that 1.8 million Americans have been job searching for more than six months.
The current situation is a stark contrast to the goals set in 2008 by President Barack Obama, who aimed for the United States to have the highest proportion of college graduates worldwide by 2020. While college attainment rates have more than doubled since 1980 – rising from 17% to 38% according to the Education Data Initiative – the job market hasn’t kept pace. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis notes that wages for college graduates have remained flat since 2000, adjusted for inflation.
This disconnect isn’t accidental. A 2014 analysis by Burning Glass Technologies revealed a trend of “credential inflation,” where employers began requiring degrees for positions that historically didn’t need them. The study found that 67% of Production Supervisor postings required a college degree, despite only 16% of current Production Supervisors actually possessing one. Similarly, 65% of Executive Secretary postings demanded a bachelor’s degree, while only 19% of those currently in the role had one. The jobs hadn’t changed; the requirements had.
“It’s not about the work,” explains one hiring manager, speaking on background. “It’s about leverage. When you have two hundred seventeen qualified applicants, you can demand a bachelor’s degree and narrow the field. It doesn’t necessarily make the job more complex, but it gives us more options.”
The consequences extend beyond individual frustration. The Economic Policy Institute has documented wage stagnation and the increasing precarity of work, linking it to the oversupply of qualified labor. The overproduction of graduates, coupled with factors like offshoring and automation, has created a system where employers can dictate terms and workers are forced to compete for fewer and fewer positions.
Michael Young, a British sociologist, foreshadowed this scenario in his 1958 satirical book, “The Rise of the Meritocracy.” He envisioned a society sorted by credentials, where inequality would become normalized and failure would be attributed to individual shortcomings rather than systemic flaws. What was intended as a warning was, according to the British Journal of Educational Studies, adopted as policy by the 1980s.
Sarah still checks LinkedIn, a habit born of hope and fueled by a lingering belief that the system will eventually work as promised. She hasn’t applied for a position in three months. The box containing her degree remains on the top shelf of her closet, a silent testament to a broken contract. The system, she realizes, has already gotten what it needed from her.
