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The dental instruments felt cold in her hands. A patient asked what she studied in college. “General studies,” she replied, the lie now automatic. Three years ago, she graduated with honors in anthropology, $72,000 in debt, and a spreadsheet documenting 180 rejected job applications. Now, she scrapes plaque from molars for $24 an hour.
She is one of a growing number of college graduates finding themselves underemployed, working jobs that do not require a four-year degree. Approximately 52% of recent graduates are underemployed, according to a 2024 report by the Burning Glass Institute & Strada Education Foundation. The situation is even more pronounced for those with advanced degrees, with 61% of master’s degree holders underemployed two years after graduation, according to a ResumeBuilder survey.
The stories are increasingly common: physics majors working in restaurants, film school graduates driving for ride-sharing services, music masters handling accounting tasks. These graduates, burdened by debt and expectations, are confronting a reality where their qualifications are either overvalued or undervalued in a shifting job market.
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 degree attainment more than doubled between 1980 and 2025 – rising from 17% to 38%, according to the Education Data Initiative and the U.S. Census Bureau – the number of jobs requiring those degrees did not keep pace. Wages for college graduates have remained largely stagnant since 2000, adjusted for inflation, as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the Economic Policy Institute.
This disconnect has fueled what experts call “credential inflation,” where employers increasingly require degrees for positions that previously did not necessitate them. A 2014 analysis by Burning Glass Technologies 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 employed in the role had one. The jobs themselves hadn’t changed; the requirements had.
The proliferation of qualified applicants allows employers to leverage this oversupply of talent. With hundreds of applications for a single position, a bachelor’s degree requirement becomes a filter, reducing the applicant pool to a more manageable size. As one hiring manager might explain, it’s not about the degree being essential to the work, but about having “options.”
The consequences extend beyond individual frustration. The oversupply of qualified workers drives down wages, shifts power dynamics in favor of employers, and fosters a competitive environment where workers are hesitant to negotiate or organize. The result is a workforce increasingly accepting of lower pay and less favorable conditions.
The current landscape echoes the warnings of British sociologist Michael Young, who in his 1958 satirical book, “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” envisioned a society sorted by credentials, where inequality would grow normalized and failure attributed to individual shortcomings. Young intended his work as a cautionary tale, but it was largely misinterpreted as a blueprint for progress.
The system, as it currently operates, incentivizes multiple actors – politicians seeking to boast about increased degree attainment, universities prioritizing enrollment growth, and banks profiting from student loans – while failing to address the fundamental imbalance between supply and demand. Approximately eight percent of all Americans are now working in jobs that do not require their degrees, a number that continues to rise, with 1.8 million Americans actively job searching for more than six months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (January 2026).
She still checks LinkedIn several times a day, clinging to the hope that the right connection or opportunity will finally materialize. The box containing her anthropology degree remains on the top shelf of her closet, a silent reminder of the promise that went unfulfilled. She stopped applying for jobs three months ago.
