The Headlines This Week Should Alarm Every College Student in America

Hey there!

Ford here.

Two headlines dropped this week that I have not been able to stop thinking about.

Fortune: "The entry-level job market is the worst it's been in 37 years."

CNN: "The job market is so tough, young people are struggling just to land internships."

Neither of these is hyperbole. Both are grounded in government data. And taken together, they describe something that should be treated as the crisis it actually is.

Let me walk through what the numbers actually say.

The entry-level floor is collapsing

Fortune's piece, published just weeks ago, reported that in 2025 the share of unemployed Americans who are new workforce entrants hit a 37-year high, peaking at 13.3% in July before settling at 10.6% in February of this year. That number is still higher than at any point during the Great Recession.

Let that land for a second. New entrants to the workforce are having a harder time getting in than they did during the worst financial crisis in a generation.

The jobs that were supposed to be theirs have vanished. Finance and information services, the two industries that historically provided the most reliable on-ramp for college graduates, are hemorrhaging positions. Since 2023, those sectors have shed an average of 9,000 jobs per month. Before the pandemic, those same sectors were adding 44,000 jobs per month. That is not a slowdown. That is a reversal.

The most striking data point in the Fortune piece: for six months in 2025, workers with occupational associate's degrees in skilled trades, plumbers, electricians, pipe fitters, posted slightly better employment outcomes than college graduates. According to the piece, this marks the first time college graduates have lost their employment advantage since the federal government began tracking these data in the 1990s.

Think about what that means. Decades of "go to college, get a good job" built on the assumption of a reliable earnings premium. For the first time in the history of that data, that premium, at least at the start of a career, essentially disappeared.

Internships are now a competition nobody prepared for

The CNN story published this week is about something that should terrify anyone who works in higher education or hiring: students can no longer reliably land internships either.

Handshake reported an average of 109 applications per internship posting in 2025, nearly double the prior year. In technology, that number climbs to 273 applications per posting. In finance, 192. Indeed tracked internship postings last year as the lowest in five years, slipping below 2019 levels.

Fewer postings. More competition. Both at the same time.

This matters enormously because internship experience is the single strongest predictor of employment after graduation. A ZipRecruiter economist put it plainly in the CNN piece: doing an internship or getting any work experience in school "is the biggest predictor of landing a job out of college." Their data shows roughly four in five graduates who worked during school got hired soon after graduation. Only 41% of those with no work experience could say the same.

So the thing that predicts good outcomes is becoming harder to get. Which means the students graduating into this market are doing so with less of the experience they need, into a market that has fewer of the jobs they expected, at a moment when the competition for both has never been more intense.

The people in these stories are not slackers

This is the part of the CNN piece I want to sit with, because the dominant narrative online is that Gen Z doesn't work hard enough, doesn't want to show up to the office, has unrealistic expectations.

The data says otherwise. And the people in the story say otherwise.

Muneeb Iqbal is finishing a master's degree in integrated design, business and technology from USC. He has submitted 4,000 applications over the past year. He has one internship to show for it, and no job lined up. He has $100,000 in student debt.

Jessica Lopez graduated from Arizona State with a business administration degree. She did four internships and nine fellowships while in school. She served as student government president. She networked constantly. She has sent over 150 job applications since graduating. She cannot find a full-time role with health insurance. She is living with her mother in San Diego and working two part-time jobs.

"I have a very vast network," she told CNN, "and yeah, none of it has really helped."

These are not people who didn't try. These are people who did everything right and are still getting crushed by a system that wasn't built for this moment.

What is actually causing this

The Fortune piece is careful about this and so I will be too. There are multiple forces converging:

AI is eliminating the entry-level roles that used to exist as training grounds. A Stanford study found workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations, software development and customer service chief among them, experienced a 13% drop in employment since 2022. The task that used to be someone's first job is now a prompt.

The labor market has frozen up. Quit rates fell from a historic high of 3% in 2022 to around 2% today. Workers who have jobs are staying in them. That means fewer openings above, which means fewer entry-level roles below. The whole pipeline has stalled.

Tariff uncertainty is making companies cautious. Around 42% of small and mid-size business owners said they plan to pull back on hiring because of the economic uncertainty, according to a Wall Street Journal survey. When companies do not know what next month looks like, they do not hire for a role that will take six months to get productive.

And critically, the Fortune piece argues that blaming Gen Z for this is precisely wrong. The headline says it directly: stop blaming Gen Z. The data shows this is structural, not attitudinal.

The tools universities are giving students are not working

Here is the part that I do not think is being said loudly enough.

When students struggle, universities point them to Handshake. They get a resume review. They are told to attend a career fair. And career services offices report their outcomes through self-reported graduation surveys, collect their 80% placement rates from the students who actually responded, and move on.

But the CNN story this week shows that Handshake had 273 applications per tech internship posting in 2025. Resume reviews do not solve a supply problem. Career fairs are theater in a market where employers are not showing up the way they used to. And the placement rate numbers that universities report are built on a methodology that structurally undercounts every student who graduated into a bad outcome, because those students are the least likely to fill out a survey announcing where they ended up.

Universities need to take a serious look in the mirror. The Burning Glass Institute tracked actual career histories of 60 million workers and found 52% of graduates underemployed within one year. That is the real number. The numbers universities are reporting are not. And as long as administrators are making decisions based on self-reported, survey-response-rate-dependent outcome data, they are looking at a picture of reality that is significantly rosier than the one their graduates are living.

The tools are not working. The data is not honest. And students are the ones absorbing the cost.

What I'm building in response to this

I have spent the past year talking to hundreds of career services directors, thousands of students, and employers across the country. Everything I have seen confirms what Fortune and CNN are now reporting.

So I want to say something I have been building toward across these newsletters.

We built a platform called Runway specifically to solve the signal problem, to help students find jobs where they are genuinely competitive and apply with the right strategy rather than spraying applications into the void. We now have 30,000 students using it.

Our average user sees a 10% interview rate. Industry average on platforms like LinkedIn and Handshake is around 1%.

That gap is not magic. It is what happens when students apply to roles they are actually qualified for, at the right time, with materials that reflect that fit. The playbook works. The problem is the system was never designed to teach it.

52% of graduates are underemployed. The entry-level market is the worst in 37 years. Internship competition has nearly doubled in a single year. These are not problems that a resume review or a Handshake subscription solves.

We are trying to build something that actually does. More on that next week but feel free to reply to this if it piques your interest.

I’d be curious to know what you are seeing on your end. Whether you are in higher ed, hiring, or you are a student living this right now, I want to hear it!

Keep progressing,

Ford Coleman Founder & CEO, Runway

P.S. If you know someone who needs to read this, students, parents, administrators, forward it. The more people who understand what is actually happening, the better chance we have at fixing it.