One of the best parts of being a young college graduate, and naïve to the grim realities of the working world, is being deluded about how great your career will be. Maybe you’ll found the next Nvidia, or win the Nobel Prize in your field, or start a charity that will make the world a better place. Or maybe you’ll take that entry-level job and climb the corporate ladder into middle management.
The point is, anything is possible! Delusion can be valuable, especially in reasonable doses, and optimism can be self-fulfilling. They allow you to take risks while you are still young and learning.
Today’s graduates, however, are more practical. According to a new survey from Handshake, a recruiter for college students, more graduates now aspire to work in government, and fewer want to work in technology.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with working for the government. Some of my best friends, as they say, are in the public sector, and it is possible to have a rewarding career in the civil service. But there is something depressing about recent college graduates, with their whole lives ahead of them, dreaming about … a job in government.
It’s also important to note that the numbers are not huge. Only 7.4% are applying to government jobs, up from 5.5% in 2023, compared to 21% in technology (compared to 23% last year). But overall, the survey suggests, more graduates are seeking the predictability of a government job. The most popular factor applicants are looking for, cited by 76%, is job stability. The least, cited by just 21%, is a fast-growing company — even though fast-growing companies are correlated with fast-growing salaries.
What explains this shift? Perhaps they just feel grateful to be working. Despite a historically good labor market, they are inundated with reports about how hard it is to get a job and how no job will make use of their degree. Then again, graduates seem to realize that even if their first job isn’t great, future jobs will be better: 67% “are confident they can find a job that builds their career.”
It is also worth pointing out that this survey comes amid a slight trend of fewer people working in government.
It could be that job stability is more important to young graduates than it used to be. There are reasons to think that Americans are becoming more risk averse in many ways; maybe one of them is in their job aspirations. Perhaps the Covid generation wants even more certainty after years of chaos in their education.
Maybe this desire to work in government reflects a sense that it is where the growth and opportunity is. Much recent legislation — the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act — aims to make the government a bigger player in the economy, even if it does so through subsidizing the private sector.
Meanwhile, there is a contraction in tech hiring, perhaps because the industry overhired in an era of free and easy capital that is now over. Technology will continue to be a dynamic sector of the US economy, but the next few years look uncertain, just as finance did after the financial crisis. In fact, employment in finance has yet to recover to pre-crisis levels, and interest in a career in finance has also fallen.
Granted, this is just one survey, of just 2,687 students in a generation that experienced more uncertainty and turmoil than usual. Yet it is striking how their work preferences reflect a shift in policy to grow the public and manufacturing sectors, both of which had long since be on the decline and are less dynamic that tech and finance. It suggests that industrial policy can influence not only capital allocation but also the choices people make when it comes to investing in their human capital.
And it’s not as if today’s graduates are completely risk-averse. Some 73% expressed interest in working for themselves eventually — not because they want to build a big company or be their own boss, but mostly because they expect self-employment to generate passive income. In a way, it’s almost reassuring: Maybe today’s graduates are just as deluded as previous generations.
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