This much, at least, everyone agrees on. Exactly how worrying this trend is and what’s to blame are the subject of far greater confusion. According to an analysis of BLS data by Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale University, hiring rates for new grads are down from their post-pandemic highs, but they’re still in line with the latter half of the 2010s. And in population-level numbers, things in the labor market look placid. “We still see low unemployment, and we do see pretty solid job gains,” says Allison Shrivastava, an economist at the hiring platform Indeed. Young adults are getting spat out into a job market that isn’t nearly as bad as, say, that of the Great Recession, but it also isn’t as lush as it was in the recent past, when they might have watched older friends and siblings get snapped up before graduation. Being in that position would certainly feel terrible, though in the long arc of a professional life, it could be worse.