A new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce is pushing back against alarming headlines about college graduate underemployment, arguing that the most widely cited figures significantly overstate the problem, and that how researchers measure underemployment matters as much as the phenomenon itself.
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The report, Rethinking Underemployment: Are College Graduates Using Their Degrees?, examines three methodological approaches to measuring underemployment and concludes that estimates ranging as high as 52 percent — figures that have captured significant media and policy attention — fail to account for key labor market realities, particularly the earnings premium that bachelor's degree holders enjoy even in jobs not formally classified as requiring a four-year degree.
Published estimates of how many college graduates are working in jobs that don't require their degrees have ranged from 25 percent to 52 percent, a spread the report's authors say reflects deep methodological disagreement that the field has yet to resolve.
"The wide range of estimates, methodologies, and considerations highlights an important — yet seldom addressed — issue about underemployment: How we define and measure underemployment is not settled," the report states.
At the center of the debate is how researchers use U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on "typical education needed for entry" to classify occupations. The standard approach labels a college graduate as underemployed any time they work in a job that BLS designates as requiring less than a bachelor's degree for entry-level hiring. But the Georgetown researchers argue that relying solely on that framework produces misleadingly high estimates.
"Estimates that rely only on BLS entry-level education assignments are misleadingly high, as they fail to account for actual hiring patterns and employer preferences in the labor market," said Jeff Strohl, CEW director and the report's lead author. "For example, 27 percent of occupations categorized as high school level by BLS employ more prime-age workers with a bachelor's degree than with a high school diploma. It is difficult to imagine that all these workers are underemployed."
Using the BLS-based approach alone, the report found that 43 percent of full-time, full-year workers ages 22–23 with bachelor's degrees were underemployed — a figure close to the 52 percent estimate from the widely cited 2024 Talent Disrupted report by the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Institute for the Future of Work, which has shaped much of the current public conversation on the issue.
