As college seniors in Chicago don their finest clothes, fix the caps upon their heads and walk across the graduation stage, they’ll probably hear: “You did it!”
But for this class that’s up against rising unemployment and the replacement of some entry-level jobs with artificial intelligence, many feel they haven’t truly “done it” as they wait for an elusive job offer.
Recent grads say they’ve grown used to being “ghosted” by employers, having their application tossed aside by an AI screener or beaten out by a more experienced candidate for an entry-level job. Some businesses, like Morgan Stanley and Block, Inc. which both have hubs in Chicago, have laid off thousands of workers and slowed hiring as they grapple with the economic effects of tariffs and the Iran war.
“It felt like I did everything right, and still nothing’s coming of it, and that’s incredibly demoralizing,” says Bazil Frueh, a recent Northwestern University graduate who’s been on the job hunt since August.
In March, Illinois unemployment was at 5.1%, up from 4.6% the same time last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Recent Illinois unemployment has been higher than the national average, which was at 4.3% in March.
Young college graduates are in an especially bad spot. Their unemployment has risen more than the overall unemployment rate and the unemployment rate for young people without a college degree, according to a March report by the research organization Economic Innovation Group.
This job market is different from the one most adults have experienced, including college graduates from just a few years ago, says Alex Lundrigan, the federal policy manager at Young Invincibles, a nonprofit that advocates for college students and recent graduates.
“It’s completely different from older generations, like Gen X or Baby Boomers,” Lundrigan says. “It’s very easy, even if you are an excellent applicant on paper, to get put to the side by a robot.”
The Chicago Sun-Times spoke with three college graduates from the class of 2026 about how they’re changing up their plans — and praying for a job offer.
Anja Royko, Loyola University Chicago
Anja Royko, 21, chose her majors carefully, landing on accounting and finance largely because she thought they would provide her with job stability after graduation.
Usually that would be a good bet: Last year, the Labor Bureau projected business and financial fields would have better-than-average job growth with considerably higher median pay than other industries.
“That was something that gave me a lot of comfort, the idea of having a job right out of graduation,” she says.
While studying at Loyola, Royko completed competitive internships, including at an investment banking firm and the financial firm Morgan Stanley. Those companies were known to offer interns full-time jobs after graduation, but Royko says she and other interns missed out because companies weren’t offering those roles.
After months of searching for jobs and submitting more than 150 applications, Royko came up dry.
“It’s just hard to hear again and again that A, they’re not going to go in your direction, or B, they just don’t respond to you,” Royko said.
She applied for jobs waiting tables to support herself financially while she continued to apply for positions in her field, but she didn’t hear back from those either, despite having restaurant experience, she says.
Without any prospects, she felt she had no choice but to move back in with her parents in Stoughton, Wisconsin, while she studies for the certified public accountant exam. She hopes if she earns that license, it will give her a leg up on future applications.
“I have been spending the past four years building my life in Chicago, and I feel like I was starting to get momentum,” Royko says. “But financially, it was a very easy decision to make, because I simply just didn’t have money.”
Royko did get an offer, but it wasn’t ideal: a summer accounting internship in Wisconsin instead of a full-time job in Chicago.
“There’s no experience that’s bad experience, in my opinion,” she says. “But it definitely would be nice to feel more secure in a position.”
At Loyola, Royko thought she was doing what she needed to do to land a job after graduation. She sees others in her class encountering the same hurdles, she says.
“It’s weird because I look around and I see how capable all my friends are, and I see how smart and valuable they would be to these companies that they’re applying for, but everyone’s just having a really hard time getting a foot in the door,” she says.
There’s one silver lining: Royko was able to advise her younger brother, who will be a college sophomore in the fall, that good grades and internships aren’t enough to break into the professional world. She told him what she wished she would have done: Start networking and making connections now.
Bazil Frueh, Northwestern University
Frueh graduated from Northwestern in December, thinking he would have ample time to apply for jobs while he spent a semester completing a paid internship at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.
At Northwestern, he majored in marketing and journalism, did two internships at small companies and launched a school magazine.
The 22-year-old has applied to more than 150 jobs since August, mostly in marketing. After almost a year on the job hunt, he describes his search as a series of “flops and fails.” At the beginning of his search, he was pickier about where he would work, but now he’s at the point where he just applies “to as many things as possible.”
Frueh has tried tailoring his resume to appeal to the AI software that some employers use to parse through applications. He’s had Claude, an AI bot, read his resume and suggest tips like adding keywords that bots are likely to notice.
“The process itself doesn’t even feel human anymore,” he says.
He also worries that AI technology is making some entry-level jobs obsolete, and overqualified candidates are taking opportunities that used to go to recent grads.
Frueh applied to one position that seemed perfect for him: It was a combination of art and marketing, two of his interests, and employers pedaled the job as ideal for recent graduates. After several interviews, he got rejected. He later found out the person who beat him out had a master’s degree and multiple years of related experience.
“I would love to send a message to companies like: ‘I get that you’re focusing on the bottom line right now, and that you can cut these entry-level jobs, but you’re going to be in such a dilemma when your senior-level people start retiring, and you have no entry-level people that start taking those mid-level jobs,’” he says. “AI is destroying those pipelines that have always existed for people to rise up in their careers.”
Margarita Arango, University of Illinois Chicago
After graduating from the UIC this month, Margarita Arango thought she’d take a year off from school before starting a master’s degree in public policy. But then she heard terrible things about the job market.
In the past, Arango saw public policy graduates leave college with gigs at think tanks, research firms or local political offices. But now, some of her friends are still looking for full-time employment in the field a year after graduation.
So she decided to speed up her plans for graduate school.
“It really just startled me, and it really dissuaded me from taking any kind of gap year,” she says. She figures if the job market doesn’t improve by her next graduation “I’ll at least have a leg up in two years and have a degree.”
Arango isn’t alone. More people are interested in pursuing a graduate degree in the next year compared with last year — 78% compared with 69% — an annual survey by the higher education marketing agency Spark451 found.
But finding work as a grad student isn’t much easier. Federal funding cuts for research have led several colleges to scale back jobs typically done by grad students. Arango checks often to see if graduate assistant positions have opened up for the fall, but many positions haven’t been posted yet.
If Arango can’t secure one of those positions, she’s hoping to continue her part-time jobs doing administrative work for a dance studio and working as a student ambassador for UIC.
Arango says she sees few peers in her graduating class following their initial plans.
“A lot of people have started to come to terms with lowering their expectations, or moving back home for a period of time, just changing their plans, maybe not even going into the field that they initially got their degree in,” she says.
Mary Norkol covers higher education for the Chicago Sun-Times in partnership with Open Campus.