The Long-Term Unemployed Today? College Grads.

Sean Wittmeyer would seem to be highly employable. He has more than a decade of experience in architecture and product design, impressive coding chops and two master’s degrees. His skills make him an asset in two industries, technology and construction, which helped power the economy’s growth over the last 15 years.

But construction activity has faltered since 2023, after the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, and many tech companies began layoffs around the same time.

That helps explain why Mr. Wittmeyer, 37, has been unemployed for a year and a half, since he lost his job in business development for a company that makes software to help with real estate projects. He has been so eager to earn income that he has applied for positions befitting an intern, only to be told he was overqualified. “I can’t even work at the little board game store down the street,” he said.

When the federal government released its August employment numbers on Sept. 5, the overall unemployment rate was still relatively low, at just over 4 percent. But underneath was a concerning statistic: The portion of unemployed people who have been out of work for more than six months, which is considered “long-term,” rose to its highest share in over three years — to nearly 26 percent.

The trend has alarmed some job-market watchers. “Such an increase is unprecedented outside of recessions,” said an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, alluding to a steady worsening of the long-term unemployment rate. Economists at Goldman Sachs recently expressed concern that a collapse in the number of job openings “risks locking out” those who are already unemployed.

But just as surprising as the rise in long-term unemployment is the subset of workers who are increasingly driving it: the college educated. The fraction of long-term unemployed people with a college degree has grown from about one-fifth a decade ago to about one-third today, according to government data compiled by Matthew Notowidigdo and Jingzhou Huang of the University of Chicago. The problem has worsened over the past year or two after easing temporarily.

Economists cite a number of reasons for this trend. There are simply more college graduates today than there were 10 years ago, and the job market for people without college degrees improved, reducing their share of long-term unemployed.

But employers also appear to have less need for college-educated workers, driven by technological change, automation and, most recently, President Trump’s cuts to federal workers and funding, which have disproportionately affected the college educated.

“The data is signaling that there’s some restructuring going on,” said Andreas Mueller, an expert on long-term unemployment at the University of Zurich. “People are losing jobs and can’t find jobs in high-skilled occupations.”

Any bout of unemployment can be traumatic, but the psychological and financial toll of long-term joblessness tends to be especially serious. More than 200 people responded to a New York Times questionnaire about being unemployed for longer than six months, and many mentioned depression or anxiety. A few alluded to thoughts of suicide.

“I have checked all the boxes of ‘success’ my entire life: went to college, got a degree, worked toward a career,” wrote Katie Gallagher, a former sales and marketing director in Portland, Ore. She has been out of work for almost a year and estimated that she had applied to more than 3,000 jobs.

“The stress of rejection is unbearable, along with the looming threat of financial insecurity,” Ms. Gallagher, 34, continued. “I have never felt depression like this before in my life.”

In an interview, Ms. Gallagher said she had $6,000 in credit card debt and was relying on supplemental nutrition assistance. She said she recently borrowed about $4,000 from her brother to enroll in a course on A.I. automation and started a business that helps other firms automate functions like sales and on-boarding customers.

Employers’ need for college-educated workers appears to have slowed during the past decade or two, according to several studies by economists. Even before ChatGPT was released, applications like accounting software and earlier forms of artificial intelligence used in fields like finance and merchandise planning rendered some skilled workers obsolete. Data from Indeed, the job-seeking platform, shows that the portion of job advertisements requiring a college degree has dropped about 6 percent since 2019.

“There were big advances in A.I. starting around 2016 ,” said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence has only accelerated the trend. Mr. Wittmeyer, who also lives in Portland, said the coding projects he once did — like creating a tool that calculates the optimal window sizes for a facade — can often be done by someone far less skilled than he is. “Anyone with a free subscription to Claude, ChatGPT, could do a decent amount of what I could do before,” he said.

Until she was laid off in the spring of 2024, Charlene Chen worked as the corporate counsel for a medium-sized law firm in New York, where her responsibilities included handling the firm’s employment agreements and contracts with vendors. She said that many companies have software that automates some of these functions, which may have complicated her job search.

As her search stalled, she began to look outside her field and at one point landed a temporary data-privacy compliance job with a New York City municipal agency. She quit after the first day. “There was a mouse trap under my desk and it smelled like urine,” she said. “Sitting there in the cubicle looking at that mouse trap made me feel so bad about myself.” She later flirted with paying $3,600 to a career coach before deciding it was too costly and might be a scam. She was thrilled to land another temporary job last week.

Dr. Mueller, the expert on long-term unemployment, said that college-educated workers may have more trouble finding jobs in a shrinking industry than workers without a degree because they are more likely to have skills or connections that are unique to that field. They may also be prone to excessive optimism and slow to realize that some of their traditional jobs are vanishing.

“You find yourself in a situation where you think, ‘I should have accepted that job earlier,’” Dr. Mueller said. “That mechanism could be strong in a market where you have this restructuring and people have to switch from one sector to another.”

Jeremey Davis, who was laid off as a senior director of engineering at Nielsen, the audience measurement firm, was offered a job early in his search, but turned it down because he was interviewing for another that he preferred. Roughly 11 months, 1,200 applications and 17 interviews after losing his job, he is still out of work. “I rolled the dice and they didn’t offer me the other position,” he said.

A colonel in the National Guard, Mr. Davis volunteers for extra guard duty to help pay the bills. He says that the number of applicants for each job has increased now that it is so easy to apply online, and he worries that it has become harder for job candidates to stand out.

Emma Wiles, an expert on the use of algorithms in hiring at Boston University, said that A.I. and other software tools can make the hiring process more random by creating a flood of similar-looking applications. That could hurt college-educated workers, who may have been less likely to get overlooked beforehand.

Mr. Wittmeyer has also chafed against what he sees as an explosion of applications on sites like LinkedIn. He has sent out over 200 applications and heard back from only seven companies. In the meantime, he is thankful that his wife has a steady job and he has been trying to turn his hobby — board-game making — into a career.

In 2023, he and his wife raised more than $100,000 on crowdfunding sites to build a game where players pretend to be tycoons who build ski resorts, eventually turning a small profit. He is finishing up another game, in which players compete to become the most popular airline at an airport, and expects to raise funds for it this fall.

“That’ll be our third game,” he said, adding hopefully: “I think it will make some money.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. If you are someone living with loss, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention offers grief support.