42.5% of Recent Grads Are Underemployed — and Career Fairs Show It

At the Society of Women Engineers' conference in Boston this month, students lined up at 4:30 a.m. and sprinted for recruiters' booths — a scene one TikToker captioned "Thank god I'm employed." The crowd behavior reflects a hard number: 42.5% of recent graduates are underemployed, according to the Federal Reserve.

For employers, the message is straightforward. In-person career fairs have become a primary channel where early-career candidates concentrate, even as some companies cut entry-level hiring and reduce campus recruiting visits. Recruiters who showed up faced roughly 14,000 attendees at SWE alone — and candidates who arrived prepared to interview on the spot.

How big were the crowds?

Jennifer Scott, SWE's chief growth officer, estimated about 14,000 people attended the conference, with college students making up roughly 40% of that figure. The event has drawn more before — over 20,000 attendees at one point, a level Scott called "too many."

The competitive pressure has sharpened in recent years, Scott said. Fewer jobs are available, some companies have shut down early-career hiring, and fewer fairs exist as recruiters stop visiting campuses. The Grace Hopper Celebration, another women-focused engineering conference, canceled its career fair this year.

"These students are going to get jobs wherever they can," Scott said. "We try to keep them from using their elbows and crawling over each other."

What does the desperation look like on the ground?

Isabella Wong, a 20-year-old biochemistry student at Simmons University, skipped the opening rush but stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other candidates at the fair, which ran three days alongside panels and networking. When she reached a booth, the recruiter pointed her to a QR code.

"I think it's very indicative of people being determined to get their foot in the door," Wong said. Most people she spoke with were chasing internships rather than entry-level jobs, which seemed out of reach. "The current job market is looking for more experience than what we have as college students," she said.

At the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers conference, Isabel Amaya saw friends give up on early-career searches entirely. The 21-year-old informatics student at the University of Washington said some peers switched industries, hunted internships instead of jobs, or delayed graduation to stay eligible for internship programs.

Do the fairs actually produce offers?

Yes — for a subset of prepared candidates. Amaya landed her internship-turned-offer at last year's SHPE conference; this year, her friends received offers from Bank of America and Bloomberg.

Jocelyne Suerte, a 21-year-old mechanical engineering student at the University of Houston, attended both SHPE and SWE. She researches which companies interview on-site and approaches only those booths. At SHPE, attendees queued from 4:30 a.m.; at SWE, poor WiFi blocked her access to the venue map, so she wandered the halls hunting for her chosen employers. The strategy worked — she said she received offers from both conferences and is weighing which to accept.

Not everyone succeeds. Allan Morales, a sophomore studying chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, found most recruiters at the conference were only interested in juniors. He knew one candidate who landed an offer from Micron — but that student, Morales noted, already had competing offers and interviews. "He was stacked," Morales said.

What should talent teams take from this?

The fairs are built for hiring, not browsing. Some companies solicit and review résumés in advance; many interview candidates in private booths on the spot. Candidates have adapted by targeting only employers with on-site interview slots — meaning recruiters without a defined process may draw crowds but convert few.

The underemployment figure suggests the supply of hungry, credentialed early-career talent remains large. As long as entry-level openings stay tight and competing fairs disappear, employers that maintain campus and conference presence will keep meeting unusually motivated candidate pools at events like these.