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Gordon Lightfoot was the first Canadian musician to make it big without selling out by moving to the States. Known to his friends as Gord, his acoustic guitar’s rolling, fingerpicked rhythm on Early Morning Rain (1966) was the falling rain that allowed Gord’s folky baritone to soar, making the song his first major hit. Bob Dylan covered Early Morning Rain and once said every time he hears once of Gord’s songs, “I wish it would last forever.” In 1967 Gord wrote and recorded the Canadian Railroad Trilogy for Canada’s Centennial, an epic 7-minute folk suite about the line that built a nation. So he would have been a national treasure even if he hadn’t borne a name so Canadian that Canada’s most beloved band of the last half-century, The Tragically Hip, featured two Gords.
Unlike nearly all Canadians, Gord wasn’t always nice. In the early 70s, following his first #1 – If You Could Read My Mind – Gord got involved with another not-nice Canadian. Cathy Smith was a groupie and backup singer who grew up to become a drug dealer, drug addict, and the woman who killed John Belushi by injecting him with heroin and cocaine. Gord’s next #1 – Sundown – was about how crazy he got when Smith went out partying with friends. Which was the pot calling the kettle black, because Gord was far from faithful and partied nearly as hard. When Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue stopped in Toronto in 1975, following a four-hour show at Maple Leaf Gardens, Gord invited Dylan et al. back to his place for a legendary party. According to the Toronto Star, “everyone was either drinking, snorting or inhaling something, and smoke floated freely about the sprawling house,” which ultimately led to one of Dylan’s buddies throwing his leather jacket into Gord’s fireplace, ending the party by filling the house with thick black smoke.
I have a couple connections to Gord. His song Christian Island (Georgian Bay) is about a place 10 minutes from where my mom lives. (As I’ve mentioned, she’s a proud member of the Georgian Shores Swinging Seniors.) And when my dad was a senior at University of Western Ontario, he was elected by the class of ’68 to produce the student council show in the school’s 1,200-seat Alumni Hall. He succeeded in booking Gord for one concert, then after it sold out, for a second night. In addition to making a tidy profit that subsidized the class’s 5th and 10th reunions, he dealt with Gord’s “hissy fit” when the venue didn’t have a red filter for the spot he wanted for one song. After the first show, my dad drove Gord’s two sidemen back to the London, Ontario Holiday Inn and dealt with them grumbling about how they couldn’t have their “regular after-show party” with local ladies because Gord’s wife had come to the show.
Gord passed away two Canadian summers ago. But if he’s remembered for one thing, it’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. After learning of the loss of the iron ore freighter and the deaths of all 29 crew members from Newsweek, Gord lifted passages from the article and put them to a dreamy dirge. For anyone who’s taken a boat ride on Lake Michigan or Lake Erie – or Lake Champlain for that matter, which, in one of the dumbest acts in congressional history, was once named one of Great Lakes at the insistence of Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy – a Great Lakes shipwreck may sound ancient and fanciful. But Lake Superior – the big lake the Chippewa called “Gitche Gumee,” the planet’s only inland ocean with swells over 25 feet – is different, which is at the core of the tragedy and the song’s magic. And for anyone who’s heard the song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald ranks with the best artistic depictions of a disaster in progress, from the mundane:
When suppertime came the old cook came on deck sayin' Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya At seven p.m. a main hatchway caved in, he said Fellas, it's been good to know ya
To the profound:
Does anyone know where the love of God goes When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
We’re in the midst of another disaster in progress. It involves the employment prospects of new college graduates. While American higher education has been distracted, disaster has befallen the Class of 2025. Like the 29 men on the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Class of ‘25 was sailing in dangerous waters. But they kept on going. It was all they knew how to do.
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According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for the last five classes of college graduates has skyrocketed 40% in two years to 5.8%: a 30-year high and, for the first time ever, well above the national unemployment rate (4%). Last spring, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a stunning 12% unemployment rate for college graduates in their 20s. Oxford Economics estimates new grads account for 12% of the rise in the national unemployment rate since mid-2023.
Due to widening skill and experience gaps, media outlets haven’t had to sail the seven seas to find young men like Gabriel Nash who graduated last year from University of Central Florida and makes YouTube videos about gaming because none of his 450 job applications panned out. Or Peter Stuart, who graduated from Loyola and reports “getting ghosted basically by everything I apply for.” A recent Yale psychology grad’s Instagram account is the story of how his degree has not translated into a job:
But as Lake Champlain is to the Great Lakes, so is college graduate unemployment to underemployment. 94% of recent grads have landed paid work. But if they’re working in jobs where most employees don’t have degrees – jobs they should have been able to get without investing years of their life and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars – the main hatchway has caved in.
While underemployment definitions and metrics vary, they’re as high as Lake Superior’s waves that fateful night. Last year Strada and Burning Glass measured underemployment for college grads one year out at 52%, up from 43% in 2018. In April the New York Fed had it at 41.2%, up from 40.6% last year. According to LinkedIn, entry-level hiring is down 23% in the past five years. In 2022, 79% of HR leaders told PwC they were hiring for entry-level roles. In 2023, it was 61%. PwC hasn’t asked the question since then, perhaps because they fear the answer.
Because neither governments nor accreditors require colleges and universities to track employment outcomes, no school has signaled SOS. But beginning with the Class of ’23, search sea shanties have been growing grimmer. Seniors are applying to hundreds of jobs and not hearing anything from anyone. Searches are taking months longer than expected before starting work. Expectations are being lowered from analyst to assistant positions. Increasingly, internships are considered wins.
All this was before a half-million new grads hit the job market last month. This spring the annual employer survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found that finance, insurance, and real estate companies – among the largest launching pads – were planning to hire 14.5% fewer new grads. The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers corroborating evidence: hiring in professional and business services at a 15-year low. A survey of major consulting firms found that nearly half would make fewer offers this year. All of which suggests that cases like Taylor de Sousa – a new UMass Amherst grad who applied to nearly 300 jobs, landed three interviews, and no offers – or Colleen Kane – a University of Maryland grad who applied to 40 jobs and by April had reset her sights on a summer internship – are no longer exceptional. The boat is taking on water.
2025 isn’t helping. The federal hiring freeze has ruled out the country’s single largest employer. According to Handshake, applications to federal jobs were down 40% for the Class of 2025. Trade and tariff uncertainty has prompted companies in numerous sectors to batten down the hatches. But the iceberg is the private sector’s historically rapid adoption of AI. A new report from Oxford Economics concludes new grads are already seeing a “displacement effect.” The report looks at recent computer science grads and finds that employment for 22-27-year-olds has declined 8% since the emergence of generative AI.
New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose is certain we’re only seeing the “tip of the iceberg.” He’s hearing all about businesses “making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work, and that AI companies are racing to build ‘virtual workers’ that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost.” Roose cites Brookings’ Molly Kinder who reports she’s hearing from companies that “these tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.”
I’ve written previously about how AI is eliminating entry-level jobs by automating the busy work that new hires used to be tasked with while they learned the ropes and became productive. As a venture capital executive told Roose, “nobody has patience or time for hand-holding in this new environment.” Anthropic’s (misanthropic?) CEO Dario Amodei believes AI could replace half of all entry-level jobs. In his Notes on AI Readiness, Alex Kotran points out that much of this could happen as soon as the next downturn; historically, 88% of job displacement due to automation occurs within 12 months of the onset of recessions. And while far from the scariest prediction they make, the end-of-days-ers at AI 2027 recount a disaster in progress – albeit with less art than Gord – foretelling the first major anti-AI protest in DC in just over a year as AI job displacement becomes the next major social crisis.
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The Class of 2025 is well-versed in rejection. They were rejected from the extracurricular (and usually pre-professional) clubs they wanted to join. Then they were rejected from internships. Now they’re being rejected from jobs. And fittingly, they’re increasingly being rejected not by human hiring managers, but by the very technology that’s displacing them.
A remarkable 88% of companies say they’re already using AI to screen candidates at the top of the hiring funnel. Even without purpose-built AI tools, small and mid-sized businesses are asking AI to produce a capabilities grid before uploading resumes to map applicants against the rubric. Only then will human hiring managers begin looking at candidates. And use of AI in hiring isn’t limited to screening. One survey of 900 companies found 23% already using AI for interviews, resulting in some subpar candidate experiences. Like Ohio State’s Kendiana Colin whose answered two standard questions, but couldn’t figure out how to answer the next one:
AI Interviewer: Vertical bar pilates. Vertical bar pilates. Vertical bar pilates. Vertical bar pilates. Vertical bar pilates. Vertical bar pilates. Vertical bar pilates.
Due in part to AI, college grads are applying to more positions and not hearing back. The average senior applied to more than 21 jobs on Handshake last year up from 14 in 2023. One research firm found a 160% increase in the percentage of job applicants who don’t hear anything after submitting an application.
It’s dispiriting for all, soul-crushing for some. Said one student: “It’s not so hard to send out maybe 100 or 200 job applications. But when you start getting to, like, 500, 800, 1,000 and you’ve been doing it for six-plus months, it can take a toll on you.” LinkedIn’s May labor market report finds that Gen Z workers in the U.S. “report the lowest confidence levels of any generation, recently hitting an all-time low.” It’s also producing more lying on resumes.
The longer term is even more worrisome. Unemployment or underemployment out of the gate is pernicious not only for lifetime earnings but also for second-order effects like criminality (not just lying on resumes). And because young people from wealthy, connected families are less likely to be rejected hundreds of times or interviewed by hallucinating bots, expect inequality to get worse.
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This November marks 50 years since the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Next year is the 50th anniversary of the song. If we don’t move quickly to address the career launch disaster – if the classes of 2026, 2027, and 2028 find themselves in even stormier weather – it’s not a freighter at risk, it’s the ship of state. Because while trade and tariff uncertainty will abate and the federal government will hire new grads again at some point, secular trends will put more young Americans in peril with each passing year. Could we make it for 50 more years? Unfathomable.
If we want to keep college graduate unemployment + underemployment from skyrocketing past 70 and 80%, it’s all hands on deck. Accreditors must put an end to schools’ willful ignorance of employment outcomes. Schools must equip young people with AI skills, not only in support of learning, but for actually doing the things businesses need them to do, which necessitates an epic shift from classroom to work-based learning. Governments must dramatically scale investment in the intermediaries needed to both make work-based learning work for companies, schools, and students and also build the earn-and-learn career pathways that are much more forgiving in terms of skills and experience. President Trump’s goal of 1M apprentices is a good start, but not nearly enough. We can no longer afford to force high school grads to choose between College and Chipotle.
Gord closed The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald with a stanza about the funerals:
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed In the maritime sailors' cathedral The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
And then – in the bardic tradition of repeating until encoded in memory – by returning to the top:
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee Superior, they said, never gives up her dead When the gales of November come early
Let’s stop this disaster and save lives before some new Gord writes and records an amazing and depressing song about it.