&gt;Underemployment should be mentioned in any discussion of job difficulty; in the US, getting a job as a barista or fast food is possible, but a horrendous waste of a college education.<p>But there have never been enough &quot;good&quot; white collar to employ the current number of Americans getting a college education. The difference was there were enough good, white collar jobs for the college graduates back then. But the number of college graduates has exploded.<p>You can train another 20k Physicists, but we wouldn&#x27;t have any use for them.<p>And the quality of the degrees are lower too because colleges are accepting (and then graduating) worse and worse students.<p>Not everyone is cut out to do great things. There is no shame in slinging coffee.