The labor market has been in a state of stagnation in recent years; employees are reluctant to leave their current jobs, and companies are hesitant to hire new staff—a combination that has severely constrained employment opportunities for university graduates.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Jack Weis, a resident of Salt Lake City, Utah, has submitted over 2,300 job applications since earning his PhD in chemical engineering from Princeton University in 2024—yet he remains unemployed. He wryly describes himself as “just another unemployed person living in his parents’ basement.”
The son of two physicians, Weis graduated at the top of his class from Rice University before enrolling in a doctoral program at Princeton in 2018. His research on ice crystals was even cited by the Nobel Committee when they announced the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Weis initially targeted research and development roles in the private sector and postdoctoral fellowships at national laboratories. He later broadened his search to include positions in fields like software engineering—but even an application for a food preparation job at a company selling frozen crab cakes yielded no response.
Weis also held a part-time position training artificial intelligence (AI) models, but that role eventually came to an end.
His experience reflects the broader stagnation of the U.S. labor market; an August Gallup poll revealed that only 34% of Americans believe it is currently easy to find a good job.
Weis’s mother, Holly Carveth, reviewed his resume, hoping to identify why it failed to attract employers—but she could find no obvious flaws. “It’s baffling,” she said. “I just don’t understand it.”
Recent employment reports have fallen well short of expectations. While the overall unemployment rate remains low, the proportion of individuals who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer reached a multi-year high this summer—a level not seen in over a decade, excluding the period impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
A survey released in September by the non-profit Pew Research Center found that more than 70% of Americans expect that AI will lead to a reduction in the total number of available jobs. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond indicates that workers laid off due to the impact of AI now face a significantly lower probability of finding new employment compared to a few years ago.
AI applications have permeated the job-application process; employers now use AI-driven tools to screen hundreds of applications—many of which were themselves crafted with the help of AI.
A survey by the recruitment platform Greenhouse found that over 60% of job seekers in the United States participated in interviews that did not involve a human being last year.
Weiss attempted to bypass online job portals by reaching out directly to personal contacts; however, the Princeton alumni he managed to reach mostly just directed him to submit his resume through the company’s official website. Weiss expects these applications to lead nowhere—a prospect he finds “chilling.”
Since the time of his doctoral dissertation defense, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has reached new closing highs more than 50 times. Having received a research stipend during his doctoral studies and carrying no student debt, Weiss has invested his savings. “It’s great that my stocks keep going up—I’m not angry about it—but it just makes the whole situation even stranger,” he says.