Intro

John Logan: 00:00 – 00:20

For the first time in decades, the unemployment rate for four-year college graduates is higher than the general unemployment rate. So new graduates are struggling in the job market. They’re taking longer to get jobs. They’re taking jobs they might not otherwise take because they’re having such problems getting a job.

Interview 

Maya Latz: 00:25 – 00:28

Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do?

Logan: 00:28 – 00:52

I’m John Logan. I’m a professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State. I do research on labor issues broadly defined. So a lot of my research has been on unions or union decline or labor law or the difficulty in forming unions in the United States, or what corporations do to stop workers from forming unions.

00:53 – 01:30

I mean, obviously, one of the really big labor stories right now is, “What is the impact of AI going to have on the labor market?” Every day, you read stories that are mostly these sort of apocalyptic predictions that AI is going to wipe out millions of entry-level white collar jobs, just in the way, it’s kind of what happened with deindustrialization and free trade and economic globalization, where the U.S. lost tens of millions of factory jobs over a relatively short period of time. I mean, now we sort of look back on that, seems like ancient history.

01:31 – 02:00

But, if you look at things like furniture manufacturing – now it sounds weird that the U.S. ever did things like furniture manufacturing or garment manufacturing – a lot of these jobs still existed in states like North Carolina and South Carolina up until the 1990s and even early 2000s, in some cases. But over that period, you had the elimination of millions of those jobs. You know, a lot of people would say we’re still living with the consequence of that right now.

02:01 – 02:34

I mean, obviously, when you take factory jobs away from manufacturing communities, it just has this sort of devastating impact and has a really wrenching impact on individuals themselves. A lot of the people who lost these jobs, some of them never worked again. And if they did work again, they worked in jobs that were lousy jobs that paid much less, had much worse, you know, low paid food service, other kinds of jobs. So it really did scar them for the rest of their lives.

02:34 – 02:59

A lot of these people now say this is what’s giving rise to right wing populism, not just in the United States, but all across like Europe, lots and lots of places. You know, it’s a variety of things, it has to do with migration and status anxiety, but a lot of it is people who used to have manufacturing jobs or live in manufacturing communities.

03:00 – 03:29

And those jobs have been destroyed and so they face lifelong economic insecurity. Therefore, they’re vulnerable to these authoritarian demagogues coming along. Because the truth is, in this country, the economies that sustained middle class lifestyles for people who had high school degrees and then went into manufacturing jobs, those economies disappeared far more quickly than anyone thought they would.

03:30 – 03:57

And neither Republicans nor Democrats really have any good answers for how to recreate sustainable economies. But, you got to have at least have candidates who kind of speak the language of people in these places and understand their problems. And if you don’t have that – and arguably, again, both parties have done a really bad job at that –

03:57 – 04:18

if you don’t have that, then people do become vulnerable to someone like Trump riding in on his white horse saying, “I alone have the answer to your problems.” And so now the question is, are we going to face a similar position with white collar jobs? Are we going to have millions of white collar jobs are going to be eliminated over a very short period of time?

04:19 – 04:54

We have no plan on, as a society, on what to do with those people. You know, of course, I mean, I’m not an AI abolitionist, I mean, that’s stupid. Everyone knows that’s stupid. I mean, AI whether we like it or not, is here to stay. And if you put obstacles in the path of companies who develop AI, I mean, they’re just going to go to some other country and develop it there. So and, you know, there’s this AI arms race between the U.S. and China and all of this stuff that people know about.

04:55 – 05:22

But if you speak to people in these companies, they think the fact that millions, or tens of millions of people, might not have jobs because of AI displacement over the next few decades, that’s not their problem. That’s government’s problem. Government will solve that. But we have a very, very poor track record in this country of government solving those kinds of problems.

Latz: 05:24 – 05:45

I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about the labor market more generally. As I was doing research to prepare for this conversation, I read in a Cengage Group Survey that in 2025, over two million people earned bachelor’s degrees in the spring of 2025, and just 30% of those grads reported finding full-time jobs in their field.

05:46 – 05:57

So, what does this kind of finding – I know we were talking about not specific majors – but what does this finding indicate about higher education? More specifically, how bachelor’s degrees are valued in the labor market right now?

Logan: 05:57 – 06:15

So that is a really good question. And it’s also a kind of a related question. I mean it’s a separate question than this one. How are recent college graduates doing in the job market? But for the first time in decades, the unemployment rate for four-year college graduates is higher than the general unemployment rate.

06:16 – 06:49

So new graduates are struggling in the job market; they’re taking longer to get jobs, they’re taking jobs they might not otherwise take because they’re having such problems getting a job. But every day, you read New York Times, LA Times or San Francisco Chronicle, it’s across the board. You can read about Stanford students or Harvard students or Berkeley students or USC students, who have sent out hundreds of applications and have been on the job market for six months, a year, longer than a year.

06:49 – 07:04

And they’re becoming demoralized because people do, but they’re also saying, “No, I’m still at it, I’m still at it, but I don’t even get replies in most cases.” So the job market is incredibly challenging for new graduates, and that’s really important for a couple of reasons.

07:05 – 07:33

I mean, we’ve known this for a while, but if you go back to the Great Recession, as we called it, you know, the global financial crisis of between 2008 and 2010. If you are just unlucky enough to graduate from college at the wrong time, like when the job market is really bad for recent college grads, it can have consequences that follow you for decades.

07:33 – 08:02

It’s important to know, there’s no point just sort of hiding your head in the sand,and, “I don’t want to read any bad stories about the job market,” it’s really important for people who are about to enter the job market to have a good overview of what’s happening in the job market so that it can make you think about like, “Well, yeah. The job market as a whole is incredibly challenging, but nevertheless, within that challenging job market, some people are succeeding.”

08:04 – 08:20

So what is it about those people who are succeeding, you know, what distinguishes them from all of the people who are not doing well in the job market? And so you have to understand things like that. What is it that they’re doing? What can I do as an individual that will make me more likely to be successful in the job market?

08:20 – 08:34

I mean, the second thing is, organizations hire individuals, they don’t hire degrees. So, I mean, I was always skeptical about the growth and growth and growth of computer science.

08:34 – 08:55

I mean, I’ll come back to that, my first point. But, you know, I also said to people, “Well, not everyone can become a coder, there has to be some limit.” And it’s true. We didn’t know where the limit was. I mean, I admitted that, as I was saying, you know, should we be advising everyone to take a degree in computer science?

08:56 – 09:17

I mean, I have a college educated son, a college age son. Should I be advising him to do a computer science? Because, this is the most marketable, you know, most degree will make you most employable. It just didn’t make sense that, you know, but it sort of did. I mean, it did and it didn’t. Like I said, not everyone can be a coder.

09:17 – 09:34

You know, there’s got to be a limit to the number of coders that society needs. But, for a while, when computer science was growing and growing and growing, we didn’t really know what that limit was. Now we have an idea of where the limit is because people are not getting jobs anymore and there’s all of these coders who are unemployed.

09:35 – 09:55

But there are still plenty of places where they want to. People will read your cover letters, will read your resumes and they’re interested in you as an individual. Not just that – I mean some degrees maybe make you more qualified for this, but at a place like San Francisco State and we’re changing, the rest of higher education is changing.

09:56 – 10:17

Most degrees are not what we call pre-professional degrees. They’re not really training you for a particular job. You know, most of the degrees that people get at San Francisco State, people go into all sorts of different jobs. I mean, there’s a few exceptions to that. Nursing is an exception, right? You know, you train as a nurse, you become a nurse.

10:17 – 10:42

There’s a few other engineering, maybe a little bit computer science. Well, not anymore maybe, but you’re still a little bit. But most of the great degrees are not like that. So, you know, there’s things that people have qualities, backgrounds, experience, work experience and internship experience, all of which makes them more likely to succeed or less likely to succeed.

10:42 – 11:11

Whether the job market is really good or whether it’s really bad. But what we learned from the Great Recession is that, if you’re just unfortunate enough to graduate at a time where the graduate job market is very bad as it is now, that can follow people for the next 10, 20, 30 years, you know, in terms of lower incomes, in terms of lousier jobs, in terms of not having the same career progression that they would normally have.

Latz: 11:12 – 11:26

And I did also kind of want to go back to when you were talking specifically about San Francisco State, and I wanted to kind of localize that a bit, considering all these previous factors and how that’s impacted San Francisco. I know a lot of SFSU students live in San Francisco.

11:27 – 11:40

You know that a lot of students are working at the same time as they’re finishing their education. But is it realistic for San Francisco State students to be able to stay living in a city as expensive as San Francisco. Is that possible?

Logan: 11:40 – 11:50

Well, I mean, that’s a really good question. I mean, increasingly, it’s impossible for anyone to live in San Francisco. I mean, unless you’re super wealthy, of course.

11:50 – 12:18

So, can recent SF State graduates afford to live in San Francisco? Well, I mean, there’s two things, I mean, as you said, the affordability crisis is a nationwide thing, but it’s particularly bad in coastal California, and it’s not just San Francisco. It’s like all down [California]. But that’s also where a lot of the good jobs are and you want to be in a place where the job market is good. If you can get one of those jobs.

12:18 – 12:42

So it’s a really, really difficult situation. I mean, housing in California just by itself has become so absolutely extraordinarily unaffordable to most people. I mean, again, you will read every day in the newspaper, the only way to get a house in California is to inherit one. I mean, what a crazy situation.

12:42 – 13:10

So, if you can’t get a house because you were not smart enough to choose rich parents who own a house. Then you’re paying exorbitant rents. You know, you’re paying like, 30, 50, 60% of your income in rent. I mean, we hope that people will be able to stay here and I genuinely believe that students who attend SF State get all sorts of benefits from doing so. I mean, you’re a perfect example of the different activities that you’ve been involved in.

13:10 – 13:33

It enriches your mind, it exposes you to things you’d never otherwise have been exposed to. It’s good for society because it strengthens democracy. It creates better citizens. I believe all of these things, I genuinely do. I mean, I think I see it every day, but the primary reason that students come to San Francisco State is for instrumental reasons.

13:33 – 13:54

They want to get a better job after they graduate, and we cannot lose sight of that. And especially in today’s job market, where people are so anxious about not knowing what the job market is going to be like in a year’s time, two year’s time, three year’s time and they read all of these sort of horror stories about the AI jobs apocalypse.

13:54 – 14:20

So we have to be involved in preparing people for the future workforce. But lots of academics have spent their entire career not doing that because, that wasn’t really their job and that’s not a criticism of them. They were really good at their jobs, a lot of them, they’re good teachers, they’re good researchers, they’re good citizens, they participate in all of these committees.

14:20 – 14:35

One of the things that I very strongly believe, if you can get a good quality internship and preferably two or three while you’re a student at San Francisco State, you are far more likely to do well in the job market after you graduate.

14:35 – 14:51

I mean, I see it. I see it in my own students, but I know there’s all sorts of studies that sort of say the same thing. You know, I go into these meetings for the people designing new degrees on workplace preparedness. And I say, you know, internships, internships, internships.

14:51 – 15:09

And, again, not a criticism because there are people who have dedicated their life to San Francisco State and who are very good at their jobs and who care a huge amount about their students. They say, “well, but I’m a chemistry professor. I have no idea how to get students internships. I have no idea how they get internships.”

15:09 – 15:23

But unfortunately, we need to know that kind of thing now. The thing is, AI is changing the world of work much faster than the job market is able to change to accommodate those changes in the world of work.

15:23 – 15:42

It’s the same with higher education. We have to change. I mean, the president says all the time, everyone knows we have to change. But it’s difficult for universities to change overnight. You know, it takes time to create new programs, or even to figure out what are the programs that you need to create.

15:42 – 16:03

I mean, it’s partly being done by people who have not spent their career thinking about workforce development issues and have not spent their career thinking about what makes people most employable when it comes to the job market after graduation. But increasingly, we have to think about those things.

16:03 – 16:22

It used to be the case that, you know, when the job market was really bad, students would still gravitate towards the College of Business because they used to think, oh, that’s the kind of degree that will help me get a job after graduation. We’ve had an almost 40% decline in enrollment in the [Lam Family] College of Business over the past eight years.

16:23 – 16:49

So it’s no longer the case that people are just going to think a degree in management or a degree in marketing or a degree in international business is a surefire way to get a job. But if we were able to put on our college website, you know, 99% of our graduates get a high-quality internship while they are completing their degree, that would achieve two things.

16:49 – 17:05

First, those students would do much better in the job market after they graduated. And second, people seeing it would be far more inclined to apply to our college in the first place, because they think, ”Oh, that’s the internship college. I want to go there.”

17:05 – 17:24

There are places all over the country, and Northeastern is one of the examples that people always cite, they have this thing – I don’t know if it’s called the practicum or something – where you work for a number of weeks, and then you go to college for a number of weeks, and you work for a number, things like that I think are incredibly useful.

17:25 – 17:47

I mean, you’ve raised the issue of being able to live in San Francisco. This is the same problem that the university [has]. Can the university afford to live in San Francisco? Well, being in San Francisco should be a huge advantage to our university. You know, if you’re running a college business, just as an example, would you rather be in San Francisco?

17:47 – 18:09

You know, the epicenter of AI and all of these other cutting edge technologies and developments and companies and organizations or would you rather be in Humboldt? I mean, the answer should be obvious, you should want to be in San Francisco. But you should only want to be in San Francisco if you can actually create connections with those organizations.

18:09 – 18:37

And I don’t just mean with Anthropic and Open AI and Google and all the rest of it. I mean, with all of the rich organizations that you get in San Francisco, if you could say to students, “You would get a great internship in San Francisco or in the Bay Area while you’re completing your four-year degree,” that would be a huge draw in terms of attracting people to the college, but also it would help some after they graduate.

18:37 – 19:05

There really are no easy answers. I feel this really acutely, I know it’s easy to say this, but I, you know, talk to students every day and try to help them and try to them think about, you know, do this, do that, do this. I really think this is really the kind of thing that helps people stand out when it comes to the job market. You know, my own son, River, is a second-year undergraduate. I think about it every day with regards to him as well. I wish I had answers.

19:05 – 19:30

I really don’t. But again, the kind of things that you’ve been involved with obviously with, a student newspaper, doing stories, with doing podcasts, things like that are invaluable experience because every organization that I work for has comms people, you know, like they have a comms, unions have comms departments, City Hall has comms departments, private corporations have comms departments.

19:30 – 19:46 

You know, they need people with the type of transferable skills that you’ve been able to develop when you’re doing things like this. My first academic job, I taught at London School of Economics for 10 years, and it was a wonderful place, really international and really interesting.

19:46 – 20:04

You can have seminars where you’ve got students from 20 different countries, it was very common, but most of those students are in the so privileged position they can put school work at the center of their lives for the year, 18 months, they were there, academic work was the main focus of their existence.

20:04 – 20:22

You know, with our students, they have complicated lives. They’re working full time, they’re commuting, they’re looking after kids or looking after parents. They’re doing all of this stuff. So they often don’t have that luxury. But they have life skills that can make them incredibly valuable.

20:22 – 20:39

So many organizations I work with, I said, “Listen, I know that you will get people from Stanford or Berkeley or wherever applying for this job, but trust me, I have this student, they would be fantastic. If you give them a chance, you will not regret it. They will do a fantastic job.”

20:39 – 20:56

In lots of different fields, it’s really challenging to break in to begin with, but once you have, then you meet people, then you hear about things, then you begin to develop that year, two or three years of experience that makes you qualified for all sorts of other jobs.

Latz: 20:56 – 21:07

Thank you so much for joining GGX today and joining me today for this podcast.