Or, alternatively, the crop of current grads education is abysmal compared to past graduates, and companies are reluctant to hire them.

This is the first graduate class since Covid. Pivoting to online learning quickly resulted in worse learning outcomes for k-12 and college as well.

Companies are seeing a decline in base-level skills typically expected from previous classes of new graduates. They can either hire now and pay the cost of training for possibly 1-2 years to get them to an appropriate level, or hire no one and instead hire from the classes of 2026 and 2027, assuming those students improve from the post-Covid education system.