A Princeton PhD sent 2,300 job applications and still has no offer (opens the source in a new tab)
- Jack Weis finished a chemical engineering PhD at Princeton in 2024. Two years and more than 2,300 applications later, from lab posts to food-prep jobs, he still lives in his parents' basement without work.
- WSJ's Lindsay Ellis uses his story to show a low-hire, low-fire market: people with jobs stay put, and outsiders are shut out even as unemployment stays low and stocks set records.
- AI sits on both sides: bots screen applications and run one-way video interviews, and a gig training AI on his expertise paid for a while, then dried up.
- 2,300
- applications since 2024
- 2 yrs
- still searching
Why it matters This is the gloom half of today's picks. Degrees used to insure against unemployment; when the best-credentialed are locked out while profits climb, the bottleneck is the hiring machinery, and AI is adding filters faster than openings.
Other side One story is not the labour market. Unemployment is still low, and a highly specialised PhD can be hard to place in any economy; the real test is whether hiring thaws.