Growing up in Detroit, Ryon Baldwin-Williams built web pages as a hobby. As a computer science major at Michigan State University’s School of Engineering, he got prized internships, working (among other stints) as a software analyst at consulting firm Accenture, and a software engineering intern at Rocket Companies, the big Detroit-based fintech built by billionaire Dan Gilbert. He even worked at MSU’s career services center during his sophomore to senior year, figuring it would help him network and learn about the resume tips, tricks, and skills needed to land a job after college.
Ryon Baldwin-Williams had multiple internships before graduating with a computer engineering degree from Michigan State in 2025. He still doesn’t have a full-time tech job, but earns freelance income designing web sites and apps for fashion brands.
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Yet more than a year after graduation, Baldwin-Williams, now 23, is still hunting for a permanent software engineering job. “I originally had a spreadsheet of every single job I applied to and the status of it,” he says. “But once I got to 100 applications, I said, ‘Uh-uh’ and deleted the whole thing.”
While lots of recent college graduates are being battered by a weak hiring market, perhaps no group is more shocked by their current plight than those who majored in engineering, long considered among the safest, most secure, and highest-paying majors. Yes, engineering grads still make more than education and English majors. The National Association of College and Employers projected in February that 2026 engineering and computer science grads would see average starting salaries topping $81,000, compared to less than $69,000 for those majoring in business, social sciences and communications.
But that’s if they can find a job. In fact, the prospects for engineering grads are markedly worse than for other majors. According to LinkedIn data provided exclusively to Forbes, while overall hiring of new grads fell 20% between December 2019 and April 2026, jobs for engineering majors were down by 25%, the biggest drop for any of the 20 most common majors on LinkedIn’s platform. By contrast, jobs for education majors and those in the health professions slid 16%.
“There was a time where we told everyone to code and we thought that was a very safe role,” says Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s Head of Economics, Americas. “And now we see for folks who graduate with computer science degrees, unemployment is relatively elevated.”
Of course it’s not just new grads suffering. Outplacement consultant Challenger, Gray, and Christmas’ reports that in the first six months of this year, tech companies announced 139,156 jobs cuts, nearly one-third of all the layoffs announced by all industries. The dominant reason, the firm says, was artificial intelligence, “restructuring around it, automating roles, and reallocating budgets toward new [AI] capabilities.”
But those layoffs hurt new grads too. As fearful older workers cling to their current jobs, it has a cascading effect, meaning there are even fewer new openings for recent grads, says Kantenga.
Engineers’ Versatility Problem
There’s another factor working against many engineers. In recent years, English, communications and performing arts majors have searched far afield to get their (admittedly lower paying) first jobs, with more than two thirds of grads from 2022 to 2024 working outside their core industries, according to LinkedIn’s analysis. That’s a factor it dubs “versatility.”
But engineering grads, particularly those in certain subspecialties, stick to a narrower set of industries and paths. In today’s fast evolving job market, that lack of versatility has emerged as a growing handicap. The chart to the right shows the versatility score for different engineering specialties.
Those who majored in aerospace and chemical engineering are facing the most challenges in today’s labor market–hiring in each specialty is off 26% and neither is particularly versatile.
Civil engineers are faring better, Kantenga says, not only because construction is robust right now–there is, after all, a data center boom–but also because they have an underlying versatility. Yes, their versatility on the chart looks low, because they tend to stay in their core construction industry. But within construction, their versatility is actually high, he explains, because they can fill so many different roles–as project managers, project engineers and field engineers. Hiring of civil engineers, LinkedIn’s data shows, is off only 16% since December, 2019.
Drilling even deeper into LinkedIn data, Kantenga reports that hiring for field engineers is actually up from pre-pandemic levels. “Field engineers are the people who support installing onsite equipment,” he notes. “So if you’re graduating with a civil engineering degree and you go into field engineering, there’s going to be all kinds of roles from everything related to transitioning to solar, to working at data centers.”
The bottom line, says Kantenga, is that all engineering graduates need to hone in on where growth is happening in their field and figure out a way to tap into it. For example, he says, automation engineering, which includes designing systems that harness AI, is another area where hiring is up from pre-pandemic levels. He says engineering graduates now need to ask themselves, “How do I take the skills that I got from that major and apply them to another area or another field within engineering more broadly?”
As for computer software engineers, while hiring in their core industry is down 25%, they’ve got a versatility edge on say, chemical or aerospace engineers, since lots of companies need their skills. If AI means the tech companies aren’t hiring as many programmers, it also means that companies in other industries need tech specialists to help implement their own use of AI–and explain it to other employees. Provided that is, they have the communication skills to do so.
How Top Colleges Are Adjusting
The best engineering schools are (as engineers do) working on fixes. Consider the Georgia Institute of Technology, which has been honored on the New Ivies list of 10 public and 10 private schools employers love for all three years Forbes has published it. Matthieu Bloch, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of electrical and computer engineering acknowledges the school’s engineering students are no longer getting “15 interviews and 15 job offers.” But they’re still doing relatively well, he says, because of its efforts to make their “students resilient to change.”
In addition to creating an AI minor program in 2024 that spans the College of Engineering, College of Business, and College of Liberal Arts, Georgia Tech has focused on ensuring engineering students have the human soft skills needed to work in any field, Bloch says. And yes, it has actually harnessed AI to help students hone those skills.
One of his colleagues, Bloch reports, has created AI-powered avatars for students to interact with. “These avatars represent different people depending on the context,” he explains. “They could be somebody who’s a VC and the student has to do an elevator pitch to the VC. The avatar could also be somebody who’s taking them through a technical review of their product.” The goal, he says, is to “leverage these new technologies to make our students better engineers, not just technically, but better at all the things that matter when working in a team in the workforce.”
Case Western Reserve University, a private research university in Cleveland, also made this year’s New Ivies list. Susan Hagness, dean of the University’s Engineering School, says it too has emphasized to students the importance of mastering transferable human skills that will be needed regardless of AI’s advancements.
“Our engineering students can pick up a wide variety of courses across the curriculum and they often do,’’ says Hagness. “Many engineering students will pick up courses in philosophy and other humanities areas. I think that helps them stand out because while AI literacy is increasingly essential, we know from our employers that they value human intelligence skills that AI simply can’t replicate.”
Hagness reports that 98% of all 2025 Case Western graduates who pursued permanent employment landed a full-time job within three months of graduation. When looking at engineering students specifically, 23% landed jobs with starting salaries exceeding $100,000, she says.
In today’s slow hiring market, Hagness says many of Case Western’s students start their job search about 10 months before graduation and keep their options open to opportunities that may not be in the traditional field for their major. “We’re teaching our students to think critically and to be creative and to solve problems,” she says. “And that’s always been in high demand across all industry sectors, so our students have not only gone into engineering, but consulting, healthcare, and financial services.”
And what about Detroit resident and MSU grad Baldwin-Williams? As he continues his search for a full-time tech job, he’s using his own eclectic interests and communication skills to build a freelance business helping fashion brands build websites and other applications. “I had to find a way to pursue what I wanted,” he says, adding that he’s now known as “the tech guy” in local creative circles.