It’s supposed to be easier to get a job if you have a college degree rather than just a high school diploma, but new research out this week from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that recent college grads may be losing their advantage.

​The unemployment gap is narrowing between the two groups.

​There are still some advantages to being a college graduate, including better pay and job security, according to Bariş Kaymak, economic and policy adviser at the Cleveland Fed.

​That said, “a typical college graduate would take about, in the past, maybe two, two and a half months to find a job when a high school graduate would then take about four, four and a half months to find a job,” he said.

​These days? “They're both taking about four and a half months to find that first job.”

Kaymak said the pandemic and AI aren’t the only causes. Some of it could just be a factor of the changing economic tides, per Harvard economist David Deming.

Some of it, he said, could be a correction from post-pandemic hiring. “So, you do often see that hiring of new college grads is like the first thing to go when a company is having to make tough decisions. They'd rather just not hire this year and do a freeze than lay people off.”

​There are also way more people with college degrees than there used to be. And some industries that would’ve given them an advantage aren’t hiring like before, said Alí Bustamante, an economist at the University of New Orleans.

“Accounting, management, legal services, HR, you name it — just this past September, we saw that that sector lost 20,000 jobs,” he said.

​Instead of looking for a job, Bustamante said people graduating from college will sometimes pursue more education, in hopes that “they'll not only enter into a better labor market, but they'll be entering into a better labor market with these higher credentials.”

​Bustamante added that that’s a gamble, though, because there’s no guarantee what the labor market will look like in the future.