Riley Reed’s stress level spiked after she graduated from Webster University in mid-May. She needed a job. She hoped her new bachelor’s degree in advertising and marketing (plus two specialty certificates in that field) would get her one. But she spent hour after anxious hour scrolling on her phone and didn’t see many job postings for someone at her level. As a new entrant in the labor market, she was OK with entry-level pay, yet the bulk of jobs offering even that compensation required several years of industry experience. Nobody seemed willing to train a newbie. She kept applying anyway—eventually, to about 15 places—and struggled to even get an interview. “I was definitely very overwhelmed,” she recalls. “And I have heard from several other students as well that they are kind of in this panic mode right now and not getting interviews.”
Reed and other newly minted college grads in St. Louis are now encountering what analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis have identified as a “low-hire, low-fire” economy—a situation in which businesses tend to hold onto the workers they already have and refrain from creating new roles. It’s a dynamic that typically arises in the wake of an exceptionally tight labor market, which the pandemic triggered only a few years ago. According to the Fed analysts, the low-hire-low-fire dynamic is observable both at the national level and in the Eighth Federal Reserve District, which covers all of Arkansas, most of Missouri, and parts of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
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Young workers feel it the most because they typically gain their footholds in the economy through vacancy and churn, says William M. Rodgers III, one of the Fed researchers.
“Entry-level positions that once were offered are not being offered,” he says. By Rodgers’ calculation, employment in the population of new-entrant college graduates in Missouri has averaged about 86.5 percent in the first half of this year—a figure that’s lower than it used to be. New college grad employment actually fell 8.5 percentage points from April 2023 to December 2025, at the same time that several other demographic groups saw slight rises in employment.
Asked how a low-hire-low-fire economy might affect these recent college grads in the long run, Rodgers says a lot depends on how long it lasts. If job seekers keep running into brick walls, they will eventually grow discouraged and exit the labor force. “But I’m not seeing large labor force declines,” Rodgers says, “which is a good thing.”
Rodgers and a co-author, Alice Kassens, who is a research fellow and dean of the School of Business, Economics, and Analytics at Roanoke College, recently tested various competing hypotheses for the drop in employment among recent college grads. Maybe, the analysts thought, it had to do with the Trump-era drop in the nation’s foreign-born population: After all, those folks are consumers, and their absence would affect economic sectors such as retail, where young workers commonly get their start. But the timing of the two phenomena didn’t match up. The researchers also looked at contraction in the manufacturing sphere and the decline of women’s federal employment as the Trump administration seeks to shrink what it calls “the administrative state.” Neither of those appeared to explain what was happening to young workers.
One aspect of the Missouri economy that did seem to offer at least some explanatory power, Rodgers found, was a modest increase in job openings that demand skills in artificial intelligence—specialized skills that recent grads are less likely to have acquired. But the main culprit in the Show-Me State has been a drop in job openings. Overall, those fell by about a third over the past few years.
Still, it’s all relative. Missouri has fared a bit better than its neighbors on the metric of the overall hiring rate—that is, the portion of open positions that get filled. In the Fed district, that number fell in every state except Missouri, where it rose by about half a percentage point between April 2023 and December 2025.
And one Missourian who just caught a break was Riley Reed, who recently turned 22. She found a job at a recruitment marketing agency in Brentwood and started working there in mid-June.
“It really showed me that what I worked for paid off,” she says. “It’s exactly what I wanted coming out of school, which I think is very rare.”
