Manpower Minister Tan See Leng told Parliament in May that graduates were taking longer to find their first full-time job, but urged that the softening be read in context. The 2022 benchmark of 87.5%, he said, reflected an unusual post-Covid-19 rush to hire. Over the past decade, employment rates for degree holders aged 25 to 29 have stayed “broadly stable” at around 90%.
Some of the cooling is cyclical. Demand eased after the post-pandemic boom, weighed down by three years of high interest rates, thin returns on AI spending and tariff shocks from Washington. Many firms are recalibrating and taking a wait-and-see approach.
A less comfortable possibility is that employers have found a huge bargain in interns and contract staff instead of full-time hires. For one, an intern or contract worker costs a fraction of a permanent hire, adds no headcount and leaves on schedule, without the costs or friction of retrenchment.
When a graduate-level employee can be engaged on such loose terms, the incentive to offer permanent roles weakens. The clearest sign of this phenomenon is when the entry-level roles being advertised on job portals are not entry-level at all. Some job-seekers report being told at recruitment fairs that vacancies for fresh graduates in fact require three to four years of industry experience.
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Much of that pressure now rests on the internship itself, a role which has changed significantly. A decade or two ago, an internship was a matter of exposure. A student spent a few weeks observing an industry from the inside, with little expected in return and nothing much riding on the outcome.
Today, it functions as a credential. An undergraduate hoping to enter banking, say, must work out early which three internships will carry them there, then devote each vacation to securing them. Little room remains for exploration when the path must be plotted from the moment students enter university, producing a cohort that optimises rather than experiments. In fact, summer internships may not even be enough. It is not uncommon to hear of students taking leaves of absence during school semesters to pile on more off-cycle internships.
This is where the internship becomes more like an audition than an education. When experience must be accumulated before a salary is offered, the internship is no longer a rehearsal but a try-out for an entry-level job. The degree is increasingly regarded as table stakes rather than a milestone achievement in one’s education.
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The real signalling weight lies in the quality and quantity of one’s internships. Employers expect a fresh hire to hit the ground running from day one, and the internships stand as proof that they can. By the time a graduate applies for the entry-level role, their internship record has already decided whether they are in the running.
Universities themselves appear to be endorsing the practice too. It is becoming increasingly common for universities to offer students academic credit in exchange for completing an internship. The Singapore University of Technology and Design and SMU require all their students to complete at least one internship in order to graduate. Institutionalising the audition may improve individual outcomes, but it also normalises a system in which experience, sometimes unpaid, must be accumulated before a job is offered.
Perhaps that really is what’s necessary to kickstart one’s career these days, but it reflects a quiet lowering of expectations about what a degree is supposed to secure. A qualification that once opened the door now merely qualifies you to audition for it.
