There are a number of caveats to this. I appreciate that. But it is actually quite funny seeing this occur, across the "West", pretty much in most developed countries now, not just in the "Anglosphere"...
It's partially a consequence of 'Rona, and the government policies that various countries went for, in response to that. It's partially because of vaccine mandates. It's partly because, so we're told, a bunch of Boomers used 'Rona as the final push they needed, I guess, to retire, and get out. As a result of all that, though? Massive labour shortages, almost everywhere you look.
Media orgs and governments never admit this, but one of the only reasons that this situation can possibly exist is that young people are, increasingly, hugely overqualified, and are unwilling to take positions that they feel are somehow "beneath" them, or basically anything that they might consider "working class" or "unskilled"...
Previous to now, you also had employers not hiring people, because they were "overqualified" (amusingly, had that problem myself. Not anymore, lol), but now, most are seemingly so desperate that this excuse has gone out the window...
In essence though, in much of the world - the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, NZ, Germany, et al, society has spent the last 30-40 years telling young people that the only way to succeed is to: get a degree, probably get another degree, become a "professional" and fuck and/or backstab your way "to the top"...
No wonder young people have become so deluded as to think that manual labour, manufacturing, agriculture, whatever, is all beneath them. Especially when, in Australia at least, you still need to get qualifications, in order to do pretty much any of those jobs...
This was never sustainable. Nor were the ever-increasing levels of "student debt", across much of the West. Yet only now is it seemingly really coming home to roost, and still, it's pretty unlikely you will see anyone with power or influence admitting to any of this...
Personally, I can't wait until the day that this entire (economic, societal, political) house of cards comes crashing down.
One thing I've seen is that they're not "over qualified" they are "over credentialed".
The "qualifications" are so high that they are utterly unattainable by a normal human, and can only be met by someone with literally zero work experience.
I shit you not, one of these private schools had a job position open for a teacher who was:
That math don't fucking math. Someone who is a doctor and a lawyer has been in school for a long time, but has likely had decades of experience. But to go through 3 of those professions? It's insanity. To ask them for 2 years experience means they've never even held a professional position, and the wage certainly shows that.
It's just people packing credentials on credentials on credentials on credentials, all without work experience. That's a sign that these people are deep within the Social Justice Racket. No one ever actually did any work.
What's really sad is that even in the STEM field, people don't realize, Academic and Research positions in STEM? They're full. They've been full. Every time you saw a scientist say that we need more people in STEM? Yeah, either that was a lie or they didn't know. The US government has a strategic national objective to oversupply STEM in order to drive down the price of engineers, and also to push STEM into non-STEM fields. Most physics graduates don't work in physics... they work in finance. That's on purpose.
The college grad field is wildly oversupplied. But instead of admitting that colleges are flooding the labor market with the wrong labor, they just turned into over-priced diploma mills that produce bureaucrats and Social Justice Racketeers. The economic correction on this is gonna be real bad for all these people who have never really worked a day in their lives.
A lot of that is due to simple economic illiteracy among politicians and proles, which compound and enable whatever wealthy parasites setup. STEM degrees are pursued by millennials and zoomers since liberal arts bachelors no longer serve as general IQ tests for entry-level positions that pay more than unskilled labor. This started when morons thought restricting IQ tests, and other wishfully rationalized regulations necessitated the creation of HR departments in the first place, wouldn't result in a ballooning overhead and other poor tradeoffs.
Proles are always the most culpable for whatever dysfunction overtakes civilizations.