The share of U.S. employers offering paid family leave dropped two percentage points in 2025 to 31%, according to SHRM's annual survey, and at least two large companies have recently reduced what they offer.
Deloitte cut paid family leave in half for certain administrative and support staff and eliminated financial support for adoption, surrogacy, and IVF for those employees. Zoom cut parental leave to 18 weeks from 22 for most birth mothers and to 10 weeks from 16 for other parents.
The cuts hit women hardest: paid family leave has been shown to help women stay employed, and Deloitte's reductions target support roles that are predominantly held by women and generally lower-paid.
Not all employers are moving in the same direction: Starbucks recently increased paid parental leave for retail employees to 18 weeks for birth mothers and 12 weeks for other parents, up from six weeks for both.
Talent does not have the upper hand in any segment of the economy, and companies are profit-maximizing machines and they will take advantage of that."
Read more via The New York Times
After parting ways with more than 300,000 federal employees in 2025 through resignations, retirements, and reduction-in-force programs, the Office of Personnel Management is now focused on recruitment and retention, according to OPM Director Scott Kupor.
The administration's U.S. Tech Force program aims to bring roughly 1,000 engineers into federal government for two-year stints; the first hire under the program started work this week.
Only 7% of the current federal workforce has five to seven years of work experience, compared to 22% in the broader U.S. workforce, and many current federal employees will become retirement-eligible in the next five to 15 years.
OPM is working to remove time-based restrictions on promotions, allowing high performers to advance regardless of tenure, while making it easier to move out underperformers.
Kupor said AI will be used to make federal workers more efficient, not replace them.
Read more via WTOP
Policy changes to the H-1B visa program and a pause on visa processing for nationals of 39 countries have made it significantly harder for international students to find work after graduation, with employers pulling back on sponsorship and some students already making plans to leave.
The Trump administration imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B applicants from outside the country and introduced a wage-based lottery, while the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services raised doubts about the future of the Optional Practical Training program, which currently allows international students to work in the U.S. for up to three years after graduation.
The share of U.S. job postings open to international talent fell nearly 25% over the past year, according to job search platform Interstride; at Cornell, the share of postings offering visa sponsorship dropped from 4.6% in March 2025 to 2.5% in April.
In 2025, nearly half of all Ph.D. and master's degrees awarded in science, technology, and engineering went to international students, a pipeline that employers and universities say could dry up.
Some students are already looking abroad; a Ph.D. graduate from Iran whose visa processing has been paused said her chemotherapy research project has been delayed indefinitely while she applies for jobs in Europe and Australia.
With applications slumping and prospective students holding onto their jobs amid AI-driven uncertainty, business schools are offering steep discounts on specialized degrees sold as the credential you need for the AI era.
Purdue's Mitch Daniels School of Business is cutting tuition 40% this fall, bringing its online MBA to $36,000 for out-of-state students, down from $60,000; UC Irvine is cutting as much as 38% on its Flex and Executive MBA programs; Johns Hopkins is offering a 50% scholarship to spring graduates of Maryland colleges.
Washington University's Olin Business School launched a $10,000 scholarship specifically for professionals whose careers have been disrupted by AI, whether through a layoff or a rapid shift in what their job requires.
The share of graduate management students receiving financial assistance has risen from 48% a decade ago to 62% in 2025, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council; merit-based scholarships rose from 32% to 47% over the same period.
Applications from international students have slowed due to visa uncertainty, while some domestic students say they would rather stay employed and learn on the job than take on debt for a degree.
Read more via The Wall Street Journal
Accommodation and food services recorded a quit rate of 4.3% in March, the highest of any industry tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and nearly double the private-sector average of 2.2%, according to an OysterLink analysis of BLS JOLTS data.
Roughly three-quarters of all separations in the sector are voluntary; layoffs held steady at 1.3%, matching the national average, meaning operators are constantly hiring to replace people who just left.
No other major industry came close: retail trade was second at 3.1%, followed by professional and business services at 2.0%, health care at 1.9%, manufacturing at 1.4%, finance at 1.2%, and government at 0.7%.
The sector's hiring rate of 6.2% in March was also the highest among all industries, a direct result of the churn.
Read more via Business Journal Daily
A Radical Candor survey of 600 U.S. workers finds a widening trust gap between employees and leadership, driven by undertrained managers, weak feedback cultures, and growing concerns about AI accuracy that nobody is addressing.
45% of employees say they don't feel psychologically safe at work; 61% say they see colleagues staying silent about problems, compared to just 48% of executives who think silence is even an issue.
54% of employees say they rarely or never get feedback from their managers; 70% of current managers were never taught to give or receive feedback before taking on the role.
Employees report catching inaccuracies in AI-assisted work 73% of the time, and more than half say those concerns are only sometimes or rarely acted on.
58% of executives admit they aren't investing enough in their people, a view shared even more strongly by managers (68%), HR teams (71%), and employees (76%).
Read more via Globe Newswire
A Gallup World Poll of 141 countries found that the United States has the largest generational gap in job market confidence of any country surveyed, with 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 saying it is a good time to find a job locally, compared to 64% of those aged 55 and older.
Globally, the pattern runs the other way: a median of 48% of adults aged 15 to 34 say it is a good time to find a job, compared to 38% of those 55 and older.
Young Americans' job market optimism has fallen 27 percentage points since 2023, a drop comparable in speed to what happened during the 2008 financial crisis, though older Americans' confidence has barely moved.
The steepest pessimism is among young women, college graduates, and those not yet working full-time, the group most actively trying to get into the labor market.
Last year was the first on record, aside from 2020, when U.S. youth job market optimism fell below the median for other advanced economies.
Read more via Gallup, AP
