The Higher Education Inquirer has long examined how digital labor platforms shape the trajectories of college graduates. For years, Indeed, LinkedIn, and an expanding universe of niche job boards promised to democratize opportunity and connect graduates to meaningful work. Today, they increasingly represent something else: evidence of a broken system in which educated workers—often carrying significant debt—are funneled into precarious labor markets mediated by platforms whose incentives are misaligned with student success. What Cory Doctorow has described as enshittification is no longer an exception but the operating model.
Indeed’s trajectory is the clearest expression of this decline. The site began as a transparent aggregator designed to make employment searchable and accessible. Over time, it has transformed into a pay-to-play environment in which sponsored listings overshadow organic results, duplicates and recycled ads clutter searches, and misleading postings reduce trust. Users on both sides—job seekers and employers—report diminishing value even as the company extracts more revenue from each.
LinkedIn has followed a parallel arc. Once positioned as a professional network that expanded access and visibility, it now privileges those who can pay for premium placement or “boosted” visibility. The platform’s feed is increasingly dominated by engagement-optimized content, sales pitches, and algorithmic noise. Genuine networking—the discovery of mentors, colleagues, and opportunities—has been pushed to the background by monetized features and incessant upselling. Graduates hoping to build relationships now find themselves navigating a digital marketplace that treats their careers as data points to be monetized.
Niche job boards, often touted as more curated alternatives, have also succumbed to similar dynamics. As private equity money flows into the sector, these boards increasingly rely on subscription fees, visibility boosts, lead-generation schemes, and paywalls that frustrate both applicants and employers. The promise of specialization is overshadowed by the same structural pressures: monetization first, user value second.
For graduates—especially those from working-class backgrounds—the consequences are profound. They enter the labor market carrying debt, often underemployed, and reliant on platforms that promise opportunity while quietly undermining it. The search for stable employment becomes a cycle of misdirection: applying to ghost jobs, fighting algorithmic opacity, and competing in markets distorted by platform-driven gatekeeping. Instead of delivering upward mobility, digital labor platforms frequently reproduce inequality, masking structural failures in higher education and the U.S. economy behind glossy interfaces and “skills gap” rhetoric.
Employers, meanwhile, face their own frustrations: rising costs for visibility, declining applicant quality driven by algorithmic prioritization of click-throughs rather than fit, and a sense that recruitment has shifted from a relational process to a transactional one. The platforms that were supposed to streamline hiring have introduced new layers of friction, opacity, and expense.
The deeper issue is systemic. Digital labor markets now operate on extractive logic: workers and employers are commodities to be converted into revenue streams. For the educated underclass—graduates who followed the prescribed path but find the rewards collapsing beneath them—these platforms do not solve structural inequality. They obscure it.
Higher education institutions must acknowledge this reality. Career centers cannot simply direct students to LinkedIn or Indeed and hope for the best. Instead, institutions should cultivate critical digital literacy, teaching students how to understand the incentives and limitations of platform-mediated job markets. They must invest in direct employer engagement, build relationships that bypass intermediaries, and challenge the outdated narrative that degrees alone guarantee upward mobility. The task is not merely to help students navigate broken systems but to recognize how these systems perpetuate precarity.
The enshittification of job platforms is not a marginal story. It is a window into the lived experience of millions of graduates—and an indictment of an economy that relies on debt-financed education feeding into precarious labor. The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to track these developments, expose the structural forces behind them, and advocate for approaches that put students and workers before platform profits.
Sources
Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso, 2023).Cory Doctorow, “Tiktok’s Enshittification,” Pluralistic (2023).
Gary Roth. The Educated Underclass: Students and the False Promise of Social Mobility (Pluto Press, 2019).
Emily Stewart, “LinkedIn Has a Spam Problem,” Vox, 2023.
Suresh Naidu and Eric Posner, Labor Market Power (2024).
Annie Lowrey, “The College Debt Crisis Is Now a Labor Crisis,” The Atlantic, 2022.
Philipp Staab, Digital Capitalism (Polity, 2019).
Alex Hern, “Job Platforms and the Algorithmic Trap,” The Guardian, 2021.
