Noah Herd, a 30-year-old computer science senior at the University of Washington Tacoma, gave himself six months to land a software engineering job.

If that doesn't work, he told the Hechinger Report, he'll consider joining the military.

"It's not looking good. I want to be a software engineer, and I'm still pushing for that," Herd said after attending an April career fair on the UW Tacoma campus. "The reality is I have to pay rent."

Herd is one of more than 1,600 graduates who crossed the stage at the Tacoma Dome on Friday, June 12, according to UW Tacoma. Computer science is the campus's most popular major.

The class also included the first-ever graduates of UW Tacoma's Master of Science in Information Technology program, recognized at a hooding ceremony on Saturday, June 6, in William W. Philip Hall.

They entered a job market where full-time postings on Handshake, a major early-career recruiting platform, fell 2% from last year and sit 12% below 2019 levels, according to the Hechinger Report's analysis published June 9.

Those numbers land hard at UW Tacoma. More than half the campus's undergraduates are first-generation college students, 46% qualify for Pell grants, and 60% are students of color.

NACE data shows those populations are less likely to secure paid internships.

Amanda Figueroa, UW Tacoma's associate vice chancellor for social mobility, warned that AI could deepen those gaps. As employers shift entry-level and intern tasks to AI tools, Figueroa told the Hechinger Report the trend "risks reinforcing the good old boys' network" by cutting off pathways that historically underrepresented students rely on.

At the April career fair, tech recruiters drew the longest lines, the Hechinger Report found. Herd and other computer science majors waited to speak with Anshul Bhandari, a recruiter for Infoblox, a private cloud-computing firm. Bhandari told the Hechinger Report that Infoblox already uses AI bots to conduct initial job interviews.

The broader picture is more complicated than a simple shortage of openings. NACE's spring 2026 survey found employers plan to hire 5.6% more new graduates than last year. But a growing share of those roles now require AI proficiency, a demand that nearly tripled since fall 2025.

More than a third of entry-level positions require some AI skill, and nearly three in five employers are assigning AI-related work to interns. The unemployment rate for bachelor's degree holders ages 20 to 24 stood at 5.8% in May 2026, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data reported by NACE.

Ibadat Sandhu, 22, another UW Tacoma computer science major hoping to work in cybersecurity, told the Hechinger Report that recruiters increasingly want two to three years of experience for positions labeled entry-level.

Herd's self-imposed deadline runs roughly to December 2026. He taught himself to fix his family's desktop as a kid and later built a video game after learning a programming language on his own.

Whether the six-figure coding salaries that drew him to the field during the pandemic still await on the other side is the open question for every CS graduate leaving the Tacoma campus.