Ask Jack Weis what he does and he’ll joke that he’s an unemployed guy in his parents’ basement. The joke skips the details. He’s from Salt Lake City and finished a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Princeton in 2024. The Nobel committee cited his research on ice that same year. Since graduation he has applied to more than 2,300 jobs. He still doesn’t have one.
Lindsay Ellis tells his story on the cover of the Journal’s Review section. She first met him late last year, the day before his 30th birthday. His first targets were science jobs at companies and research fellowships at national labs. When those went nowhere he tried software. By the end he couldn’t get a reply from food-prep jobs, one of them at a frozen crab cake company. In January he found a gig at $70 an hour training AI in chemical engineering, through a startup called Mercor. In mid-March the contract ended with a message in a Slack group of 810 people. “Friendship with Mercor ended, unemployment is my best friend now,” he wrote to Ellis.
Ellis uses him to explain a labor market economists call low-hire, low-fire. People with jobs are staying put. People without one can’t get in. The unemployment rate is still low. But look at the long-term jobless, people out of work 27 weeks or more. Their share of the unemployed was the highest this summer in more than a decade, outside Covid. Gallup asked Americans in August whether it was a good time to find a quality job. Only 34% said yes. Weis once got 72 hours to finish a consulting firm’s assessment game. He was backpacking for 48 of them. The firm says candidates can ask for more time.
The part that matters for parents
Here’s the odd part. The Dow has closed at a record more than 50 times since Weis defended his dissertation two years ago. He’s lived at home, saved money and invested some of it. The Ph.D. left him no debt, because doctoral students get paid to do research. “It’s cool that my stocks keep going up, I’m not mad about that,” he said. His parents, both physicians, compare notes with other parents of stuck graduates. He used AI to design a drone that zaps an invasive weed with lasers. And in October he checked on a Los Alamos job he’d applied for in 2024. It had finally been filled. For two years the status had read “Review in progress.”
Our read
This is a career story, and for parents it’s a cash flow story. Call the stretch from diploma to first paycheck the launch. Most family plans assume it takes a summer. Diploma, job, apartment, gone. Weis is two years in with the best résumé in the room. If a Princeton Ph.D. can sit for two years, a family can budget for a long launch, on purpose and in writing. That means a number per month for the adult kid at home, an end date you both agree on, and a health insurance plan for the gap. Weis himself petitioned to cut the tie between jobs and health coverage. For his family it’s a line item either way. Notice what went right for him. No grad-school debt, a cheap place to live, and savings he invested instead of spent. That’s why two years hurt without breaking anything.
The one thing to check in your own plan is the launch line. If you’ve got a kid in college or just out, put a monthly number and an end date on what you’d cover this week. Then find out how long they can stay on your health plan. Then look at whether that money comes from cash flow or from retirement savings. Cash flow comes back next month. Retirement money you pull out doesn’t. Bring the number to your next review. Better to pack the umbrella while the forecast is still just a forecast.