The fate of job-seeking college graduates indicates the economy’s high levels of unemployment are cyclical in nature, giving hope continued growth and stimulative policy should help bring down the nation’s unemployment rate.

New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco zeroed in on new college graduates because they are assumed to be free of the things that would tie many workers down. Young, mobile and educated, these workers can chase jobs in a way others can’t.

So the jobless rate of these workers can go some distance toward explaining why the unemployment rate remains so high, and answer whether elevated joblessness is structural, the result of disconnections between the kind of workers that are available and what jobs exist. Structural unemployment is harder to fix and is largely beyond the remedy of monetary policy. To the extent it does exist, it blunts the economy’s ability to grow.