As a greater proportion of workers earn college and graduate degrees, it is less clear what job should count as the beginning of a students’ ‘career line’ (Spilerman 1977). About half of college graduates eventually return to enroll in some sort of graduate degree program (NCES 2022). Around 85% of these students, however, have at least one spell of employment between college graduation and re-enrollment. These jobs may shape their career and educational trajectories, but there is a little evidence on how this process unfolds. How should we think about students’ post- college employment in this changing education and labor market landscape, and the consequences of jobs they hold between spells of enrollment for their later educational and career trajectories? Given changes in career trajectories and in the higher educational landscape, the relationship between baccalaureates’ first jobs and their occupational and educational outcomes has shifted over time. There is little work considering how specific post-college employment is related to future educational and occupational trajectories, and how these relationships may differ across cohorts or demographic groups. In this paper, I will focus on a growing subset of the population: those who are college-educated. Using four nationally representative panel studies to capture cohort changes over 40 years, I will examine employment and enrollment trajectories within four years of college graduation. I will focus on how early work experiences may influence students’ educational and occupational choices and consider how changes across cohorts in trajectories inform our understanding of the nexus of higher education credentials and occupations.