The latest Bloomberg Businessweek offers the following bad news for President Obama’s re-election effort:

A year after graduating from college, 23-year-old Alison Foster is living with her parents in Arlington, Va., and getting by on a part-time, temporary job. Along with a degree in environmental sciences from the University of Vermont, her résumé includes prestigious internships with a member of Congress and the National Park Service, and yet no offers have come. “I didn’t anticipate that a year out I would be barely making any money at all,” she says.

Foster’s discontent is a problem for Barack Obama. Many of the young voters crucial to his election of 2008, are now having second thoughts about him—and about whether they’ll bother to vote at all this election. Sixty-six percent of voters under 30 cast ballots for Obama in 2008. Turnout among young people was the highest in 16 years. Their support assured his victory in Indiana and North Carolina, states that had voted Republican for decades. That enthusiasm has dwindled. The portion of 18- to 24-year-olds who say they’ll definitely vote has fallen to 47 percent this year from 64 percent in 2008, according to polls conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. In this age group, Obama leads Mitt Romney 41 percent to 29 percent, compared with 53 percent to 32 percent against John McCain in 2008.

And Romney didn’t have to engage in any cringe-inducing pandering to young people to reach this point.