Gen Z is hurtling toward a career cliff

Jacqueline Kline was a proud overachiever in college. She enrolled in a packed class schedule, attended campus networking events, landed an impressive slate of internships, and graduated cum laude from Florida State University.
Then, after her 2023 graduation celebrations wound down, Kline found herself back in her childhood bedroom. Over the next year, she applied to hundreds of communications and media jobs between babysitting shifts. The responses were deflating: Some companies sent quick rejections, others turned her away after a couple of interviews, but most simply ghosted her.
"I graduated, but I didn't feel successful," the now 24-year-old told me. "I had this degree — and that's a privilege, not everyone has that opportunity — but it didn't matter. My GPA didn't matter. None of it mattered if I didn't have a job."
It's a tough time to look for work. For 20-somethings, breaking into the market is particularly daunting. Companies and consumers are bracing for an economic slowdown, and employees are hesitant to leave their current gigs. Federal policy uncertainty is spooking businesses, and white-collar industries are not the safe career bets they used to be.
The tried-and-true ways that young people used to climb the economic ladder are disappearing, and AI is threatening to replace entry-level work in enviable fields like tech. President Donald Trump's cost-cutting efforts have wiped out jobs in government agencies, nonprofits, and public health. Law school applications are ballooning beyond what the industry can sustain, and humanitarian routes like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps are among the White House DOGE office's latest targets. It all leaves young people — even those who spent their teen and university years positioning themselves for the future — barreling toward a career cliff.
So, what's an ambitious Gen Zer to do?
Kline is finishing her second year of graduate school at FSU. She said she gave up looking for full-time work because "the burnout was definitely real" and decided to take out student loans to pursue her master's. Many of her friends are also facing tough decisions: Commit to a tall stack of job applications, go back to get another degree, or settle for a role outside their chosen field. Each option feels risky.
set of circumstances.
As Richard Mansfield, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, put it, Gen Z has "a whole lot of clouds on the horizon." Based on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's analysis of census data, 41.2% of graduates in their early and mid-20s were underemployed in March, meaning they were working jobs that don't typically require a bachelor's degree. That's up from 38.9% in December. And Ivy alums aren't immune: In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that job placement at more than a dozen top MBA programs was the worst "in recent memory" last year. Notably, Harvard told the Journal that 23% of its job-seeking MBAs who graduated in spring 2024 were still looking for work three months after leaving campus, a figure that was up from 20% in the prior year and more than double what it was in 2022. Higher education may be known for its historical role as a path to prestige and higher pay, but Gen Zers are wondering whether it's worth it anymore.
Bella Babbitt, 21, graduated a year early from a private New York liberal arts school with a dual degree in business and sociology in 2024. She hoped her internships and the fact that she completed her bachelor's in just three years would help her to land a role in media strategy and to eventually start her own business. She spent a year applying to hundreds of roles without luck while taking on odd jobs to make money, such as waiting tables and delivering food. More recently, she's worked at a marketing firm owned by a family friend. She "truly believes" the reason she's employed is because of that personal connection.
"I was applying and I felt like, 'This is so stupid because I know I'm going to get rejected,'" she said, adding, "My parents have such a different mindset, where they can't comprehend how we've applied to all these jobs and we're not getting anything."
Historically reliable prestige jobs are facing challenges, too. In tech, hopeful grads are being boxed out of entry-level positions not only by AI, but also by hiring freezes. In law, US firms' hiring of entry-level summer associates is hitting a historic low. Even "stopgap" roles that were stepping stones to bigger things are evaporating: From the start of 2023 to the start of 2025, internship postings on the college job-search platform Handshake declined by over 15%. When Gen Zers are ready to take the leap into a larger role, they're finding themselves stuck — young people can't fill desks because older generations are delaying plans to quit and retire, leaving new grads on the lower rung of the career ladder for longer.
It's leaving Abbey Owens discouraged. She graduated summa cum laude last month from a liberal arts college with a record of marketing internships, good grades, and a slew of unanswered applications. After months on the job hunt, the 21-year-old said she's thinking about bartending and losing hope of finding a role in her field: "I'll accept almost anything," she told me.
Babbitt and Owens describe the pain of continuous rejection — a stream of "no's" that drags on for months or years, application after application. Their experience is a symptom of a landscape with a dwindling number of job postings and lower hiring rates. One in five job seekers is considered long-term unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meaning they've been out of work for 27 weeks or longer.
Even Gen Zers who are trying to follow their passions into less pressure-packed jobs than finance and tech are facing tough times. Young people dedicated to public service or academia, where there is an implicit exchange of stability in place of bigger salaries, are staring at an uncertain road.
A 21-year-old University of Maryland student (who asked not to be named for fear of career retaliation) told me they'd lost two roles because of federal government cuts. This spring, they were interning at the Transportation Security Administration before being let go after DOGE prompted cuts of the agency's remote work contracts. Their summer internship — a coveted role at an intelligence agency — was canceled the following week.
"I think it's just important for people to know how shocking all of this is," they said, adding, "There's a whole new wave of talented young individuals who are excited about public service who are being denied opportunities and thrown to the dirt."
Now, without a summer job, they're likely to stay in their hometown and scoop ice cream or take shifts at a coffee shop, they said. They have two years left at Maryland, and they're rethinking their dream of working in government.
Other public sector options aren't promising, either. As part of DOGE 's work, federal agencies are under a hiring freeze, AmeriCorps is pausing programs, the Peace Corps is cutting staff, and federally funded roles at nonprofits, science labs, and public health centers are vanishing.
Amid the rising sense of doom, Mansfield cautions that the Zoomer labor market outlook is complicated — and economists don't yet have a full picture. Hard indicators show the economy is relatively healthy on paper: The US added a higher-than-expected number of jobs in May, inflation is getting under control, and the unemployment rate is low. Mansfield said that "the data hasn't caught up yet" to reflect the loss of entry-level opportunities that many new grads are experiencing.
"It's not as if we're running out of useful things for young, educated people to do," he said. "It's just that we're undermining our mechanisms for getting them there."
While Gen Z might seem headed toward a careerpocalypse, economists and labor market analysts told me the cruelest part was that this instability wasn't inevitable. Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said Gen Zers were almost set up for success. Gould's analysis of labor market data from May indicates that even after adjusting for inflation, 16- to 24-year-old workers experienced historically strong wage growth of 9.1% from February 2020 to March of this year, a figure that exceeded wage growth for workers 25 and older (5.4%). The cohort was set to have lower average unemployment rates and better job opportunities than every other set of young workers since the 1990s. But the rosy picture has rapidly worsened. Job prospects for 22- to 27-year-olds with a bachelor's degree or higher " deteriorated noticeably" in the first quarter of this year, per the New York Fed, and the recent-grad gap — the difference between the overall unemployment rate and the unemployment rate for people who recently graduated from college — just hit its widest point in at least 40 years.
It's worth noting that previous generations have faced tough labor markets: Some baby boomers launched their careers in the middle of the 1970s stagflation, and millennials were looking for jobs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But Gen Zers are seeing the start of a troubling trend. Educated Zoomers, specifically, are now more unemployed than the rest of America, something that didn't happen early in the pandemic, during the Great Recession, or in the midst of the dot-com crash.
"When the overall unemployment rate goes up a little bit more, I don't think people always understand that that is what happens: the 'last hired, first fired' phenomenon," Gould said, adding: "What are you going to do at that point? You've gone into debt going to school, you've already decided your major, you've already made all those investments. It's very hard to shift."
The economists I spoke with emphasized that there were solutions to the Gen Z career cliff, but things may get worse before they get better. Mansfield said some sectors, like caregiving and healthcare, could see increased labor demand as baby boomers and Gen Xers grow older — even if those opportunities aren't as attractive to people trained to do something else, like law or finance. He added that as AI becomes more integrated into the economy, Gen Zers and later generations will most likely start to find roles in careers that don't exist yet.
Kline, the recent Florida State grad, is banking on some sort of turnaround. Even as opportunities for people with advanced degrees dry up, she thinks the master's and some more internships will make her resumé that much more attractive to prospective employers.
"I'm reminding myself that it will be worth it, taking all these loans will be worth it, because having this master's degree will get me further and give me a better chance at a job opportunity," Kline said, adding. "Before I came back to school, that was one of the loneliest times of my life."
Market conditions are changing how ambitious Gen Zers see themselves and their work. It isn't just about whether they can land a job after graduation. A lot of people my age feel that open doors older generations took for granted — having access to homeownership and retirement, affording kids or healthcare or further education — are being locked alongside our career paths. It's part of why young people are becoming less loyal to the grind, or giving up on traditionally white collar careers altogether.
It's also why Isabella Clemmens, 22, is betting on herself. After graduating from Oregon State in May, she's moving to Austin to try out a new city, meet friends, attend concerts, and try living on her own. When Clemmens and I spoke a few weeks ago, she was planning to work in retail until her growing stack of applications landed her a branding or graphic design role. After four years of hard work, she hadn't expected her job hunt to be so challenging. To kick off postgrad life in Texas, though, she would have to make concessions.
"My dream job might exist," she told me. "But I'm one of 400 people applying for it."

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Business Insider

2 hours ago

• Business Insider

Gen Z and millennial day traders tell us about turning to the stock market to escape the usual 9-to-5

Carmine Rosato, a 26-year-old based in New Jersey, has never worked a traditional 9-to-5, but his alternative path has been lucrative. According to income statements he showed Business Insider, Rosato has managed to make as much as six figures in a month. There are ups and downs, but he's become used to the swings in his time as a full-time day trader, he said. "I was just drawn to the freedom and the unlimited upside," he told BI in an interview. "I just saw a path that could give me full control over my time." Younger Americans have flocked to the stock market in recent years. Online communities on Reddit, YouTube, and Discord are thronged with Gen Zers and millennials who claim to trade the market full-time or are actively trying to — many in an effort to escape the typical career path and the 9-5 workday. Andrew Menaker, a psychologist and trading performance coach who says he works with retail traders trying to go full-time in his practice, thinks the trend is a response to the economic struggles that younger people face. "How do I get a good job? It's harder for young people these days to get a head start, and I think they recognize that," he said, pointing to concerns like AI destabilizing the workforce, and general macroeconomic uncertainty. "Day trading feels like a way to regain some kind of control." Here are the stories of three full-time Gen Z and millennial traders. The college dropout stock portfolio. Rosato says he grew up seeing many of his family members unhappy and overworked in their corporate jobs. Being his own boss and the prospect of a comfortable life were major motivators for him to learn how to trade. "I wanted a Lamborghini. I wanted a nice watch. I wanted to go on vacation," he said. "And I'll even attribute that to the Wolf of Wall Street." Rosato said he practically locked himself in his dorm room for two years while he learned how to day trade. Eventually, he started hitting his stride and made a deal with his father that allowed him to drop out of school once he made enough money. He left college at the end of his sophomore year. Rosato, who's been in the market for nine years and also shares trading advice on YouTube and Discord, says the key to his strategy is controlling losses, such as by implementing stop-loss orders that prevent a trade from losing more than he's comfortable with. He also limits himself to no more than two hours of trading a day. By 11:30 a.m., he logs off to pursue his hobbies. Over the years, Rosato has been able to treat himself to big-ticket items like cars, watches, and vacations, but he says the freedom is one of the biggest perks. "Some people are just unhappy going through their normal 9-to-5 job, whereas I wake up every single day grateful that I get to work out of the comfort of my own home," he said. The millennial who traded his inheritance Ross Cameron, a 40-year-old day trader based in Massachusetts, also became interested in stocks after creating a dummy stock portfolio for a middle school class. He says the project opened his eyes to just how much money could be made in a short amount of time. At the time, he delivered newspapers and mowed lawns for spare cash. His family lived so frugally that they budgeted every dollar and frequently argued about what they couldn't afford. "It was never about getting rich. It was never about becoming a millionaire or anything like that. It was about just making enough money that I wouldn't have to go work a regular 9-to-5 job," he told BI. When Cameron was 22, his father died and left $100,000 to him and his sister. Cameron used some of the money to fund a brokerage account and began to day trade small portions full-time. It took several years of trial and error before Cameron found a strategy that worked. He attributes his success to trading high volatility stocks and riding the intraday swings. He also limits his losses by putting a trading cap on his brokerage account. The cap prevents him from executing more trades once he loses his average daily gain, which current stands around $30,000, according to brokerage statements viewed by BI. Like Rosato, Cameron also offers trading advice to followers online through his YouTube channel and through online courses. He says that on a typical day, he trades for around three hours, from around 7 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. Like most day traders, his profits vary wildly, but he made an average $157,000 a month in 2024, according brokerage statements shared with BI. Cameron says he lives a relatively non-extravagant life, but he feels secure in his ability to provide for his family and has been able to splurge on luxuries over the years and regularly travels with his family. "I have a level of affluence that I never would've expected to have," Cameron told BI, though, due to the variability of his income, he said he still feels the need to work every day. The nurse looking to escape the grind For every story of hitting big in the market, there are cautionary tales that show how stressful the life of a day trader can be. Edgar Camacho, a 35-year-old nurse based in Florida, got into day trading a decade ago, as Robinhood and other zero-fee brokerages lowered the barriers to the market for more people. He purchased some Disney call options and "instantly" made $2,000. From there, he was hooked, he told BI in an interview. "I was like, holy crap. I had no idea what I just did," he said. "I just made money from my phone. I've got to figure out how to do this more often." Over the next several months, Camacho says he got sucked into the hype of trading and learning from day traders who showed their activity on YouTube. He decided to take a six-month sabbatical from his job and try his luck at playing the stock market full time. Camacho was frustrated by the demands of his job, where 60-80 hour weeks are the norm. "Our life is wasted working pretty much. There's no three-day weekends. There's barely a two-day weekend. And once you have real adult responsibilities—laundry, groceries, kids—I mean, those two days fly by." He also felt squeezed by the pressures of saving for a home, saving for retirement, and providing for his family. "I went to school for eight years. I got my master's. I always figured once I got to this point, I'd be set," he said, adding that, while he's financially secure, he still makes some sacrifices to save. Camacho traded using a brokerage account with a balance of around $30,000, which was his entire savings at that time. In a few months, the balance had been whittled down to $2,000, he said. Camacho said losing that money was one of the lowest points of his life, and though he pared most of his losses, he ultimately decided to call it quits and go back to work. Camacho says he believes millennials and Gen Zers are enticed by the fantasy of being a full-time trader in part due to influencers on social media who claim to fund lavish lifestyles by trading just a few hours a day. "People truly believe that. And I think, in a sense, I kind of believed that that could be done as well," he admits. He said that he thinks the best way to make money in the market is to be in it for the long haul. "The only strategy that really works when it comes to this is buy and hold," he said.

Business Insider

2 hours ago

• Business Insider

Meet the Gen Z 'stay-at-home son' who's selling his lifestyle as an aspirational brand

First, there were the trad wives. Then came the stay-at-home girlfriends. Now, a cohort of Gen Z men who live with their parents are rebranding, too. They call themselves stay-at-home sons, and they include early career professionals saving on rent, college dropouts struggling to find steady work, and unemployed Jeopardy champions. One such self-described stay-at-home son, 24-year-old Abdullah Abbasi, is monetizing his lifestyle through his clothing line, aptly named Stay At Home Sons, which he runs with two of his childhood friends. They sell hats, T-shirts, and hoodies emblazoned with their taglines: "Doing nothing is hard" and "Trust the fund." The brand is designed to be aspirational, not tongue-in-cheek. Its Instagram account is brimming with private jets and Ferraris and hashtags like #oldmoney, #richlife, and #wealth. The conspicuous consumption is the point. "It doesn't really matter how you got it, as long as you have it," Abbasi told Business Insider. Abbasi said he and his co-founders, who all live in a well-to-do Chicago suburb with their parents, earnestly believe that living with their families isn't a bad thing. The path to success doesn't necessarily mean moving out at 18 and living independently, they argue. "We wanted to unapologetically own the fact that we're happy to stay at home," he said. "I have no problem living with my family, and I think there's no shame in that." To be sure, Abbasi and his peers represent a privileged slice of young adults living with their parents: those with families well-off enough to help support them. In Abbasi's case, that means he doesn't pay rent and he doesn't need to make a certain income to satisfy his parents. "It's a household economy, everybody's money is everybody's," he said. Grown men living with their parents is nothing new. Many of them struggle to find work and affordable housing. Young people are more likely to live with their parents when jobs are hard to come by and wages are stagnant, according to Pew Research Center researcher Richard Fry, who authored a recent report on where in the country younger Americans live with their parents. Abbasi decided the stay-at-home son life was right for him during a summer in college that he spent living at home with his parents and not doing much of anything. He was relieved to get a break from dorm life, and it dawned on him how good life he had it at home, kicking it with his friends and hanging with his family. "Basically every night we were on the golf course, having dinner, going out, and during those extended hours of what most people would consider leisure time, we realized doing nothing is pretty hard," he joked. So Abbasi moved back home and started part-time online classes. In his spare time, he helps out with his family's businesses, which include a physical therapy venture and a medical administration company, and splits his time between Pakistan, Dubai, Canada, and Chicagoland. "Wherever the family goes, I go," he said.

Yahoo

7 hours ago

• Yahoo

Aussie with $60,000 HECS debt reveals why he isn't paying it off: 'Opportunity'

Australians with HECS debts are being urged to reconsider putting extra money towards their student loans. While it might make sense to chuck extra cash at your HECS to pay it off sooner, you could be in a much better position if you put your money elsewhere. That's what Noah Capozza has done with his $60,000 loan. The Link Wealth financial advisor told Yahoo Finance investing your cash can leave you better off, as HECS debts are hit with indexation every year. "The idea behind that is the average rate of return on the share market, which, over the last 100 years, is 9 per cent year-on-year," he said. Gen Z graduate with $50,000 HECS debt reveals degree she regrets Centrelink payment alert for 58,000 Aussies in caravans Couple's side hustle amid double redundancy secures $13 million fortune Comparatively, he said the rate of HECS indexation should be in the 2-3 per cent range. Capozza said it could be a better idea to make your money grow rather than fight against that yearly increase in your student loans. The average HECS debt is $27,600, and your employer has to send a percentage of your salary towards that loan every pay cycle, which is based on how much you earn. If you're on the average salary of $102,742 per year, 5.5 per cent of your pay, which is roughly $5,650 per year or $470 per month, would go towards HECS. If you put no additional money into that loan, it would take nearly 59 months, or close to five years, to pay it you put $500 per month on top of your employer's contributions, that loan would be paid off in a little more than 28 months or two and a third years. Those two time frames are tricky because they don't take into account the yearly indexation that hits in June, which can increase the loan by hundreds of dollars. In Capozza's case, his HECS went up by $1,800 recently thanks to this year's indexation. Compare that with the 8-10 per cent rate of return on the share market, Capozza said it made sense to him to invest his cash rather than put it towards his student loans. But the average rate of return and isn't guaranteed. However, even if you put it into a high-interest savings account, which was around the 5 per cent mark, your money could be growing more than the rate of indexation. Victoria University found recently that the average amount of time it takes to pay off a HECS debt is 9.9 years. If you directed that $500 monthly contribution towards a share portfolio, you would have $37,712 in your account after five years, based on a 9 per cent return. If you invested that same $500 over 10 years, you would have $96,757 in your portfolio. That money is purely from your investment and compound interest, and doesn't take into account any dividends you might earn on top. You can also take that money out of your portfolio at any point, whereas sending cash to your HECS debt means you say goodbye to that money forever. "You can just let it grow and compound over time," Capozza told Yahoo Finance. "It could provide you with the opportunity to either pay your HECS off or have other opportunities that will come up later down the track." Capozza sees plenty of clients worried about paying off their HECS and whether it will affect their borrowing capacity if they want to buy a home in the future. But lenders don't ever look at the size of the debt when assessing your suitability for a loan. Instead, they watch how much of your salary goes towards it. "You could have a million dollars, you could have $10. It actually has no difference," he said. Instead of seeing Capozza's $60,000 balance, a bank would only assess him on the $470 leaving his pay every month, if he were on the average salary. The financial advisor also said diverting your money towards investments could be a better idea as the government has been making huge strides in the HECS department recently. A poll of more than 1,600 Yahoo Finance readers found 46 per cent of people thought they would never fully pay off their HECS by themselves or without government support. Last year, the Albanese government changed how indexation worked, so that it would be whatever was lower out of the consumer price index and the wage price index. It changed the 7 per cent indexation rate in 2023 to just 3.4 per cent. Additionally, Labor promised to wipe 20 per cent of every person's student loans. "I dare say that will probably happen every time there's an election going on, I'm sure they'll push some sort of agenda to help out with HECS debt," Capozza said. But he insisted that anyone who is thinking about where to put their extra cash should speak to an expert beforehand to make sure it's the right direction for them. Disclaimer: The information contained in this article is general in nature and does not take into account your personal objectives, financial situation or needs. Therefore, you should consider whether the information is appropriate to your circumstances before acting on it, and where appropriate, seek professional advice from a finance nel recupero dei dati Effettua l'accesso per consultare il tuo portafoglio Errore nel recupero dei dati