A college degree once ensured prosperity – but gen z is finding ‘just not much out there’

Jes Vesconte graduated from one of California’s most prestigious art schools, did a Fulbright in Germany and got a master’s from Columbia University.

Yet Vesconte, 29, is struggling to afford everyday life. Amid freelancing and working service-industry jobs, they are now in the midst of yet another job search to supplement their income before their student loan repayment schedule begins next month.

“I can barely find a way to make more than $3,000 a month,” Vesconte said.

Vesconte is not alone. The college degree is “losing its edge”, according to a report this month from the Economic Policy Institute. Despite a growing economy and low unemployment rates, young college graduates are faced with dismal hiring prospects. Survey after survey show that gen Z is experiencing deep economic instability, along with eroding trust in the country’s leadership and weakened social connections.

All of this contributes to a feeling among many young people that they are stuck, and the life and freedom they had envisioned adulthood would bring is simply out of reach.

“They have low expectations for how they’re doing now, they have low expectations of how things are going to look in the future,” said Janelle Jones, the former chief economist at the Department of Labor and a senior fellow at the Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning thinktank. “That is in part the labor market, but people aren’t just workers. They’re living in a time where we’re facing multiple existential crises right now.”

It may be easy for some to dismiss the angst and instability felt among many of today’s twentysomethings as a rite of passage that all young adults inevitably experience. But the data shows this generation is facing a set of challenges different from anything the country has seen before.

The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has been higher than that of the overall American workforce since the pandemic, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And while the overall unemployment rate among college graduates is still lower than the unemployment rate of all workers, the gap between them has narrowed significantly compared with decades before.

“We’ve told generations of young people that if you want to make it, if you want to be secure, if you want to be stable, if you want a comfortable middle-class life, you should go to college,” Jones said. “The leg up of a college degree is not lost by any stretch, but it’s a little less than it was, because so many more people have a college degree.”

Even as the value of a college degree has gone down, the cost for one still remains high. The graduating class of 2024 left with an average of $29,560 in loans, according to LendingTree, while total student loan debt in the country reached upwards of $1.8tn, with more than 44 million Americans owing federal loan debt.

Even for people who have jobs, the current economy can make it difficult to switch career paths or pursue more meaningful work. Sophia Xu, a 28-year-old designer at a big tech company, said she has struggled to find a new job internally or externally.

“I’ve worked in this industry long enough where I have a better sense of what I am looking for in my next job and what would make me happy,” she said. “There’s just not much out there.”

Young people’s confidence in the economy and their personal finances are also down. Since the 1970s, the University of Michigan has found that the consumer sentiment index among people aged 18-34 has been mostly stronger than their older counterparts. But that index took a nosedive last year and has since remained lower than that of Americans over age 55.

Research from David G Blanchflower, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, has found that the wellbeing of American workers is deteriorating most quickly among young employees, stemming from reasons that extend well beyond the state of the job market. For example, fewer young Americans have their driver’s license, want to go out on a date or are having sex.

“We’ve seen this huge decline in all sorts of things,” Blanchflower said. “There’s long trends in this stuff going on, and then it was exacerbated by smartphones. So I think we’re in a deeply complex puzzle.”

The experience of early adulthood has ended up being lackluster compared with what many young Americans saw on TV and in movies growing up.

“The idealized life of the Carrie Bradshaw, or the cast of Friends, that we see in these TV shows might have been possible when those shows existed, but now, capitalism has fractured things so much that even having a social life in New York City is really an effort,” Vesconte said. “Most of my friends, who I met at school, moved out of New York after they graduated, because it’s so hard to live here and hard to have a social life.”

Ragini Subramanian, 23, majored in journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, hoping to work in anything but public relations. But after graduating last May, the job they landed was an hourly contract at a small PR firm based in East Brunswick, working long hours at a desk with no windows.

After nearly a year making roughly $1,600 a month and spending just under half of that paycheck on an apartment shared with four roommates, Subramanian quit their job and moved back home to the Bay Area.

It’s a solution that many in gen Z have turned to over the last decade. Though the percentage of Americans aged 25 to 34 who live with their parents has dropped slightly since the pandemic, a fifth of young adults still live with their parents.

“Financially, it wasn’t giving me enough for me to be able to live here [in New Jersey] and pay rent,” Subramanian said, adding that they were saving very little during that time. Living with their parents has allowed them to focus on freelance work and look for a long-term job.

But while they consider themselves lucky to have the opportunity to move back home, Subramanian, who is queer, said it can also be socially isolating.

“That’s what’s kind of stunting me right now, especially someone who’s trying to work in the creative field. So I’m trying to find ways around that, and to get myself outside in spaces where I feel more understood, of course, and just be myself,” they said.

Despite plunging into the uncertainty of unemployment and applying for jobs in the precarious media industry, Subramanian said that since leaving that job in PR, they feel anything but stuck.

“I know I have a lot to do and offer to this world, whether that is being paid by a company or whether that is my own work that will lead me elsewhere,” they said. “I have no doubt in my mind, right now, that I’ll be OK.”