There’s Another Reason Gen Z Can’t Find Work

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Jessica Grose

Opinion

There’s Another Reason Gen Z Can’t Find Work

April 22, 2026

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Eleanor Davis

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By

Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

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In March, Times Opinion published a discussion with

12 white-collar job-seekers

in their teens and 20s. Their view of their prospects was incredibly bleak. These young people, who had a mix of political leanings, careers, and racial and geographic backgrounds, used words like “horrible,” “rough” and “messy” to describe the job market.

A Black Democrat named Michelah, who works in customer service and had applied for at least 30 jobs in the past six months, described the market as “dry.” When the moderators asked her to elaborate, she said, rather poetically: “It’s like a desert. There’s nothing really there. You can be out there, but you’re not being hydrated.”

I had been hearing the same thing from other members of Gen Z, who told me in November that they found

the job search

“dystopian.” Twenty-somethings who do manage to find work, like Michelah, aren’t necessarily feeling great, either. They report

higher levels of mental despair

than their counterparts did decades ago.

Indeed, the job market for the Class of 2026 has been described elsewhere in this paper as

the grimmest in years

, but it isn’t solely because of A.I.’s impact on hiring for office jobs, and it isn’t just because of the state of the economy. For those who think trade jobs are a cure-all, the employment numbers for non-college graduates are not looking so cheery either — some of them have

stopped looking for work entirely

. It is true that we are in a period in which not many people

are getting hired

or

fired

, which leads to a kind of logjam for new entrants to the work force. But this stasis is just the rancid icing on the spoiled cake of much longer trends.

A new working paper from three economists explains how

the U.S. job ladder has been breaking

for 40 years. This decades-long problem doesn’t affect just Gen Z but has also stymied wage growth for Americans in their 30s, 40s and 50s. This could be why the midlife millennials I

interviewed a few years back

felt that they were physically in their 40s but economically in their 20s, unable to find a career that felt secure.

In a

working paper

for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Niklas Engbom, Aniket Baksy and Daniele Caratelli analyzed

Current Population Survey

federal data from 1982 to 2023 to try to figure out why

wage growth has been weak

over four decades. They estimate that “employed workers today are about half as likely to receive a better-paying outside offer as they were in the 1980s,” and major salary jumps often happen when you move to another company.

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