High-achieving Florida State University graduate Jacqueline Kline's journey from cum laude honors and impressive internships to the realities of a challenging job market. Her story highlights the struggles of recent graduates navigating a competitive economy and the evolving landscape of entry-level employment in communications and media
Post-graduation, despite a stellar academic record including a cum laude degree from Florida State University and numerous internships, Jacqueline Kline faced the harsh reality of the competitive job market. Her job hunt, juggling babysitting with hundreds of communications and media job applications, yielded mostly rejections, ghosting, and a frustrating lack of opportunities
Post-graduation job hunt struggles: A 24-year-old's story highlights the challenges facing recent grads in today's competitive job market. Despite a stellar academic record, including a cum laude degree and impressive internships, finding employment proved unexpectedly difficult. This experience underscores the harsh reality for many young adults: a degree, GPA, and even internships don't guarantee a job in a tough economy
Navigating the challenging job market for recent grads? Breaking into the workforce, especially in competitive fields like communications and media, is tougher than ever for 20-somethings. Economic slowdown, hiring freezes, and uncertainty surrounding federal policy are creating a difficult climate. Traditional career paths are disappearing, and AI is disrupting entry-level roles. Learn how ambitious Gen Zers are overcoming these hurdles
Gen Z Job Market Crisis: AI, Budget Cuts, and a Shrinking Career Ladder
Facing a tough job market, recent grads like Jacqueline Kline struggle to find employment despite stellar qualifications. Traditional career paths are vanishing, with AI impacting entry-level tech jobs and government budget cuts eliminating positions in public service, non-profits, and healthcare. The oversaturation of law school and cuts to programs like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps further exacerbate the problem, leaving young adults facing a bleak career outlook. This generation's struggle highlights the urgent need for new career strategies in a rapidly changing economic landscape
Facing a tough job market? Ambitious Gen Z grads like Jacqueline Kline are finding traditional career paths blocked. With fewer entry-level jobs and economic uncertainty, what's the next move for today's driven young professionals?
Facing a tough job market, recent FSU graduate Jacqueline Kline chose further education over a grueling job hunt. Burned out from countless applications and rejections, she's pursuing a master's degree, a decision mirrored by many peers grappling with limited career options: intensive job searching, additional schooling, or settling for less-than-ideal roles. This highlights the challenges facing Gen Z as traditional career paths become increasingly uncertain
Navigating the Post-Grad Job Hunt: How Gen Z Faces a Tougher Market Than Ever Before. Recent grads face a challenging job market, with economic slowdown, emerging technologies like AI, and limited entry-level opportunities impacting their career prospects. This article explores the struggles of young adults entering the workforce and offers insights into their challenges
Gen Z Grads Face Tough Job Market: Is Higher Education Worth It? A record number of recent college graduates, including Ivy League alumni, are underemployed, sparking concerns about the value of higher education. Data reveals a staggering 41.2% of young graduates are in jobs not requiring a bachelor's degree, surpassing previous highs. Even top MBA programs report historically low placement rates, with some graduates still searching for work months after graduation. This challenging job market, fueled by economic uncertainty and AI advancements, leaves many questioning the traditional path to career success. Is a college degree still the golden ticket?
Bella Babbitt, 21, a 2024 graduate with a dual degree in business and sociology from a prestigious New York liberal arts college, faced the challenging post-grad job market. Despite graduating a year early and completing impressive internships, her hundreds of applications for media strategy roles went unanswered. After a year of juggling odd jobs like waiting tables and food delivery, she secured a marketing position—a role she attributes to a personal connection. Her story highlights the difficulties facing recent graduates navigating today's competitive job market
Facing rejection after hundreds of job applications, despite a stellar academic record (cum laude from Florida State University), recent graduate Jacqueline Kline shares the disheartening reality of today's competitive job market for young professionals. Her experience highlights the struggle many 20-somethings face, where impressive resumes and high GPAs no longer guarantee employment, leaving them questioning the value of their education and battling feelings of failure in a challenging economic climate
Gen Z Job Market Crisis: AI, Hiring Freezes, and a Retirement Delay Squeeze Entry-Level Opportunities. Even traditionally reliable careers in tech and law face historic lows in entry-level hiring and internships. The decline in internships (over 15% on Handshake from 2023-2025) and delayed retirements are leaving recent graduates stuck in low-level positions, creating a challenging job market for young professionals
Recent grads face a tough job market. Summa cum laude graduate Abbey Owens, despite internships and stellar grades, struggles to find a marketing role, highlighting the challenges facing young professionals. After months of unanswered applications, she's considering bartending, reflecting a widespread feeling of disillusionment among ambitious Gen Z job seekers. The competitive job market, economic uncertainty, and AI advancements are creating unprecedented hurdles for entry-level positions
The crushing weight of job rejection: Months, even years, of unanswered applications and "no's" are the harsh reality for many job seekers like Babbitt and Owens. With dwindling job postings and low hiring rates—a situation impacting one in five as long-term unemployed (27+ weeks, BLS)—the struggle to enter the workforce is intensifying, especially for recent graduates facing a competitive job market
Gen Z's Job Hunt Struggle: Even those pursuing public service and academia face tough competition and uncertain career paths, highlighting a challenging job market for young graduates despite academic achievements and internships. The economic slowdown, AI advancements, and government budget cuts impact entry-level positions across various sectors, leaving many recent grads struggling to find employment
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.”
Are you a Gen Zer looking for a job? Reach out to this reporter at allisonkelly@businessinsider.com or via Signal at alliekelly.10
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.”
Allie Kelly is a reporter on Business Insider’s Economy team. She writes about social safety nets and how policy affects people.
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