Young people are already discontented. It is not going to improve anytime soon.
Youth sentiment is notoriously difficult to measure. Polling is fraught even without the added complications of inconsistent respondents, ambiguous questions, and the possibility that words like “confidence” or “satisfied” shift meaning across generations. The most reliable signals come from consistent annual surveys that reveal clear trends over time.
Last year, 43 percent of Americans aged 15 to 34 who answered a Gallup survey felt positive about their local job market. By contrast, 64 percent of those over 55 said it was a “good time to find a job.” This is a reversal of the long-standing pattern. Until 2024, younger respondents were typically more optimistic—an outcome that made intuitive sense, given the usual difficulties of job-hunting near retirement. The recent drop among the young is sharp: in 2023, 70 percent of 15-to-34-year-olds still viewed the market favorably. Gallup notes that the decline resembles the fall seen between 2007 and 2009, around the global financial crisis.
Similar reversals appear throughout the data on youth employment. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates now exceeds the overall rate—a flip that began after 2021, and that ends a thirty-year pattern running in the opposite direction. The shift has been especially pronounced among middle-class, college-educated young people. In the fourth quarter of 2024, 49 percent of college graduates expressed confidence in the job market, compared with 44 percent of those without a degree. The following year, the numbers inverted dramatically: 19 percent versus 35 percent.
No single factor fully explains the change. Unemployment among college graduates has worsened only modestly. Political shifts and constant stories about artificial intelligence may have amplified anxiety. What the data do show, taken together, is that something distinctive is happening to this generation—something different from the experiences of their parents and grandparents. In 2020, a Pew study found that 42 percent of Americans believed today’s young people would be better off financially than their parents. By spring 2024, that figure had fallen to 26 percent.
The reasons for the new sense of precarity are clear even if overall unemployment and wages for young graduates remain relatively solid. Housing is the most obvious and longest-standing pressure: many young adults still measure economic adulthood by homeownership, yet buying a house has become nearly impossible in large metropolitan areas. The second pressure is the perceived vulnerability of entry-level white-collar work to AI. Actual displacement remains limited so far, but the technology’s arrival has magnified negative expectations and helped produce a collective mood of despair, especially among the educated young.
Here are five predictions about what lies ahead for young people and the job market.
AI will not eliminate every entry-level white-collar position, but it will produce an extended period of pain. An increasing number of employers, impressed by successive technological advances, will quietly reduce or pause hiring of recent college graduates. This will widen the already growing unemployment gap between young degree-holders and everyone else. If the rate for this group rises from roughly 5 percent to 10 percent, confidence—already falling fast—will sink further. One possible political consequence is a deepening of populist energy on both the far right and the far left. Establishment figures may shift leftward on certain issues in an attempt to contain the unrest. Whether any return to normalcy is possible remains an open question.
Job losses from AI will be highly uneven across sectors. Law firms, for instance, may conclude that even if an AI system can perform much of a junior associate’s work, it is still advantageous to bill clients for the time of someone who attended a prestigious law school rather than for a few million tokens. For the next decade at least, industries that already believe in the technology will move fastest. Resistance elsewhere will slow any total transformation: people still value going to work and interacting with other humans, and many older workers remain attached to established ways of doing business.
The divide between AI believers and skeptics will endure. Some evangelists expect continual improvement to convince holdouts of the technology’s limitless potential, eventually producing enough abundance for a kind of robot-enabled universal stipend. Many others simply do not want that world and prefer that young people continue to find meaningful, steady work even when machines can perform the tasks.
The media and social-media environment will deteriorate further. Precarity in knowledge-work fields is already feeding nastiness online. Despite efforts to reshape platforms, much of the conversation still flows through journalism and the academy. As those professions feel more threatened—whether or not AI can fully replace them—coverage of the media and universities themselves is likely to grow more inward-looking and self-obsessed.
A broader sense of hopelessness and disconnection will spread even if the job market eventually stabilizes. The Great Recession delayed traditional markers of adulthood and reduced birth rates, with little recovery so far. Even if AI-driven displacement remains concentrated in tech, finance, insurance, and a few other sectors, further delays in family formation and higher rates of workforce dropout are probable. Japan’s experience in the 1990s offers a cautionary parallel. During its “employment ice age,” overall youth unemployment was not catastrophic by global standards, yet college graduates were hit hard. The scarring effects lasted into middle age and contributed to phenomena such as *hikikomori*—prolonged social withdrawal, predominantly among young men. Japan later created job cafés, training programs, and specialized centers for NEETs (those not in education, employment, or training). The results were mixed, but the episode illustrates what can happen when a large cohort that did everything asked of them finds the expected rewards of adulthood deferred en masse: a culture of disaffection and emotional stasis that outlasts any economic rebound.
The current moment for young Americans is not identical to Japan’s lost decade. It is, however, different enough from the decades that preceded it to warrant attention—and to suggest that the consequences may linger long after any particular technology or political cycle has passed.