By Mukesh 
Gowns are on. Folding chairs are lined up on the quad. Graduates: Ready to begin the rest of your lives?
This year, that question sounds like a dare. Neither the manicured grass nor the dignified tune of “Pomp and Circumstance” can mask the sour vibes. Inflation is accelerating. Hiring is glacial. Businesses are petrified by wars, tariffs and artificial intelligence.
Gather the evidence, and the verdict seems clear: These poor graduates are screwed. A small army of internet essayists promotes this view, and young Americans subscribe to it. Just 43 percent view their job prospects positively — down from 75 percent in 2022.
Pessimism rules. But is everything as bad as it seems?
Held back
In 1965, the Who sang “The Kids Are Alright.” Thirty years later, a California band called the Offspring recorded its own take, “The Kids Aren’t Alright.” For my generation, the second song is more resonant. Its title has become a Gen-Z rallying cry.
We came of age during a recession and doom-scrolled through a pandemic. We were told that college was a shot at deliverance. If we worked hard, and if we could stomach the cost (or more often, if our parents could), then we’d reap long-term benefits.
But for many, deliverance hasn’t come. As older Americans steered more teenagers to college, the job market for degree holders failed to keep pace. The employment rate has sagged to virtually the same dismal level for young adults with and without degrees. One data point captures the disappointment: For decades, fresh grads were less likely to be unemployed than the average worker. That’s not true anymore, according to the New York Fed.
Commencement speakers are in the unenviable position of having to acknowledge these issues without bumming everyone out. The Morning analyzed 50 graduation speeches — half from this year, half from 2018 — to see how their messaging has changed. While many of the 2018 speeches focused on gender and racial inequality, this year’s focused more on generational inequality and grit.
A third of the 2026 speakers explicitly mentioned “resilience,” but only one said that word in 2018. James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, told graduates at Paul Quinn College this month that the economy simply isn’t built for Gen Z. “Young people can’t afford to buy a home,” he said. “Young people can’t afford to fill up their gas tank.”
Brain fog
When things get hectic, people tend to delay big decisions. Businesses do the same, which helps explain what’s happening in the labor market.
“Think about young college grads like an investment: You pay now and you get the full benefit later,” David Deming, a Harvard economist and undergraduate dean, told me. “Companies are much less likely to make those investments when the environment is so uncertain.”
Executives don’t know whether they’ll wake up to a huge trade deal with China or a complete decoupling. They don’t know whether energy prices will rise or fall.
Throw A.I. into the mix, and things get even hazier. Experts can’t agree on how this technology might change the economy, but it menaces the white-collar professions that so many students were told to pursue. Commencement speakers this year couldn’t stop talking about it. Graduates understand the threat: When a speaker at the University of Central Florida called A.I. “the next industrial revolution,” they booed.
High marks
It’s easy to succumb to gloom, but the post-college job market isn’t all bad.
Real wages have grown a lot — more than 13 percent since 2014. Young people enjoy higher incomes than their parents and grandparents did, even in fields exposed to A.I. In fact, people in those fields earn more than anybody else.
“Graduates are still in a much better position than non-college workers, and this bears repeating early and often,” said Lisa Kahn, an economist at the University of Rochester.
Young people are saddled with debt, which postpones wealth accumulation, but as they reach their late 20s, they’re getting much richer than previous generations did at the same age, according to data from the Fed. The average net worth for millennials and Gen Z at age 30 is around $118,000. For Gen X, after adjusting for inflation, it was $53,000.
“In terms of earnings and income,” said Kevin Corinth, an economist who advised President Trump during his first term, “Gen Z is starting to pull away from previous generations.”
For more
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Many graduates are resetting their ambitions in search of a first job. Some are working as servers and baristas, or in other positions that don’t require college degrees.
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The hiring process feels impenetrable. A.I. screening systems are reading applications — and rejecting them, many applicants suspect — without human input.
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As more graduates view themselves as underdogs, they are shifting to the political left. But the transformation is deeper.
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My colleague Jodi Kantor recently published a book offering advice to new college graduates. Here’s one of her tips for figuring out what career you might want to pursue:
Look to your friends instead. Think about what roles you take on with them: math tutor, party planner, psychologist, workout coach. These answers often reveal truths that our résumés do not. In social relationships, we aren’t bound by suffocating expectations about our future. Our friends have needs, and by noticing how we respond to them, we can learn who we are.
THE LATEST NEWS
Politics
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Senator Bill Cassidy, a two-term Republican who voted to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, lost his primary race after Trump backed another candidate.
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A Senate official ruled that a Republican proposal to provide $1 billion for Trump’s White House ballroom cannot be included in a budget bill.
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Nearly 10 years after Congress passed measures to crack down on sexual harassment, lawmakers and aides say it’s still rampant.
War in the Middle East
Other Big Stories
THE SUNDAY DEBATE
Does the collapse of Spirit Airlines, a low-cost carrier, hurt consumers?
Yes. Spirit Airlines was an affordable choice that increased price competition, making travel possible for the working and middle class. “For millions who flew Spirit, the cheaper fares made the difference between taking a family vacation or staying home,” The Miami Herald’s editorial board writes.
Worlds apart: In the 1920s, a young Black man who could pass for white left his darker-skinned brother in New Orleans and headed to Chicago. A hundred years later, a reporter unraveled her family’s secret.
A strange alliance: Scientists have derided MAHA for its anti-vaccine efforts. But when it comes to antidepressants, the two sides seem closer in alignment.
SPORTS
N.H.L.: There’s been no home-ice advantage in the playoff series between the Buffalo Sabres and the Montreal Canadiens. Buffalo scored seven consecutive goals Saturday en route to an 8-3 Game 6 victory in Montreal. Game 7 is in Buffalo on Monday.
N.F.L.: The quarterback Aaron Rodgers has agreed to play another year with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Here’s a breakdown of the implications for the team.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
“The Calamity Club” by Kathryn Stockett: In this long-awaited follow-up to “The Help,” Stockett tracks a plucky orphan and a resourceful spinster doing whatever it takes to survive the Great Depression in Mississippi. Both yearn for family and find it in unexpected places. One devises an ingenious plan to open a brothel with a “slapped-together band of misfits,” while the other proves unsinkable under the most trying circumstances. At more than 600 pages, “The Calamity Club” is a commitment — but, as our reviewer wrote, “It’s all about plot, baby.”
This week’s subject for The Interview is Maine’s presumptive Democratic Senate nominee, Graham Platner, a progressive 41-year-old military vet and oyster farmer who is pitching a working-class revolution. He is poised to take on the incumbent, Susan Collins, in November.
You grew up in a small town, didn’t graduate college, became a bartender. But also your father was an attorney, your grandfather was a Cornell-educated architect, quite well known. How do you think about class? Is working-class how you grew up or how you live now?
I work with my hands. I don’t make a lot of money. My wife and I work incredibly hard and we probably make, like, $60,000 a year combined. We don’t have money left over. We’re not saving for retirement. I was lucky. I got to buy my house in 2017, and I could not afford my house today. My house has gone up almost three times in value.
Do you have family money?
My father gave me the mortgage, except, of course, because he’s my dad and he’s an attorney, he gave me a significantly higher interest rate than the bank would have. I could have used a V.A. home loan if I had wanted to, but at that point it was just easier to do it that way. But I could never get that today because I couldn’t afford the monthly mortgage if it was three times what it is. My income hasn’t gone up three times. But you know, in this day and age, you are working class if you make your money from work and wages. The world of wealth disparity has become so intense that there are just so many people now who are sitting on so much money who do not work. They make money off their investments. I know it’s an expansive definition of “working class,” but I think you need to have an expansive definition when we have the most expansive margin of wealth inequality in the history of the country.
Read more of the interview here. Or watch a longer version on YouTube.