Jobs for New Grads: How Does Gen Z Stack Up Against X and Y?

Here’s what the overall labor market was like when cohorts from Generation X and Generation Y (aka millennials) entered the workforce after college compared with today’s graduates, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York through the first quarter of 2024.

For the purposes of comparison, the generations and college graduation years are approximate. The comparison also assumes that grads left college at around 22 years old.

Approximate graduation date range for each generation:

• Gen X: 1987 to 2002.

• Millennials: 2003 to 2018.

• Gen Z: 2019 to present.

Baby boomers were omitted due to a lack of equivalent data.

Annual salaries: Gen Z vs. Gen X and millennials

Annual salaries are higher among recent college graduates compared with most other generations, even after adjusting for inflation. Other than a spike in the late 1990s and early 2000s — which benefited Gen X graduates — Gen Z has seen consistently higher average salaries compared with earlier generations.

Unemployment: Gen Z vs. Gen X and millennials

Gen X recent grads experienced some of the lowest unemployment rates — well below the overall unemployment rate — during the 1990s. And the early 2000s wasn’t a terrible time to be a newly minted graduate either (although the Great Recession would soon follow).

While unemployment among recent graduates in Gen Z may be higher than overall unemployment, the rate itself is significantly lower than the all-time high unemployment rates met by recent graduates during the Great Recession and immediate aftermath.

Coming out of the Great Recession, the prolonged recovery delayed recent graduates’ ability to get on the career track by five to 10 years, says Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonpartisan think tank. She adds, “It definitely has had an impact on their lifetime earnings.”

Meanwhile, even though Gen Z suffered a high unemployment rate in 2020 due to the pandemic, the labor market swiftly rebounded. It was such a quick and strong bounceback, says Gould, that the pandemic recession is likely to be just a blip in Gen Z’s careers and, importantly, is unlikely to eat into lifetime earnings.

“Their outcomes are much better than they would have been, say, a generation prior,” says Gould.

Much of the data for Gen Z is, of course, in early days since most of Gen Z has yet to graduate college. The current labor market is relatively good, but it’s unclear if that will persist.

“Right now is not overall indicative of what labor can be in the early part of their career,” says Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at Indeed Hiring Lab. That also means that Gen Z grads have something in common with all the college students who came before them: There’s little certainty about the career path that lies ahead.