More than half of students who graduated in 2024 and 2025 were still looking for their first job, a sign that the first step after college is getting harder for Gen Z Years. The share stood at 58%, far above the 25% seen among previous graduates, including millennial and Gen X predecessors, who struggled to land work after college.

The gap is not just about delay. Nearly 40% of earlier graduates said they had secured full-time work in time for graduation, but only 12% of 2024 and 2025 graduates could say the same. For many young job-seekers, the search is stretching on for 10 to 12 months, and about 20% have been looking that long. Around 40% of unemployed people said they did not land a single job interview in 2024, a grim marker of how thin the market has become.

Lewis Maleh put the problem in blunt terms: “Universities aren’t deliberately setting students up to fail, but the system is failing to deliver on its implicit promise.” That warning now lands in a market shaped by AI agents, fewer entry-level openings and a tightening white-collar jobs pipeline, all of which have made the standard college-to-career path less reliable than it was for older generations.

The strain is visible beyond graduation ceremonies. Young professionals have reported sending as many as 1,700 applications without getting hired, a level of frustration that captures how much effort can be swallowed by a stalled hiring process. The pressure is also feeding into broader labor data: 4.3 million young people are now NEETs, meaning they are not in education, employment or training, and the number in the U.K. rose by 100,000 over 2025 alone.

Maleh's warning carries the harder truth now: the degree is no longer the guarantee it once was. For many in the Gen Z Years, the problem is not that they lack ambition or applications. It is that the old promise of full-time work after college has been weakened, and today’s labor market is not yet offering a clean replacement.