Every few weeks I end up chatting with a friend from St. Lawrence who graduated last year.  The conversation usually involves sympathy that they were unable to have a commencement, an expression of how much I miss seeing them, and eventually leads to the question “what are you doing these days?”

The Class of 2020 was looking to enter a strong job market.  According to US News and World Report, the median salary of St. Lawrence alumni was $54,200 and eighty percent of the Class of 2018 was employed within a year of graduation.  

But things have changed since then.  In 2019, the unemployment rate for Gen Z was 8.4 percent, but in 2020 this jumped to 24.4 percent, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute.  In comparison, unemployment rates for all other generations went from 2.8 to 11.3%.  In short, the unemployment rate for Gen Z rose by 16 percent, while the unemployment rate for everyone else rose by 9.

Many of the Class of 2020 have found their desired employment, but others are not where they pictured themselves a year ago.  And this is not unique to St. Lawrence: Forbes estimated that roughly half the internships that were offered in 2019 were offered in 2020, and seventy-one percent of the Class of 2020 lost opportunities in their desired career field.

Graduate schools have been affected too.  The number of graduate school applicants actually spiked quite significantly, while acceptance numbers remained the same, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council.  Though graduate schools were more flexible in their admissions process this year, many making the GED optional for their applications, it doesn’t change the fact that the admissions process has shifted.

With this in mind, we can expect that the job market and graduate school admissions rate are not going to be in our favor either.  The classes of 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 will be graduating into a much more challenging environment than previous years, and the United States government doesn’t seem to take our plight very seriously.  Many college students have found themselves excluded from the stimulus checks the government provided.  For college students whose parents pay a portion of their college expenses it is normal for their parents to claim them in their taxes as a dependent.  Surprise, surprise, college students who were claimed as dependents aren’t eligible for the stimulus checks.

The members of Gen Z at St. Lawrence followed the track outlined by society for success: we worked hard, earned good grades, and were accepted to a strong university.  Now we are finding ourselves cheated by the very system we thought was on our side.  And this isn’t St. Lawrence’s fault: this is industry-wide.

With this in mind, we need to change the expectations for Gen Z.  It is okay to graduate and not immediately find a job, or to find work outside your desired field.  Don’t feel bad if you aren’t accepted to the graduate schools you wanted.  The conditions facing us are different from previous years, and it would be unreasonable to expect us to have the same results.  Don’t expect the classes of 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 to have the same high numbers as other years: it’s not our fault.