Great City Still Glows But Are There Jobs Enough for Young People?

New York, E.B. White wrote long ago, is always full of “young worshipful beginners” energizing the Great City. Young people drawn here from everywhere for endless reasons. From immigrants seeking economic opportunity to small town kids looking for a bigger canvas to paint their lives on.

They take hope from the city and in return do more to power the city than even its ageing public utility, as White described with some poetic license:

“Each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison company.”

But what if that source of power fails? What becomes of the Great City if the plug is pulled on all that heat and light of youth?

White was a writer not an economist. But it is economists who are now warning, perhaps less poetically, of a trend that is dimming the prospects of that very group of young New Yorkers who have generated the city’s energy for generations.

“Young workers are having a particularly hard time finding meaningful employment,” wrote the city’s comptroller, Mark Levine, in a new report on the city’s economy and job prospects.

“Young college graduates in particular have seen their standing in the labor market decline to a greater degree than the overall workforce.”

This is a national trend, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reports. But it is particularly pronounced in New York and, more to the point, New York is, as White captured all those years ago, dependent for its future on the energy of youth.

“Retaining the state’s young workforce is a critical component of New York’s prospects for its long-term economic growth and prosperity,” said the State Comptroller, Tom DiNapoli, in his own report about the vulnerability of the New York economy.

He noted that the proportion of the city’s population that is between 18 and 34 has declined in the last decade, by an alarming 7.6%. Overall, the state’s population of young workers is down only 1.9% and both Long Island and The Hudson valley are up.

So, something particular is hampering those young worshipful beginners who E.B. White recognized as the city’s power source.

“I have a whole army of undergraduate students who cannot get jobs,” reports Professor Tessa West at NYU, “and they have stellar resumes.”

Sean Halbert thought he would have no trouble finding an entry level Human Resources job with his resume of summer jobs and internships and his BA in psychology from the University of Miami.

“I was so wrong,” he said. “I applied to probably around 75 jobs a week for months before I finally heard back from one. It was a job I didn’t even want in a career field I wasn’t going to be part of.”

At the age of 23, Sean is working in a restaurant on 18th street and living with his parents near Gramercy Park. He has abandoned his search for an HR job and gone back to school at NYU for a graduate degree in sports business.

This phenomenon is so widespread that it is now dramatically driving the data, Levine notes.

“Historically, the positive employment effect of a college education surpassed the negative impact of youth,” he said, “meaning that young college graduates had a lower unemployment rate than older workers without a B.A. But the relative size of this gap steadily shrunk through the 2010s, and since late 2022 the trend altogether reversed, with unemployment among college graduates age 22-27 now exceeding that of older workers without a college degree.”

There has been a tendency to attribute this to Artificial Intelligence destroying entry-level white-collar jobs. But as both Levine and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland note, the trend began well before the rise of AI.

Professor West, a social psychologist, has been looking into the challenge. She finds a negative cycle between the weak social skills of this generation, raised on mobile phones and Zoom, and financially pressed employers who are fed up dealing with them.

“They are having a hard time on-boarding them,” said Professor West of the experience many companies are having with young workers, “getting them to transfer skills they thought were transferable. Getting them to stop asking for help. Getting them to learn the culture. They are just not getting over that hump as quickly as they want them to, and they see them more as a loss than a gain.

“They are time consuming. They are demanding. And they often ask for resources that previous generations have not asked for. They ask for mental health resources. Time off. Things that have to do with work-life balance. This generation is a little bit more demanding on that front and they are struggling with all that kind of interpersonal stuff.”

Employers, with their own challenges to deal with, eventually conclude that the cost-benefit analysis argues against hiring new, younger workers, Professor West says.

“When you have a high maintenance generation and they have that negative stereotype against them; and you’re really struggling to make your financials work; the first thing you are going to do is look to your current employees and say, ‘Do I really need another person to do that thing? Or can I split that job into ten different pieces and just give each person a little bit of that, instead of hiring? And this is what people are doing.”

There is a growing recognition this disconnect needs to be addressed.

“Young adults are dealing with mounting obstacles to achieving financial stability and independence,” DiNapoli said. “They face a shrinking pool of entry-level jobs and rising unemployment, driven in part by AI. Increasing housing costs along with growing debt are also making it increasingly difficult for them to live independently and build their future. Addressing affordability, expanding housing options, and improving access to education, job training and employment opportunities are essential to reversing these trends.”

Professor West is focusing sharply on upgrading the soft skills of young workers. She encourages students to practice conversations in which they don’t just talk about themselves, and to learn to communicate more professionally in workplace settings.

“I teach professional development right now,” she explained. “They don’t know what LinkedIn is. They don’t know how to make a phone call. They don’t know how to write an email. That is literally an NYU course. Those things are all contributing to [the job gap]. There is a massive negative stereotype against this generation.”