Gen Z has been sold a bill of lies.
Most of the generation was born into the “Learn to Code” public information campaign. Tech moguls, celebrities, and even U.S. presidents poured funding and influence into an effort to create more computer programmers. Students were told they would get six-figure salaries for entry level jobs after graduating with a computer science degree.
Only the first half of Generation Z ever saw this promise come to fruition. The newer crop of college computer science graduates are barely able to get work with their hyper-specialized degree, as evidenced by a recent New York Times interview with graduates who applied to thousands of jobs to only receive a callback from Chipotle.
It’s popular on the right to dismiss and ridicule young people who are struggling, especially those in the tech sector. But dismissing someone as “entitled” who merely wants a job misses the whole point.
Sure, the death of the uppity tech sector is a bit rich to watch. Blue collar Americans watched their jobs get shipped overseas or outsourced to illegal immigrant labor in the last 50 years. They were told to get with the times and snag a job in the exciting and growing field of technology. Jobs seemed limitless and the pay very nearly so, and anyone who wanted to work outside of it was treated as antiquated and obstinate.
Yet the young people actually suffering from the deflation of the tech bubble aren’t the ones who created it. They were born into a world of iPhones and apps and computers the size of the palm of your hand more powerful than the ones that helped send us to the moon. A career somewhere in the field of technology was the obvious choice for young people born around or just after the year 2000.
“I’m very concerned,” Jeff Forbes, a former program director for computer science education and workforce development at the National Science Foundation, told the New York Times. “Computer science students who graduated three or four years ago would have been fighting off offers from top firms — and now that same student would be struggling to get a job from anyone.”
While technology takes over more of life, it somehow yields increasingly less profit for young people seeking solid, well-paying work. Amazon, Meta, Intel and Microsoft are laying off workers. AI is taking over the very entry-level jobs that used to provide a reassuring career path for graduates. AI is making a lot of people rich, but only the people who started it. Gen Z faces joblessness, or at best, menial careers and a decreased sense of pride and agency in their own work as A.I. is constantly improved to become more like a human – eventually “better” than a human (better, at least, in the ways that a tech CEO would find profitable).
Before we are tempted to jeer at the shiftless Gen Z students who believe anything but a job in computer science is beneath them, we must remember who trained them to think that way in the first place. Gen X and millennials were excited about the technological boom. Jobs abounded and a little entrepreneurial spirit and math proficiency could bring them a salary their parents didn’t enjoy until their middle age. Gen Z was told it would enjoy the same, only for the generations that told it so to invent technological innovations that rendered them obsolete.
Sarah Wilder is a writer and commentator on culture and the family. Formerly a reporter at the Daily Caller, her work has been published in Chronicles Magazine, The Federalist, and The American Mind.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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