Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell put it bluntly after the Fed’s rate cut on Wednesday: recent graduates are feeling the squeeze. At his press conference, he said, “You are seeing some effects from AI, but it is not the main thing driving it.” Despite a recent Stanford analysis that finds since late 2022, early-career workers have seen a 16% relative decline in employment, a quieter force may be even more damaging. Youngism, the set of stereotypes and practices that discount younger workers as unreliable, lazy and disloyal, has outpaced any other type of ageism — and the economic impacts are startling.
Here is the bigger picture. Early-career workers have lost ground relative to older cohorts since 2022 and roughly half of employers tell researchers that young applicants are “not job-ready.” In one report, 93% of young people said they have faced negative age-based treatment at work, and more than one in four say it made them question working at all. In the United States, federal age-bias protections under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act begin at 40, which leaves Gen Z in a legal blind spot.
