I'm part of the luckiest class of Gen Zers. Here's how we won the economic recovery.
Juliana Kaplan/Insider
- The pandemic threw Gen Zers off their professional trajectories.
- But unprecedented cash assistance and a strong labor market have been boons.
- For the oldest Gen Zers, the pandemic economic recovery was a huge success.
If you were in the college class of 2019 (like me), congratulations: You're a winner of the pandemic economy.
Hear me out. You graduated before the pandemic hit and didn't have to contend with remote school. Many of us also landed a full-time job before the pandemic hit. For some of us, that meant we qualified for enhanced unemployment benefits when laid off – or got to work from home and shed the commute. We got all three stimulus checks deposited into our accounts.
And finally, as the economy recovered from the pandemic, we benefitted from the rise in wages and the Great Resignation.
It's all part of how geriatric Gen Zers — the eldest group in the cohort born between 1996 and 2012 — disproportionately benefited from an unprecedented flow of money and jobs through a quirk of timing, as Gen Z economist and fellow class of 2019-er Joey Politano told me. Just because he'd had the opportunity to work before the pandemic shut everything down, "I received all of this money," Politano said.
Here's how the class of 2019 won the pandemic recovery.
The class of 2019 graduated into recession fears, but it was an economic downturn like none we've seen before
Politano technically graduated in fall 2018, but considers himself part of my cohort as he began work in 2019. He reminded me that 2019 was filled with speculation about another recession.
"I was so terrified of the horror stories I had heard from people a generation above me who graduated in like 2009 or 2008, who were like, 'oh, I could never get a job. I moved back in with my parents. I couldn't do anything for X amount of years,'" he said.
In 2019, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute's economists wrote that they hoped that college graduates could find themselves in a "high-pressure economy" where a prolonged period of "labor market strength translated into better opportunities for workers across the board."
Little did they know that a recession would come, and it would be coupled with a pandemic and be like no other in American history. Younger workers were the first ones sent packing as companies scrambled to stay afloat and shed their workforces. A 2020 Pew Research study found that one in four young Americans — those who were between the ages of 16 and 24 — had lost their jobs from February to May 2020.
But government assistance quickly followed that sudden shock, with dramatically expanded and enhanced unemployment benefits. For many, the checks provided a more stable and higher income. The big catch to getting those unemployment benefits was that you had to be employed in the first place, or unable to complete work because of the virus — conditions many younger Gen Zers likely didn't qualify for.
"March 2020 was accidentally the best time in American history to be unemployed," Politano said. For laid-off 2019-ers already in the labor force, those benefits may have a boon — but the situation "was worse for that category of people who were graduating that year, and lost the job that was lined up, or couldn't get into the labor force in the first place."
And college students who were still claimed as dependents also, in many instances, couldn't immediately receive the stimulus checks being pumped into the economy and consumers' wallets.
The class of 2019 benefitted from skyrocketing wages and a Great Resignation
In the years following the brief pandemic recession, Gen Z disproportionately powered the Great Resignation, becoming the archetypical job hopper as many landed pay bumps and more stable roles.
"These last few years have been very good for people who are upgrading jobs, people who go from working in food service to working a general nine to five office job or something higher paying," Politano said. That benefits younger workers, who disproportionately work in those so-called entry-level jobs.
"It's very different than that 2008 stereotype of someone who graduates college and they get a job in food service at a restaurant as a barista, and they struggled to make it in what they wanted to do," he said.
Underpinning the job hopping was also an undeniable culture shift, as people became more open about navigating work-life balance and mental health. Trends like treating your life as a full-time job, with work as a side hustle, made it more acceptable for young workers to advocate for themselves and create clear boundaries from the very beginning of their careers.
Of course, the class of 2019 has weathered their own challenges: Living through a pandemic in their early 20's, and entering a world of work that's been forever changed.
But they're getting a stronger start than people who graduated in 2008 who — through no fault of their own — are going to have "massively lower lifetime incomes by virtue of both not having a job immediately when they graduated, being behind on climbing the ladder towards higher paying jobs, towards home ownership, towards like being able to save for retirement or have children," Politano said. Indeed, as Hillary Hoffower previously reported for Insider, millennials were particularly fractured by the Great Recession — potentially becoming a "lost generation" when it comes to their ability to accumulate wealth.
"You have a cohort that in 2019, 2020 is going to look back on this period as something that shaped their lives but isn't going to have that literal lost decade of progress," Politano said. "They had the opportunity that people in 2013 didn't have — by virtue of the very different policy choices we made this recession compared to the last recession."
Are you a class of 2019 graduate, and have a story to tell about the economy of the last four years? Contact this reporter at jkaplan@insider.com.
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