Traditionally, younger Americans have held a brighter outlook on the job market compared to their older counterparts, even during challenging times like the Great Recession. However, a startling turnaround has occurred, as a recent poll released on Monday indicates a significant drop in confidence among young people over the past two years, while older generations maintain a more positive perspective.
The Gallup World Poll reveals an unprecedented divergence in job market perceptions between younger and older Americans, a gap wider than in any of the other 141 countries surveyed. In the U.S., only 43% of individuals aged 15-34 believe it is currently “a good time” to find a job locally, contrasting sharply with the 64% of those aged 55 and older who share this optimistic view.
Globally, the situation is quite different. The median share of young people who consider it a favorable time for job hunting stands at 48%, whereas among older individuals, it is only 38%. This highlights a unique generational divide in the U.S., where younger people are increasingly discouraged about job opportunities, while older people largely feel optimistic.
This divide is likely to deepen existing generational tensions, particularly in the political arena, where younger voters are increasingly concerned with economic issues like housing affordability and display diminishing trust in institutions. These concerns could further influence their political engagement and priorities.
Benedict Vigers from Gallup noted this new trend of pessimism among young Americans as particularly striking. According to him, last year marked the first occasion in Gallup’s extensive polling history where young Americans’ job market outlook was more pessimistic than their peers in other developed nations. “Has this happened in most other advanced economies? The answer is a resounding no,” Vigers emphasized.
The disparity between younger and older Americans’ perceptions of job availability underscores a significant generational divide that could have broad implications for the country’s social and economic fabric.
Young people, with fewer physical limitations and family responsibilities — along with an ability to adapt more quickly than older counterparts — normally are more optimistic about their ability to land work.
But the new Gallup analysis finds the U.S. is one of only five countries where younger people are at least 10 points more pessimistic about the availability of work than older ones, joining China, Hong Kong, Norway, Serbia and the United Arab Emirates.
Among the 141 countries surveyed, younger Americans ranked 87th in job market expectations. Even that is striking, Vigers said, because young Americans have long stood out globally for their optimism about job opportunities. Other countries, such as New Zealand and Canada, had lower levels of optimism among the youngest group, but there was no significant generational divide.
The divergence between younger and older Americans happened suddenly. Every U.S. age group registered a drop in confidence in the job market after 2023 — following a post-COVID rebound in 2021 and 2022 — but those 34 and younger saw the largest decline in recent years. The share of younger Americans saying it was “a good time” to find a job plunged by 27 percentage points from 2023 to 2025. That’s comparable to the rate of decline for young people during the 2008 global financial crisis, which also saw a drastic drop in confidence for older Americans. But that hasn’t happened in the last few years. In fact, older Americans’ views have barely dropped.
Older Americans also have a sunnier view of the economic landscape more generally, according to recent AP-NORC polling. About 8 in 10 adults under 35 describe the U.S. economy as very or somewhat poor, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in April. Only about 6 in 10 adults 55 and older say the same, although a majority still see the U.S. economy negatively.
John Della Volpe, a pollster who regularly surveys U.S. youth for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, said young people are frequently frustrated at how prior generations don’t understand their current economic challenges.
“It’s just another thing that drains their mental health — ‘my parents don’t understand that their pathway at this stage in life that I’m in was so much easier,’” Della Volpe said.
Job market optimism among younger adults approaches Great Recession levels
Younger Americans’ job market views now register close to the level they did in 2010, when the country was still deep in the Great Recession. This is not the first Gallup poll to find striking levels of pessimism among young Americans — they also register notably high levels of anxiety about pocketbook issues compared with people their age in other countries.
A separate Gallup survey on perceived U.S. job prospects found pessimism emerging at the end of 2024 and continuing into 2025. That coincides with the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term and the rise of artificial intelligence, which many fear will transform the labor market and eliminate many entry-level jobs.
The new poll finds the most frustrated groups of young people are those who haven’t secured a first job yet, college graduates and young women. But the heightened pessimism spreads across all subgroups of younger Americans, including men and those who haven’t attended college.
“Whoever they are, they are more pessimistic than they were three years ago,” Vigers said of young Americans.
The older Americans who have a less dire view of the job market are themselves more likely to be retired and not looking for work. They’re also more likely to own their own homes, a longtime building block of American prosperity that has increasingly seemed out of reach to younger people.
Day-to-day financial concerns were a key issue in the 2024 election, particularly for younger voters, and Trump improved on his previous performance among this group as he ran on a platform of economic prosperity, fighting inflation and affordability. But like other groups that were important parts of Trump’s 2024 coalition, some younger Americans have soured on the president as inflation continues, recent AP-NORC polling finds.
About 8 in 10 adults under 35 disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy and the cost of living, the recent AP-NORC poll found, compared with about 6 in 10 older adults.
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The Gallup World Poll results are based on telephone interviews conducted among approximately 1,000 U.S. adults from June 14 to July 16, 2025. The margin of error is ±4.4 percentage points for the U.S. sample.
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Associated Press writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.
