Laura Pappano, May 20
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Ally Wilkinson did not plan to spend her senior year at Wake Forest University doing something strikingly stressful: juggling a full-time job with a global consulting firm while also taking classes to finish her degree.
But like many in her generation, Wilkinson demands that her job allow for life balance and overall wellness, she said, including time for exercise and socializing. She tells her bosses she has a class or a meeting, for example, and they tell her to do what she needs to do. Even so, she said, “they honestly get annoyed.”
Wilkinson and other new college grads are starting careers at a time of a sharp generational disconnect over how the workplace should operate and how younger employees should inhabit it. In response, many colleges are rewriting the way they prepare students for jobs – and life.
Some of this adjustment is the result of changes colleges have noticed in their students: because they lost key in-person experiences to Covid and often continued learning on Zoom, new grads and other Gen Zers often haven’t had practice at speaking up in large groups, asking for help or responding to authority figures.
This generation, typically those born between 1997 and 2012, also has grown up with threats, from Covid to school shootings to the impact of social media, including bullying and self-doubt sown by pop culture pressures. This has led many to prioritize their mental well-being, according to research and experts who work with them. Surveys repeatedly show that a large percentage of Gen Zers struggle with well-being and want to be able to talk about it at work.
At the same time, “there are some students who get stressed out easily and prioritize taking care of themselves over being accountable,” said Briana Randall, executive director of the Career & Internship Center at the University of Washington.
The result is friction around how much employers should bend to individual needs. As young workers vocalize expectations — for work-life balance, flexibility around schedules, plus a relaxed approach to dress, interactions with bosses and deadlines — they are being labeled by some as “unprofessional” and “entitled.”
A 2024 Intelligent.com survey of managers found 51 percent said they were frustrated by Gen Z employees — and 27 percent would avoid hiring them.
For colleges – judged by how well they prepare students for the workforce – this means it’s not enough to host job fairs or assist with resumes, cover letters and mock interviews. Students need explicit instruction on old-fashioned tasks like composing a professional email (no emojis or exclamation points) and work etiquette (how to break in and out of conversation). They also need to learn how to react to workplace demands, said Shannon Anderson, a sociology professor at Roanoke College in Virginia who teaches a course called Internship Planning and Prep.
Having missed out on social learning and been “given a lot of grace” around turning in work late in high school and even college, she said, “when somebody comes in and says, ‘You have to get things in by the deadline,’ they feel angry.” She admits to blanching when students declare they “need a self-care day,” but says they need to be taught about professional expectations.
She does that by providing extremely explicit information. For a generation accustomed to step-by-step advice on TikTok and Instagram, knowing what to do in detail offers relief. Jennifer Burch, a senior planning a career in public health, took Anderson’s class. Just because her generation grew up with the internet, she said, older people think “that we know everything about how to correspond with another person via email or on the phone. You know, some people don’t even know how to answer phones.”
Information that another generation might grumble is “common sense” shows up in for-credit career classes on campuses like Roanoke’s. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore offers two dozen, and Wake Forest has five, including EDU 320: Strategic Job Search Processes (“Do You know how to sell yourself on paper and in person?”) and EDU 360: Professional Life and Skills (“How to flourish in work and life”).
Around the country, 486 institutions teach a set of “career competencies” developed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE, and many weave them into academic courses.
While most of these career competencies focus on workplace skills, like professionalism (sample: “be present and prepared”), one of them, called career and self-development, delves into mental health and well-being. It explores “how a student thinks through their whole self and what it means to have work-life balance,” said NACE president and CEO Shawn VanDerziel.
The notion that you are more than your job is important but has rarely been a point of emphasis on campus. That’s changing. John Hopkins, for one, has reframed its approach from helping students find a job to helping them seek life satisfaction.
“What Gen Z is asking for is, ‘Provide me a work environment in which I can work and feel fulfilled,’” said Farouk Dey, a vice provost who in 2018 began flipping the campus’s career counseling to focus instead on “Life Design.”
Today Hopkins’ vibey Imagine Center, which opened in 2022 adjacent to the football stadium, features free coffee and hot chocolate, comfy modular furniture and enclosed workspaces with words like “HYGGE” (the Danish concept of coziness) and “‘IMI OLA” (Hawaiian for seeking your best life) etched in frosted letters on glass.
Instead of pressing students about what they want to be, then creating “very linear pathways towards that,” Dey said, staffers seek to uncover what makes them curious, and help them investigate those paths, including whether a passion will become a job — or an avocation.
This is new for an elite university that typically sends graduates straight into finance, consulting, tech, government, engineering, health care or to law or medical school. “We’re trying to detangle their identity from the outcome that they come in here saying is ‘success,’” said Matthew Golden, who leads the Life Design Lab at the center.
Rather than pursue medical school “because I told everyone at high school when I was the valedictorian, I’m going to go to medical school,” they urge students to consider that fulfillment may be about more than a six-figure salary or admission to a top 10 medical school. This contradicts old-style career coaching in which, he said, “you told everyone you’re going to work on Wall Street, so let’s get you to work on Wall Street.”
The approach resonates. A survey of Hopkins’ graduating seniors in 2024 found 74 percent satisfied with the Life Design experience, versus 39 percent in 2016 under the old model. (Their data reflects the same competitive placements, but students are presumably happier about the way they made those choices.)
This broader view of success seems wise in a tough job market. It’s too soon to know if the U.S. faces a version of the 2007 financial crisis. But new data on the Class of 2025 from the online job platform Handshake shows the average number of applications for each posted job are up a whopping 30 percent from a year ago. Data also shows many seniors reevaluated their “dream job” — and small employers of 250 employees or fewer this year received 37 percent of applications, more than medium and large employers and a greater percentage than for the classes of 2022, 2023 and 2024.
At the University of Washington, which lacks the resources of an elite private university, 12 staffers at the Career & Internship Center serve 25,000 undergraduates, 9,000 graduate students, plus recent alumni. Randall, the executive director, said employer attendance for the spring job fair was down more than 25 percent. She canceled a virtual job fair for April after only two businesses registered to attend.
There, and around the country, options for new grads are also being curtailed by government cuts. Federal agencies have pulled out of campus visits and jobs (“The Marines still came,” said Randall, who typically gets five to 10 federal employers). In February, Rafael Medrano, a Johns Hopkins senior majoring in environmental engineering who had worked in wastewater permitting at the Environmental Protection Agency and was to return after graduation, learned his job was terminated. “Returning to the EPA is no longer an option,” he said.
Teaching students to center their values, said Dey, of Johns Hopkins, can help them pivot from a government job to a nonprofit, or from corporation to startup. It makes turbulence something, he said, that “our students are fully capable of surviving, and then thriving after that.”
One recent morning at the Johns Hopkins Imagine Center, Alex Kroumov, a soft-spoken sophomore from Chandler, Arizona, majoring in biomedical engineering and applied math, ate pizza as he looked for summer internships. “It’s tough,” he said. He applied to 50 and got no offers. Then he spotted a biomedical research post, in Switzerland, which could be “a cool new experience.”
Graduation is two years off, and while Kroumov feels the current uncertainty, he said it’s not gutting his expectations. “I want whatever I’m doing to be fulfilling,” he said. “I want it to be for a good or, like, a morally just cause.” And mental health can’t be taboo. “I’m not saying, like, you have to be a therapist,” but empathy matters. (He cares so much that he and a friend made an app powered by artificial intelligence, “Humor Healer,” for students to text when they are down.)
