The end-of-year news retrospectives are over, and the “what’s ahead” predictions are wilting faster than New Year’s party flowers. But one significant 2025 milepost got little notice: Generation Z, the world’s largest generation, now makes up more than a quarter of the global labor force.
“It is the one-click, all-digital generation, growing up in a borderless world,” a World Economic Forum report says about those born from the late 1990s to early 2010s. “(They) value salary less than any other generation and see remote work as a top priority.”
Gen Z stands out for how they value autonomy, seek work-life balance, and want to feel like they belong. They are the most racially diverse generation in the United States, nearly a quarter of them children of immigrants.
As these young Americans consider their role in the labor market, the statistics tell us that:
– More jobs than ever—72%—will require education beyond high school by 2031, whether through a credential, certificate, or degree, the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce notes.
– More than 80% of Gen Z say a college education is “very important” or “fairly important,” a Gallup and Walton Family Foundation survey found.
– Yet only 62% of high school graduates head to college, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
If we’re going to prepare young Americans for good jobs and careers, we should ask why so many Gen Z folks are skipping college, how they think about their options, and what their goals are.
We need to tap into Gen Z’s optimism about the long-term value of college and, as a society, commit to helping make that a reality for them. Ensuring confidence in higher education will require more progress to make it accessible, relevant, and affordable.
Cost is an obvious challenge: Only about half of Gen Z students who want a college education think they can afford it. Many feel they don’t have enough information to choose the best path for their future. And, despite data showing that bachelor’s degree-holders earn $1.2 million more over a lifetime than high school graduates, it’s clear that people remain concerned about the value of a college education.
The result? My colleague Courtney Brown says the declining confidence in higher ed is “a crisis that threatens not only the U.S. economy, but the foundation of American opportunity.”
That’s not hyperbole. We’re not meeting our aspiration to lead the world educationally, with the United States in recent years ranking as low as 10th in the percentage of people with degrees, behind Canada, Russia, Japan and others.
“We compete in a world that is more and more dependent on knowledge industries, and we are falling behind now in the number of people that we have that can do those kinds of jobs,” Jon Marcus, higher education editor at The Hechinger Report, told American Public Media. “We are running out of people to do the jobs that really drive the American economy.”
Many solutions have been suggested, of course. Increased funding, both at the federal and state levels, has been a topic of heated policy debate for many years. One area of broad agreement has been support for community colleges, which are engines of economic prosperity. Yet the Center for American Progress estimates that community colleges receive $78 billion less than public four-year institutions, disproportionately affecting the students they serve.
But funding for community colleges, as important as it is, won’t solve the nation’s talent needs on its own. Supporting Gen Z’s ambitions will require greater emphasis on four-year institutions as well, especially those serving large numbers of students of color, low-income students, and students living in rural or remote communities. This means tackling the thorny issues of four-year college costs and the overall value of college degrees with greater urgency.
Gen Z has been shaped by an unprecedented combination of challenges, from the aftermath of 9/11, to Covid-19, to political polarization, to the increasing effects of climate change. Yet they haven’t lost their optimism. Evolving higher education systems to provide more tools — such as robust mental health services on campus, hands-on learning experiences, and access to mentors — can better prepare this generation of students for a rapidly changing world and set them up to create the changes they want to see.
Gen Z students and others are telling us they want post-high school educational options that are affordable, economically valuable, and flexible in their busy lives. We owe it to them to build a better system — or we risk our country slipping further behind until we get it right.