Why Gen Z Keeps Putting Life on Hold

Across America and around the world, young people are delaying homes, families and financial independence. Maybe the problem isn't that Gen Z is unprepared for adulthood, but that our institutions are preparing them for an economy that no longer exists.

Why Gen Z Keeps Delaying Adulthood

There is a word that seems to follow young adults everywhere these days: later. Buy a house? Maybe later. Get married? Later. Have children? Perhaps much later. Build some savings, become financially independent or finally stop worrying about the next unexpected bill? Hopefully later.

It is tempting to interpret all of this as a cultural change. Perhaps young people simply have different priorities. Perhaps they are less interested in the conventional milestones that defined adulthood for their parents and grandparents.

Some undoubtedly are. Every generation changes the definition of a successful life, and Gen Z should have the freedom to do the same. But when millions of young people across different countries begin postponing the same milestones at roughly the same stage of life, I think we have to ask whether we are looking at individual preference or something much larger.

The evidence increasingly points toward the latter. Deloitte's 2026 global survey of more than 22,500 Gen Z and millennial respondents across 44 countries found that 55 percent of Gen Z respondents had delayed major life decisions because of their financial circumstances. This is not simply a generation refusing adulthood. It is a generation trying to calculate whether it can afford adulthood.

America's College Graduates Are Entering a Different Job Market

For generations, one of America's most durable promises to its young people was straightforward. Get an education, work hard, earn a college degree and you will substantially improve your chances of building a secure middle-class life.

A college education still matters enormously, and I would never suggest otherwise. Education expands the mind, develops judgment and opens opportunities that extend far beyond the first paycheck someone receives after graduation.

But something uncomfortable is happening between educational attainment and economic reality. The labor market into which today's graduates are entering does not always resemble the labor market their professors, parents and universities prepared them to expect.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that unemployment among recent American college graduates was about 5.7 percent during the first quarter of 2026. More strikingly, 41.5 percent were underemployed, meaning many were working in positions that typically do not require a college degree.

Think about what that number means in human terms. Behind the statistic is a young person who spent four years attending lectures, writing papers, studying for examinations and perhaps accumulating substantial debt, only to discover that the available job does not require the qualification that consumed years of effort and expectation.

We have all encountered versions of that young person. You meet the college graduate working behind a retail counter, delivering food, waiting tables or moving between temporary jobs while trying to find the professional opportunity that was supposed to follow graduation.

There is dignity in all honest work. The problem is not that working in a store, restaurant or warehouse is somehow beneath a college graduate. The problem is that this was often not the economic outcome the student was told to expect when deciding whether to invest years of life and substantial amounts of money in higher education.

When a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a College-Level Job

This is where our conversation about Gen Z often becomes unfair. We ask young people why they are not progressing quickly enough without asking whether the institutions surrounding them have kept their side of the bargain.

Universities are very good at recruiting students. They show prospective students attractive campuses, impressive facilities, successful alumni and inspiring descriptions of what an education can make possible.

But students also deserve transparent information about what happens afterward. What percentage of graduates in a particular program find work related to their studies? How long does that process take? What do they typically earn? Which additional skills do employers increasingly expect?

Those questions should not turn universities into vocational factories. Universities have intellectual and civic purposes that go well beyond supplying workers to employers, and society would be poorer if education were reduced entirely to occupational training.

I am certainly not arguing against studying history, literature, philosophy, classics or the liberal arts. A society needs people capable of writing clearly, understanding history, evaluating evidence, recognizing ethical problems and thinking beyond whatever technology happens to dominate the moment.

The problem arises when we pretend there is no relationship at all between the education people purchase and the economic world they will enter. A young person can value Shakespeare and still need to pay rent.

What Happened to the Computer Science Promise?

Computer science illustrates how quickly the relationship between education and employment can change. For years, American students were told, with considerable justification, that computer science offered one of the clearest pathways into a well-paid professional career.

Technology companies expanded rapidly. Software developers were in extraordinary demand, coding boot camps multiplied, and universities enlarged computer-science programs. Parents who worried about whether their children would find jobs could reasonably view computer science as one of the safer educational bets.

That entry ramp has become less predictable. Recent graduates in computer-related fields have encountered a significantly more difficult market, while entry-level technology opportunities in some major labor markets have contracted sharply.

New York City provides a particularly dramatic example. Research reported in 2026 found that entry-level technology job postings there had fallen 49 percent between 2022 and 2025. That is one metropolitan market rather than the entire United States, but it demonstrates how rapidly a field once considered unusually secure can change.

Artificial intelligence is part of that transformation, but we should resist simplistic explanations. AI is eliminating or reducing some tasks while creating others, and remote work, post-pandemic restructuring, interest rates and changes in corporate hiring have also affected opportunities for inexperienced workers.

The larger point is more important than assigning everything to AI. If one of the most celebrated career pathways of the previous decade can change this quickly, educational institutions cannot assume that curricula designed for yesterday's economy will automatically prepare students for tomorrow's.

AI Is Changing the First Rung of the Career Ladder

There is another problem that deserves more attention. Every profession has traditionally had work that beginners perform while they learn how the profession actually functions.

Junior employees research, draft, calculate, organize, code, prepare presentations and perform repetitive tasks. Those assignments may not be glamorous, but they help inexperienced workers acquire judgment and eventually move into more demanding positions.

AI is increasingly capable of performing some of precisely those tasks. That does not mean entry-level employment is disappearing, but it does mean employers are reconsidering what beginners should do and what skills they should already possess when they arrive.

Deloitte's 2026 global survey captures the uncertainty nicely. Twenty percent of Gen Z respondents said their organizations were scaling back entry-level positions because of AI, while 23 percent reported that AI was helping create new entry-level roles.

That tells us something important. Technology is not simply destroying opportunity or creating opportunity. It is reorganizing opportunity, and education systems need to reorganize with it.

Young people seem to understand this better than we sometimes give them credit for. Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z respondents in the Deloitte survey reported using AI in their daily work, while significant numbers believed their organizations were less prepared for AI-driven change than they themselves were.

Perhaps the generation we accuse of being unprepared is adapting faster than some of the institutions preparing them.

Africa Has an Education-to-Employment Problem Too

While researching my book Stolen Youth: How Kenya's Young Are Reclaiming Their Future, I kept returning to the same contradiction. Kenya has an increasingly educated, digitally connected and ambitious younger generation, yet the economy cannot produce secure formal employment at anything close to the scale required.

Kenya is not unique. Across Africa, governments have expanded access to education, universities have grown and millions more young people have acquired qualifications that their grandparents could scarcely have imagined possessing.

That is an extraordinary achievement. But educational expansion without corresponding economic transformation creates a new problem: educated unemployment and underemployment.

The African Union and International Labour Organization have explicitly identified the mismatch between the skills African economies require and those their education and training systems produce. The problem includes inadequate employer involvement, insufficient work-based learning and training systems that do not respond quickly enough to changing industries.

Meanwhile, millions of young Africans continue entering labor markets that cannot provide enough formal jobs. In that environment, telling young people to become more resilient eventually becomes an evasion of the larger problem.

Resilience cannot create an electrical grid. It cannot construct a manufacturing sector, develop an industrial supply chain or redesign a national education system.

Why Africa Needs Skills for the Economy It Is Building

This is where I believe governments need to become much more deliberate. Countries should begin with a simple question: what kind of economy are we trying to build over the next ten or twenty years?

If a country plans massive investment in renewable energy, where are the technicians who will install, operate and maintain that infrastructure going to come from? If governments want advanced agriculture, manufacturing, digital services and modern transportation systems, who is systematically training the people who will build and maintain them?

Too often, education policy and economic policy operate as though they have only recently been introduced to each other.

Africa needs philosophers, historians, journalists, teachers, lawyers and artists. It also needs electricians, machinists, welders, solar technicians, wind-turbine maintenance specialists, refrigeration technicians, agricultural technologists, industrial mechanics, construction specialists and people capable of maintaining increasingly sophisticated infrastructure.

These are not lesser occupations. Many are highly technical professions requiring considerable knowledge, and their importance will increase as economies modernize.

Technical and vocational education therefore should not be treated as the destination for students who supposedly were not clever enough for university. That attitude is outdated and economically destructive.

A young person who can install and maintain a solar energy system possesses a skill of immediate economic value. So does the technician who can maintain a wind turbine, diagnose an industrial machine, manage a modern irrigation system or repair increasingly computerized equipment.

Solar, Wind and the Jobs We Are Not Training Enough Young People to Do

The renewable-energy transition makes this mismatch particularly difficult to justify. The International Renewable Energy Agency and the International Labour Organization estimate that renewable-energy employment worldwide has already reached at least 16.6 million jobs.

More jobs will emerge as countries expand solar, wind, storage, transmission and other clean-energy infrastructure. But infrastructure does not install or maintain itself.

IRENA has consequently called for renewable-energy competencies to be integrated into educational curricula, including higher education and technical and vocational training. It also argues that governments should connect workforce planning directly to national energy and climate strategies.

That seems obvious, yet it reveals one of the failures at the center of this conversation. Governments frequently announce investments without simultaneously constructing the human-capital pipeline necessary to ensure that their own young people can participate in the industries being created.

Imagine the difference if every major solar investment included a corresponding training plan for local technicians. Imagine if vocational institutions regularly redesigned programs with employers based on skills shortages expected five years from now rather than continuing to offer courses simply because those courses have existed for twenty years.

That is what alignment looks like. Education stops being an isolated ministry activity and becomes part of economic planning.

Universities Cannot Ignore the Labor Market

The same principle applies to universities. I do not want university administrators chasing every temporary employment trend and redesigning entire degrees whenever a new technology appears.

But neither can universities behave as though what happens to students after graduation is somebody else's problem. A university that accepts a young person's money, time and aspirations assumes at least some responsibility for understanding the world into which that student will graduate.

Employers belong in this conversation too. Companies frequently complain that graduates lack the skills they need while investing too little in apprenticeships, mentoring and entry-level development.

Everyone seems to want experienced workers. Somebody has to provide young people with the first experience.

Governments also need much better labor-market information. If a country knows that it will need thousands of renewable-energy technicians, healthcare workers, engineers, construction specialists or digital professionals over the next decade, that information should shape educational capacity today.

The alternative is what we increasingly see now: shortages in some occupations existing alongside unemployed graduates in others.

Stop Blaming Gen Z for a System They Did Not Design

This brings me back to the way we talk about young people. We accuse them of being impatient, demanding, entitled and unwilling to make sacrifices.

Some probably are. Gen Z did not somehow become the first generation in human history without lazy people, unrealistic people or people who make terrible decisions.

But individual shortcomings cannot explain a structural pattern occurring across countries with completely different cultures. When young Americans struggle to translate degrees into secure professional employment while young Africans encounter education systems insufficiently aligned with rapidly changing economies, we should look beyond personality.

Gen Z did not design America's higher-education system. They did not design African vocational systems, determine housing supply, create national industrial policies or decide how quickly universities should adapt curricula to technological change.

They are entering systems constructed largely by people older than themselves, and then they are being judged according to how successfully they navigate those systems.

That does not eliminate personal responsibility. Young people must research career options, develop practical skills, learn continuously, adapt to technology and recognize that no degree can permanently guarantee employment.

But responsibility should travel in both directions. Institutions also have obligations.

When Economic Insecurity Puts Adulthood on Hold

The consequences extend well beyond employment. If education does not lead to reliable earnings, everything else becomes harder.

The apartment waits. Marriage waits. Children wait. Homeownership waits. Retirement saving waits, and sometimes independence itself waits.

This is why Deloitte's finding that 55 percent of Gen Z respondents have postponed major life decisions because of their financial circumstances matters so much. Those decisions are not isolated from one another.

A generation cannot postpone household formation indefinitely without consequences for society. Housing markets, fertility, consumer spending, savings, communities and eventually political attitudes all feel the effects.

Young people also notice when the promises made to them do not match their experience. If we repeatedly tell them education produces opportunity, work produces security and patience produces progress, eventually those propositions have to become visible in their lives.

Otherwise economic disappointment can become institutional distrust.

Society Has to Catch Up With the Generation It Is Lecturing

Perhaps that is the uncomfortable part of this conversation. We keep telling Gen Z to adjust to the world while many of our institutions remain remarkably resistant to adjusting themselves.

Universities need to understand changing labor markets. Vocational institutions need to anticipate future skills rather than preserve obsolete training simply because it is familiar. Employers need to rebuild entry-level pathways, and governments need to connect education, industrial policy, technology and workforce planning far more deliberately.

Young people must adapt too. But adaptation cannot mean endlessly moving the finish line and then criticizing them for not reaching it.

I began thinking about these questions while studying young people in Kenya, but I no longer think of this as primarily a Kenyan problem or even an African one. The American graduate struggling to find professional work and the African graduate entering an economy unable to absorb enough educated workers inhabit very different worlds, yet both are confronting versions of the same institutional failure.

We have educated a generation for a future that changed while they were preparing for it. Now our responsibility is not to tell them that they should have somehow anticipated everything that governments, universities and employers failed to anticipate themselves.

If millions of young people keep saying that adulthood will have to wait until later, perhaps we should stop asking what is wrong with them. We should start asking what happened to the systems that were supposed to help them get there.

Patrick Machayo is the author of Stolen Youth: How Kenya’s Young Are Reclaiming Their Future.The U.S. graduate figures come from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which reports 5.7% unemployment and 41.5% underemployment among recent college graduates in 2026 Q1.  The global workplace and AI figures come from Deloitte’s 2026 survey of 22,595 respondents across 44 countries.  The renewable-energy section is grounded in IRENA/ILO’s estimate of at least 16.6 million renewable-energy jobs worldwide and IRENA’s recommendations for integrating renew