There is a familiar tone in The Washington Post’s recent coverage of young workers struggling to find their footing. It is sympathetic, data-heavy, and ultimately evasive. We are introduced to Menasha Thomas, a fresh Barnard graduate with an urban planning degree, certifications, internships, and side jobs, who has yet to land a full-time role in her field. The article gestures toward demographic shifts, an aging workforce, and employer risk aversion, as though these were natural weather patterns rather than man-made phenomena.
According to a Revelio Labs analysis released Jan. 6, 2026, and cited by The Post, the average age of workers starting new positions has climbed sharply since 2022, reaching over 42 years by 2025. At the same time, the share of workers under 25 entering new roles has fallen from roughly 16 percent in the mid-2010s to single digits today, while hiring among workers 65 and older has risen substantially.
The data are real. What The Washington Post declines to investigate is why the American economy no longer has an on-ramp. Revelio’s analysis shows this shift is not driven by workers moving into inherently older industries, but by aging within the same occupations. Entry-level hiring has weakened, while older workers remain or re-enter roles they once would have vacated. This is not demographic destiny; it is a labor-market failure.
Young Americans are not failing to launch because they lack ambition or resilience. They are navigating an economy that quietly removed the training wheels while insisting they pedal harder. The issue is not simply that employers prefer experience. It is that the systems that once converted inexperience into competence have collapsed, and few institutions appear interested in rebuilding them.
We are told the average new hire is now 42 years old, and that hiring workers under 25 has fallen off a cliff. Employers want candidates who can “hit the ground running,” Revelio chief economist Lisa Simon explained. This language should sound familiar. It mirrors the logic of a labor market optimized for immediacy and risk avoidance. Employers expect visible output, immediate productivity, and minimal errors. The modern labor market increasingly penalizes apprenticeship, gradual development, and human learning curves.
Experience has become a prerequisite rather than a product of work. Revelio’s data show that nearly the entire rise in the average age of new hires comes from aging within the same occupations, not from a shift toward inherently senior roles. This is evidence that experience thresholds have risen even for jobs that once trained newcomers. Entry-level positions now demand mid-career competence, while offering entry-level pay and security.
Older workers are not the villains of this story. Many remain in the workforce because inflation has eroded retirement savings, housing costs have surged, and health care remains tethered to employment. These pressures intensified after the Covid pandemic, as prolonged inflation, higher interest rates, and tighter financial conditions reshaped economic risk. Work has become less a stage of life than a financial life raft. When older workers stay longer and companies stop training, the bottleneck forms at the bottom. Young workers are told to wait indefinitely for a door that rarely opens.
The Washington Post frames this as an unfortunate collision of trends. It is better understood as the outcome of institutional negligence.
Higher education sold young people a promise it could not keep. Students were told that degrees signal readiness, that passion is practical, and that the market will absorb them. Instead, employers increasingly treat diplomas as expensive receipts rather than proof of skill. Graduates respond by stacking certifications, unpaid internships, contract work, and gig labor — often while accumulating debt — in an attempt to approximate experience without ever being allowed to acquire it properly. Credential inflation now collides with experience inflation, producing paralysis.
Artificial intelligence accelerates this dynamic. AI does not replace judgment first; it replaces junior labor. The roles that once taught young people how organizations function — assistants, junior analysts, coordinators, researchers — are the easiest to automate, consolidate, or eliminate. Corporate leaders praise adaptability while quietly removing the very positions that once taught it. Young workers are criticized for lacking experience in an economy that no longer produces opportunities to acquire it.
This creates a paradox. Employers want workers who can lead teams, exercise judgment, and navigate complexity, but refuse to offer environments where those capacities are developed. Leadership becomes something one is expected to arrive with, like a personality trait, rather than something cultivated through responsibility, mentorship, and time.
The labor market has been optimized to select survivors rather than to cultivate successors. Why hire a 22-year-old when a 55-year-old with decades of experience is applying for the same role? Today’s system rewards those who entered earlier versions of the system. It closes ranks behind them while insisting the rules remain fair because they are written down — somewhere.
Young people are told to be flexible, entrepreneurial, and self-directed. But flexibility without stability is not empowerment. A society that cannot integrate its young into meaningful work cannot sustain itself. Work is not merely a paycheck; it is how skills, norms, and institutional memory are transmitted. When that transmission breaks down, frustration metastasizes into disengagement, resentment, and eventually political and cultural instability.
None of this absolves young workers of effort. Gen Z is working relentlessly to find work. They apply to dozens of positions, tailor resumés, pursue certifications, and juggle internships, contract gigs, and service jobs — often unrelated to their degrees — simply to stay afloat. Yet workers under 25 now account for less than one in ten new job entrants, down from roughly one in six a decade ago. Blaming distraction, entitlement, or “phone addiction” is not an adequate explanation for a systemic collapse in entry-level hiring.
When traditional employment pathways narrow, labor does not disappear; it migrates. Some young people turn to monetized digital work, not out of cultural decay or narcissism, but economic necessity. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X are not just social media for Gen Z; they are revenue streams. These platforms function as informal labor markets of last resort, absorbing surplus ambition when formal institutions fail. This is not the core problem. It is a symptom.
If policymakers and employers are serious about reversing this trend, the solution is not moral panic about youth culture or performative concern about resilience. It is rebuilding real economic pathways. That means reinvesting in entry-level roles, paid apprenticeships, and internal training pipelines. It means confronting the distortions created by outsourcing, unchecked automation, and misleading job-growth narratives that obscure who is actually being hired.
An economy that demands experience without providing opportunity is not competitive; it is shortsighted. If young workers are treated as excess risk rather than future capital, the result will not be efficiency, but stagnation. Innovation, civic trust, and long-term stability depend on functional labor-market succession.
Gen Z is not failing to launch. The economy has failed to receive them. America cannot outsource, automate, or credential-inflate its way to continuity. Rebuilding the on-ramps to work is not charity; it is maintenance. A system that cannot reproduce itself through its young is not merely unjust — it is unstable. If the country wants a future, it must start hiring one.
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