One subset of the population that’s having a tough time in the labor market is young adults, especially those born between 1997 and 2012 — members of Generation Z.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for February, the unemployment rate for 20-to-24-year-olds was 8.3%, more than double overall U.S. joblessness. But why is Gen Z having such a hard time breaking in?

Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen attributes it largely to high interest rates, which he said have frozen many parts of the economy. “So, if you’re a company, you might say, well, things aren’t bad enough for me to have to lay people off, but they’re not good enough to make me hire either.”

Economic uncertainty is also a factor in constraining hiring, Sen said.

He joined “Marketplace” host Kimberly Adams to discuss his piece on Gen Z’s job frustration and what it says about the broader economy. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kimberly Adams: So how does Generation Z view this economy?

Conor Sen: Very poorly. We saw that in November’s elections, and they’ve had a reason to feel negative because they’re experiencing not just the same inflation and high interest rates that everybody else has been having to deal with over the past couple years, but also because we’re in this labor market best characterized as low hiring, low firing. If you’re 40 or 50, you might care more about the low firing part. It’s like, OK, I have a job. Layoffs aren’t that high. I’m safe. But if you’re in your early 20s, what really matters to you is that hiring rate because you’re entering the workforce, trying to move up in your career. And right now, that’s just very difficult.

Adams: So you write that unemployment rates are higher for younger workers right now. But is there anything else to suggest that Gen Z is worse off than, you know, other generations when they first entered the workforce?

Sen: Higher housing costs and interest rates are probably the big ones. I would characterize myself as an elder millennial. So, in the late 2000s, early 2010s we had it pretty tough too on the job market side, but at least interest rates were low and rents were relatively low — or at least they hadn’t gone up like crazy yet — and housing prices were too. Whereas now Gen Z has both the low hiring, the tough labor market, plus high costs, so they’re getting squeezed on both sides.

Adams: What in particular makes this labor market so hard for Gen Z to break into?

Sen: It’s because interest rates are so high as the Fed seeks to control inflation, which means that a lot of parts of the economy are frozen and waiting for lower rates or something to pick up. And so if you’re a company, you might say, well, things aren’t bad enough for me to have to lay people off, but they’re not good enough to make me hire either. If you’re 21 or 22 looking to get hired, there’s just not a lot of demand for you right now. You have the federal government that’s been cutting back, and there’s no reason to think they’re going to be hiring anytime soon. Universities are cutting back. And also, there’s the looming threat of [artificial intelligence] and what that means for workers, especially in white-collar sectors. So maybe companies that ordinarily would have hired might say, well, let’s try to figure out a way to do this with AI, rather than taking on a 20-something-year-old.

Adams: Now, you and I are both elder millennials, and we entered the workforce during a pretty tough economic period. People found a way around that. But what are the long-term consequences for this group of not being able to find a job right away?

Sen: So to your point, I think because many of us went through this 10 or 15 years ago, it feels like it’s kind of a bad deja vu of knowing that if you don’t move up in your career when you’re young, it tends to have long-term consequences on your lifetime earning potential. You get more into debt. You’re not saving, you’re not building networks and you’re not getting experience. And so it really is a big setback, and it’s hard to know exactly right now what makes things get better, certainly this year. I think corporate America came into the year with a lot of optimism about a maybe deregulation or tax cut agenda that would be good for growth, and instead, it feels like it’s uncertainty and tariffs instead. And so there’s not really a reason to think that hiring will pick up this year. And so now you’re already thinking about 2026 and it’s only early April. So if somebody were 22 and said, what should I do? It’s hard to say, well, wait for next year, but that kind of feels the story for hiring managers right now.

Adams: You point out in your piece that when the job market for young workers has looked like this in the past, it’s a bit of a warning sign for the broader economy. Why is that?

Sen: Well, typically, young people just sort of feel the trends in the labor market more significantly. Again, most people in their midcareer aren’t switching jobs as much, and they’re kind of more settled. But if you’re young, it’s often kind of last hired, first fired. And so, if companies aren’t hiring and if they are trying to lay people off, they might be cutting their youngest, least experienced workers who aren’t yet providing a lot of value to their companies. And so if that’s the kind of decision that companies are making, it might say, well, we’re trimming a little bit now, but if things get worse, we’ll have to do bigger cuts later. So, if we’re in that phase of trimming the young people now, you worry what would the next leg down look like for workers more generally.