The National Society of High School Scholars’ 2024 Career Survey is out. Colleges and universities would be wise to pick up what Gen Z is laying down here. The survey questioned more than 10,000 “high achieving” high school and college students, as well as recent college graduates. Subjects of interest included education, career expectations, employers, preferred colleges and universities, and even artificial intelligence.
If your marketing schtick involves chasing your dreams, rethink that. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of Gen Z respondents have some serious doubts that they can make enough money to get by if they go all in on pursuing their passions. To boot, more than half (54%) are pretty sure that passion pursuit will goof up their work-life balance, and 52% would trade their passion(s) for more job stability.
You may not really grasp Gen Z all that well, but they’re not about starving their way through young adulthood, and they don’t have much appreciation for unstable careers. High-wage, high demand jobs have a lot of interest for this demographic. Colleges and universities that don’t address that are likely to end up with shrinking enrollments.
That’s not to say that Gen Z isn’t passionate. They are quite passionate about politics, social causes, and the environment. If you want to catch a young adult’s academic attention, try offering programs in clean and sustainable energy, and environmental care. They don’t have a problem believing the science about climate change, and they’re so tired of waiting for the adults in the room to do something that they have, in fact, become the adults in the room.
Respondents’ top three academic major choices are engineering, healthcare, and science. Medicine and business round out the top five. Only 10% say they want to enter a technology field.
Gen Z has ideas about what they want to do for a living
Female respondents overwhelmingly preferred to pursue careers in medicine and health or health related fields, while male respondents preferred engineering and computer science.
Gen Z has thoughts about what they expect from their employers, too. Nearly 9 out of 10 respondents said they expected their employment to help them build the skills they need to advance their careers. Interestingly, more than half (52%) said they wanted an easy commute. Surprisingly, nearly four out of ten Gen Z respondents said they would prefer to work for a large corporation.
Their number one preferred employer? Google? Amazon? Disney? Nope, nope, and nope. St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital was the employer survey respondents most often named as the place they’d most like to work. The Mayo Clinic, Health Care Services Corp, and their local hospital snagged the top 4 spots. Rounding out the top 5 was the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Spotify, which ranked #3 in 2022, fell down a couple of flights of stairs in 2024, landing at a bruising #26. Ouch.
So, developing new health and medicine-related programs, and strengthening engineering and computer science programs would likely have a lot of appeal to Gen Z, as would environmental programs. But they don’t intend to work for free and they’re not interested in changing careers or jobs often, so any new programs should help them score a living wage salary in a relatively stable field.
Community colleges have their work cut out for them. Gen Z already has serious doubts that they can make enough money to survive, so a sub-$40K salary is not going to have much – if any – appeal. Building programs that will enable students to access a high-wage job in a high-demand field is the best way to attract the attention of Gen Z students.
Photo Credit: artistmac , via Flickr
