N.J. left the COVID generation behind. It’s not too late to save them.

Photo by Matthew Hatcher for NJ.com

By Enrique Lavín

Esther Lendore organized résumé workshops at Rowan University. She brought in financial advisers and pitched a networking event to connect classmates with employers.

Six months before graduation, she still didn’t have an internship, and she was calling her parents in tears.

“I was crying my eyes out,” she told me. “I didn’t realize how badly I was struggling until then. I thought, ‘I’m so far behind.’ That was not the person I had been in high school. I had held at least two jobs since I was 16.”

A proud Gen Zer, Lendore finished high school in 2020. Her class never experienced its last day of school or the milestones associated with it. In college, largely virtual for her two years, her class lost internships, campus job opportunities and the mentors who usually find you by accident.

The new normal still felt abnormal after they entered the workforce. They competed in a brutal job market only to land in remote offices, cut off from colleagues who might show them the ropes.

There’s no other way of saying it: The COVID generation was collateral damage. Once the emergency passed, nobody went back to check on it.

It’s not too late to help them.

Lendore struggled to move out of her parents’ home after COVID. She didn’t know her college offered emergency aid.

“The average adult thinks that is a one size fits all,” she told this Gen Xer. “You’re gonna go to college, you’re gonna get a degree, you’re going to work in that degree and then your life is all for you, right?

“That is not the case,” she went on to say.

Lendore graduated from Rowan University as the urgency of pandemic waned. She now works as a legislative aide to state Assemblyman Cody Miller, a Democrat representing parts of South Jersey.

“We are figuring out how to be innovative with numerous limitations, and that was part of the beauty, but also the angst of going through this pandemic,” Lendore said.

She is one of the young adults, now in their 20s, who finished high school or college between 2020 and 2024. They are members of Gen Z, whose early adult lives were defined in the global pandemic and who by many measures was left behind.

After all, young people are resilient, right?

For the past few months, NJ.com and The Star-Ledger have been asking what happened to that COVID generation and whether New Jersey has helped it recover.

I started with seven young staffers in our own newsroom. I asked whether they felt like collateral damage. All of them said yes.

I expected to hear stories about missed proms and attending Zoom classes while in their pajamas. They didn’t want to talk about that.

I was genuinely astonished by what I was hearing. They wanted to share how internships disappeared and the regret of not meeting mentors they expected to meet in college. And then there’s the jobs that began on a company laptop in their childhood bedroom.

They called COVID an accelerant for problems that were already there, especially anxiety and their lives lived through the glow of their phone screen. Some said older colleagues see their generation as lazy or disengaged.

A few joked that Gen Z has adopted “grandma lifestyles,” staying home and avoiding risk.

Most made sure to point out it wasn’t just the pandemic they had to navigate, the country at the time was also going through a bitter racial reckoning after the George Floyd murder.

Then I took their concerns to people who study and think deeply about this generation. Each of them described the same problem: the handoff from adolescence to adulthood broke down, and nobody fully grasps the scope of the problem.

New Jersey students still haven’t fully recovered academically from the pandemic. The latest state tests show proficiency in English and math remains below pre-pandemic levels, while science has only recently edged above its 2019 mark.

And, most poignantly, too few seem especially concerned about fixing what the pandemic broke.

They lost the launch

Dr. Heidi Hutman directs clinical training for the clinical psychology doctoral program at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology.

She says this generation lost the informal moments that teach people how work actually works. Remote school and remote jobs kept the basic tasks going. What vanished were the water-cooler chats and the quick stop at a colleague’s office. They lament missing lunch conversations that could turn into a collaboration.

“This generation doesn’t have a template for what it looks like to engage socially in a professional context,” said Hutman, who keeps a small private practice where she works with patients on life transitions and generational trauma.

Hutman also describes a confidence paradox. Young adults learned the polished version of life online, she said.

“Before the finalized polished version of the YouTube video, or the TikTok that you consume, there were 300 takes of the person falling on their face first,” she said. So a task looks easy, she told me, “until it comes to doing the thing in real life — and boom! imposter syndrome hits.”

And this is a big one that the Gen Zers told me early on: Many also missed the unwritten lessons of the workplace, like how to shake hands with confidence and how to dress professionally.

Lisa Dougherty watched those losses pile up on campus.

She’s spent more than 25 years in higher education. She joined Hudson County Community College in 2016 as dean of enrollment and led student affairs and enrollment from 2019 until she became interim president in June. Her teams built several resources for students, including a student success program and its mental health counseling and wellness center.

Students attending college from home during the pandemic missed internships, co-ops, work-study jobs, club leadership roles and, often, their regular part-time jobs, Dougherty said. “They were relying solely on their classroom experience.”

Five years later, many of them are entering hybrid or fully remote workplaces. That has made it harder to find the mentors most of us found by accident — or proximity, really.

“A brand new graduate coming out of school really needs that in-person mentorship,” Dougherty said, echoing other experts.

And employers have noticed, she said, citing research from the National Assn. of Colleges and Employers that shows graduates rated themselves 83% competent in the core career skills. Employers rated them at 67%.

The biggest gaps involved communication, teamwork and critical thinking. The job market has also gotten tougher. Entry-level graduates now often compete with applicants who have two to five years of experience, she said, and AI is one reason those openings are shrinking.

“There seems to be a real dissonance on how prepared students feel they are for the workforce, or graduates, and how employers feel they are prepared,” she said. “They’re just not getting that as much as they did, pre-pandemic.”

Lonelier than hopeful

Erin Andrews, a licensed mental health counselor, is vice president of clinical affairs at Uwill, which provides free teletherapy to students at New Jersey colleges through a state partnership. In the company’s national survey, 56% of college seniors said they had felt anxious in the previous 30 days. Their biggest stressors were career uncertainty, money and academics.

“What’s next is the thing that’s keeping them up at night,” Andrews said.

Her therapists are seeing a shift in what students need, she told me.

The students coming up behind them are doing worse. Only 41% of rising high school seniors described their mental health as good or very good. More of them said they felt lonely than hopeful about the future.

“The loneliness is the one that haunts me,” Andrews said.

It’s a sentiment a lot of her therapists have picked up on.

“They have said, ‘this generation of students that I’m serving looks different.’ The way that they’re describing things is different. The goals that we have are things that I wouldn’t have assumed a college student would need,” she said.

More of them come to therapy to learn skills earlier generations picked up without trying: making small talk, asking a classmate about homework, walking into a club meeting. Some therapy sessions, Andrews said, become career coaching.

“A lot of that boils down to in COVID,” Andrews told me in a separate interview. “When they were not in school, they were not able to acquire these skills naturally. All of their communication was happening over the phone. And we didn’t understand the cost that that would have on them at the time.”

The cost of using social media came up in every interview, including my summer listening session where the Gen Zers told me they’ve seen what it’s done to them — now they’re worried what it’s doing to the generation behind them.

Lendore didn’t hesitate when I asked whether young people think phones are part of the problem.

“I don’t know any young person who would say that’s not the case,” she said.

Miller, the Assembly representative, has already acted on that concern.

He sponsored the Assembly version of the bill with state Sen. Paul Moriarty requiring every New Jersey school district to restrict student phone use, which Gov. Phil Murphy signed in January before he turned over Drumthwacket to Gov. Mikie Sherrill. The rules took effect this school year, and so far, there has not been widespread pushback.

Miller, who serves on the Assembly’s Higher Education Committee and works in higher education, said educators told him they couldn’t get students to focus or finish assignments. He also sponsored A4013, part of a three-bill package led by Assemblywoman Andrea Katz, who serves Atlantic and Burlington counties, that would require social media platforms to display mental health warnings and alert users to signs of addictive use.

A companion bill in the package would create a research center at a four-year public college to study how social media affects young people.

The warnings, Miller said, would let the state notify users “if they’re spending too much time on social media.”

Two pandemics at once

The pandemic stressed some young people more than others. Lendore said college is often how young people of color leave neighborhoods that limit them and define themselves somewhere new. COVID kept many of them home far longer than they’d planned.

“By the time we got to the table, the food was gone,” she said of internships and work opportunities. “We were leaving with the scraps.”

Hutman described young people of color living through “multiple pandemics” at once. They were isolated at home, with trauma and injustice of the George Floyd murder served up to them regularly by a social media algorithm from which they can’t escape.

Andrews said Uwill is seeing more students of color seek help and report more acute symptoms than their white peers.

Dougherty said those students were dealing with remote learning, isolation and, in some cases, a lack of technology while the country reckoned with Floyd’s murder.

“They were extremely disadvantaged by that,” the college president said. “They were, by and large, really affected more negatively than their white counterparts, for sure.”

Miller, who grew up in a first-generation, low- to moderate-income family, said students with fewer resources couldn’t buy the tutoring and support that wealthier families could.

Who dropped the ball

Could we all have done more? That’s the question I kept thinking about after my conversations. There’s plenty of blame to go around — and, certainly at our company we had to take a hard look in the mirror after hearing from our younger colleagues.

Colleges, employers, the state and federal governments — we all seemed to be checking a box. Lendore told me her university sent her and her cohort a survey asking whether she was employed, and roughly what she made. And that was it.

“It felt as though they were checking a box,” she said.

Employers filled entry-level jobs with people who already had experience. Washington and Trenton, meanwhile, sent emergency money and moved one.

“That [money] was not a job. It was not sustainable. It was not long-term assistance,” Lendore said.

Some of her classmates needed an extra year or two to finish college while juggling mental health struggles as well as tuition. Others earned degrees and now work jobs that have nothing to do with them. And still others who hold down several jobs or have left New Jersey for better prospects.

“They were not students who failed to network,” she told me. “They were highly active students.”

This sentiment tracked with what the young staffers in our company said during my listening session.

One staffer told me: “In all of my jobs out of college, I was either partly or fully remote. While it is interesting to face challenges and make decisions for myself, it does feel like I lost the ‘rookie in the room’ experience, learning from watching and making mistakes in front of peers.”

Another said: “I feel like I was breadcrumbed into professional life. I lost opportunities for internships and workplace experience during COVID. Now I feel pressure to perform like a fully formed professional even though I’m still learning.”

Leadership in our workplace heard this and has leaned in on making sure our mentorship program remains active, establishing routine in-office work days and doing more frequent check-ins with our most junior team members.

What New Jersey owes them

Some solutions already exist. New Jersey’s partnership with Uwill has delivered more than 130,000 therapy sessions to more than 25,000 students since 2023, and the state renewed it through the 2026-27 academic year.

Andrews said students respond best to care built around concrete skills and goals.

Hutman wants employers to treat a new hire’s first year like an advanced internship, with training wheels, safety nets and mentors assigned from the start.

Dougherty points to stackable credentials, which are short-term programs in fields like the trades or AI that can later count toward a degree. She’d also like the state to make it cheaper for young adults who left college during the pandemic to go back, and to give employers incentives to offer them internships, co-ops and part-time jobs.

Miller says New Jersey has plenty of resources, including community colleges, four-year schools, county vocational schools and union apprenticeships. The trouble is that the pieces don’t connect.

“We have the tools,” he said. “We don’t have the system.”

As a result of our conversation and what he was learning about this project, Miller began developing legislation he calls “New Jersey Bridge to Opportunity.”

It would give anyone whose education or career was disrupted by the pandemic access to a navigator who’d connect them to jobs, training, college courses, resume help and soft-skills coaching.

“There’s not a point person that somebody can go to right now to get the help that they need,” he said.

I’ll admit, I was one of the people from an older generation who didn’t get what Gen Z were up against. Now I do.

Let’s help them ASAP.

Once it’s introduced, pass Miller’s bill, which will need funding and a way to measure results. It’ll also need to reach the young adults who’ve drifted farthest from school and work, since they’re the least likely to go looking for help on their own.

“We shouldn’t assume that because the pandemic ended, the impact ended too,” Miller said.

Lendore put it more bluntly. “The damage is done,” she said. “But we can secure the future.”