Frankie Llerandi, 21, has not landed a single internship in his three years at Michigan State University. He will graduate in the spring with an economics degree and an interest in data analytics, yet true adulthood still seems maddeningly far away. Most of his cousins, deep into their 30s, have not been able to buy house or start a family.

Kira Saiti, a 19-year-old sophomore, is more upset about the state of the wider world than about her own future. Every time she looks at her phone, she sees images of violence and horror, both in the Middle East and closer to home.

“It’s kind of hard to look at that and say, ‘This world is a great place,’” she said.

Julian Bautista, 20, watched his chosen profession of environmental work decimated by Trump administration cuts, a blow that pushed the junior to decide he will leave the United States after graduation to find work in the Netherlands. He regards the country that will remain his home for the next 18 months as a failure of democracy led by what he sees as corrupt politicians.

“Throughout my life, we’ve either stagnated or declined, we haven’t improved,” Bautista said.

For many of their classmates on campus and for young people across the country, the present looks bleak and the future is uncertain at best. That anxiety is fueling a restlessness with a national political system that they worry is no longer capable of improving their lives—or no longer interested in trying to help.

Two years ago, in the 2024 election, that grim economic mood helped Donald Trump win 47% of young voters—a far larger share than Republicans typically capture—according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of the electorate. Since then, anxiety about artificial intelligence and the Iran war has been layered on, energizing a wave of disruptive candidates from the opposite end of the political spectrum who have found a receptive audience among college students.

Llerandi, Saiti, and Bautista are all backing a slate of progressive, antiestablishment Democratic candidates in Michigan who pledge to shake up the status quo. The group includes Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official running for U.S. Senate, and Will Lawrence, a liberal activist seeking to unseat Tom Barrett, the Republican congressman whose swing district includes the university. Both races will be decided in November’s midterm elections, which will determine the balance of power in Congress—and how young voters show up remains one of the cycle’s open questions.

Anxieties about the job market, homeownership, and the milestones of adulthood are widespread across the campus, even among students who are not deeply involved in politics.

“It’s just something to laugh at, but, you know, I really do want a house when I’m older,” said Praveen Amunugama, a 21-year-old biochemistry major who plans to attend graduate school in hopes that the job market improves over the next two years.

His friends feel the same way. “They want to be able to afford things, raise a good family,” he said.

On paper, the picture is not as dire as it feels. Unemployment among Americans aged 22 to 27 stands at 7.2%—above the broader rate of 4.1%, but below levels seen at some other moments of relative economic calm. A 2024 study concluded that Generation Z is on track to be wealthier than millennials, who in turn are wealthier than the generation before them, notwithstanding the lingering sense of economic doom that greeted their own arrival in the workforce during the Great Recession.

Kevin Corinth, the economist who co-authored that study, said he sympathizes with Gen Z’s angst given today’s uncertainties—particularly the prospect of AI reshaping whole industries, along with data showing that young people are waiting longer to leave home and start families.

“For previous generations, if you took certain paths you were likely to succeed, to do better than your parents,” said Corinth, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. For young people today, he acknowledged, that path is far less clear.

Kathryn Edwards, a Texas-based economist, pointed to a jobless rate of 5.6% among recent college graduates—higher than at nearly any other point in recent history apart from the Great Recession. Combined with historically high housing prices and rising costs for essentials such as food and healthcare, she said, that makes for a challenging environment for young people.

“It’s pretty bad for them,” Edwards said, adding that young people are picking up on broader warning signs in the economy. “So many aspects of our current economy, I think young people have gotten right.”

Job hunting itself has taken on a new shape: AI-powered, digital, and conducted almost entirely online, where genuine openings are hard to distinguish from fake ones.

“Think about the amount they get spammed and scammed, and there are tons of fake jobs out there,” said Marla McGraw, assistant dean of career management in Michigan State’s business school. “They’re always coming in here going, ‘Is this real?’”

McGraw spends much of her time trying to buck up disenchanted students. “Our message right now is the job market is tough, but you’re tougher,” she said.

Optimism among young Americans about the job market has plummeted since 2024, according to a Gallup survey released earlier this year, which also found that the gap between how young people view the economy and how their elders do is wider than in almost any other country in the world.

A separate poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that young people are less likely to be engaged in politics, less likely to think voting is important, less likely to be concerned about political violence.

That erosion of faith in traditional political values is what worries Karlee VanAntwerp. The 21-year-old Michigan State senior leads the local chapter of Turning Point, the group for young conservatives whose founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated last year. VanAntwerp has been horrified to see Kirk’s killing repeatedly, and sometimes menacingly, mocked online.

“Gen Z tends to be more extreme with their views,” VanAntwerp said. “It makes it hard to work with people of different political beliefs, because even if you’re in the middle, they assume you’re crazy.”

In her view, that extremity deepens the despair many in her generation feel about real change ever happening.

“One administration does a bunch of stuff, another administration comes in and wipes it all out,” said VanAntwerp, who is also working for Barrett’s campaign. “It feels like we always go in circles. That contributes to the political temperature being so high, because people feel nothing changes.”

Her politics are the polar opposite of those of many liberal students who gathered one recent evening in a classroom to hear Lawrence, Barrett’s Democratic challenger. Yet the mood in the room echoed the same hunger for dramatic change. Lawrence sympathized with the glum feelings of early adulthood and urged the students not to succumb to despair.

“When I was a little younger I wanted to drop out of society, and it was organizing that gave me a path life,” Lawrence said.

After the candidate departed, though, Bautista still sounded on the verge of despair. He described how online influencers he trusts deride Democrats such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York as “mini-mes” because, Bautista contended, they are just watered-down versions of Trump.

“Our leaders are representing us less,” Bautista said. “People are desperate for big stuff.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.