Despite the prevalence of TikTok videos and recent articles detailing stories of individual college graduates struggling to find good jobs, the data tells a different story.

After all, the overall labor market is stronger than it’s been in decades. And Zoomers who recently graduated from college are certainly better off, in most respects, than previous generations of new grads.

“If you’re a recent college grad, right now things aren’t booming with opportunities like they were a couple years ago,” says Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at Indeed Hiring Lab. “But it’s still really a relatively solid labor market. And hopefully, fingers crossed, the market stays strong for a couple years. And that gives you more opportunity to find a job as opposed to hanging your hat for the first six months after you graduate.”

When you compare the labor markets faced by Zoomers with previous generations, recent college grads now are better off than their older counterparts: Zoomer grads are earning much higher salaries today than Gen X did in the mid-1990s. Inflation may eat away at Gen Z’s high wages, but it doesn’t touch the stagflation of the 1970s and 1980s that baby boomer college graduates encountered.

The short recession that Gen Z experienced at the start of the pandemic is certainly no Great Recession, which technically lasted less than two years, but was followed by several years of tepid economic growth. That period stymied recent millennial graduates during crucial early employment years and is likely to negatively impact their lifetime earnings.

“It’s not just the year that you graduate,” says Bunker. “Your first years out probably make the most difference because that’s when you’re getting your foot on the career ladder.”

Despite the fact that the oldest cohort of Zoomers — 2020 grads — entered a job market with the highest unemployment rate in the modern era, that recession lasted just two months. And what followed was one of the strongest economic bounce backs ever.

The nation’s unemployment rate has hovered between 3.4% and 4% since December 2021. The current rate, 4.1%, remains among the lowest in 50 years, which means Zoomer college graduates have strong prospects for getting jobs right out of school and moving up the career ladder.

Bunker says the job market has cooled compared with two years ago. There is far less competition among employers than in 2022, which means fewer opportunities, according to Bunker. But it’s not all that dramatic in the broader context.

“If we wind the clock a little bit more and compare to what we saw pre-pandemic, it’s around those levels,” Bunker says. He adds that when compared with previous cohorts of graduates, job opportunities are roughly in line with those enjoyed by millennials who completed college in the early 2000s.

Labor data shows that underemployment — the rate of those with college degrees who are working jobs that don’t require degrees — has always been higher among recent graduates compared with all bachelor’s degree holders.