Julia Bognar was thrilled to be graduating this spring with a degree in graphic design from Arizona State University.

But when it came time to find a job, she stumbled. U-Haul rejected her application for a typesetting role. Most companies never responded.

As her final days of college approached, Ms. Bognar, 22, began wondering if any businesses were hiring at all.

“I believe that I would be a great asset to any team that would hire me,” she said. “What’s frustrating is trying to convey that to companies.”

Her mother knows the feeling.

Jennifer Bognar was one of a dozen college seniors who spoke to The New York Times for an article in April 1991 about “the bleakest job market in a decade or more” for young graduates. A relatively mild recession, fueled by higher oil prices brought on by the Persian Gulf war, had jettisoned roughly 1.5 million jobs from the U.S. economy and intensified competition for entry-level positions.

Jennifer Bognar, then a 22-year-old political science and history major at Rutgers University in New Jersey, spent her spring break in Washington, D.C., knocking on doors asking if anyone had a job opening.

“I just can’t find anything out there,” she said at the time.

With young degree-holders today similarly desperate for jobs, The Times checked back in with three of the people featured in the article to see how graduating into a tough job market affected them.

Rather than floundering, they discovered fulfilling, if occasionally unexpected, careers. One has worked all over the world. Another is a communications executive at a pharmaceutical company. A third works in fund-raising at a university.

They have something else in common, too: They now have their own children who are going through the same thing.

Sharon Dilling started looking for a job midway through her senior year at Rutgers in 1991. She had switched from a major in theater to journalism after her father questioned her career prospects.

“I was like, this is great because newspapers will be around forever,” she said.

A year later, the outlook was less promising. Newspapers were laying off workers or closing, and reporter positions were drying up.

Back then, job seekers paged through notebooks with listings at their career centers and perused classified ads to find open positions. They printed résumés on special paper and sent applications by mail.

Ms. Dilling, now 57, remembers scouring newspapers on Sundays for hiring announcements and trying to network her way into a job, without success. Demoralized and anxious to earn money after graduation, she accepted a job as a secretary at Rutgers.

“It wasn’t what I wanted to do,” she said.

Yet that first job led to a series of roles in communications and public affairs, including at local hospitals. She is now a communications executive at a global pharmaceutical company, punctuating a career she would never have predicted during the depths of her job search.

“You don’t have the luxury of sitting down and feeling sorry for yourself,” she said. “You’ve got to keep going.”

She hopes her advice — be adaptable, be resilient — will help her son.

Dan Dilling, 23, graduated last year from the College of New Jersey with a degree in industrial organizational psychology. Unable to find a full-time job, he interned at a pharmaceutical company nearby until December.

To keep busy, he is working in the tools department at a Home Depot near his parents’ house in East Windsor, N.J. He plans to start a master’s program in analytics in the fall.

At Arizona State, Julia Bognar honed her creativity and burnished her leadership credentials as president of the women’s rugby team.

Enamored with the warm Southwestern weather and confident she would land a job as a graphic designer, she lined up an apartment in downtown Phoenix for after graduation.

A host of challenges is working against her.

Economists have found that workers who graduate from college during periods of lousy hiring contend with long-term negative effects on their wages and employment. Some analysts have also estimated that graphic design is among the industries likely to lose jobs because of artificial intelligence.

The rise of A.I. is “definitely scary,” Ms. Bognar said, though she believes that anyone who thinks A.I. can replace graphic designers is mistaken.

“People are using A.I., and it’s obvious,” she said. “What we bring to the table is something a little intangible.”

Yet while her job search has been frustrating and stressful, she is optimistic that something will work out — in part because it did for her mother.

Jennifer Bognar, who is now 57 and lives in East Brunswick, N.J., never landed a job with a government agency or organization in Washington, as she had hoped. But shortly after the 1991 Times article was published, the district manager at a Social Security Administration field office expressed interest in interviewing her for a position.

“I put that interview suit back on, went downtown with my résumé and I got the job,” she said.

She went to graduate school to study arts administration and now works in fund-raising at Rutgers.

She sends her daughter job listings and encourages her to stay nimble and resourceful.

Julia Bognar is heeding her mother’s advice. As she waits for a full-time job to fall into place, she is considering taking a job at a coffee shop or as a waitress.

“She kind of gave me that perspective of, just take what you can get for now,” Julia Bognar said. “I’m like, yeah, I guess I don’t have to have it completely figured out.”

‘It does get better’

Glen Lockwood did not have it figured out.

In his senior year as a member of the class of 1991, he applied for the banking and consulting jobs preferred by certain soon-to-be graduates of Princeton University.

The recession shattered his vision.

“The standard career routes and sending in résumés just weren’t working,” said Mr. Lockwood, who is now 57.

A professor suggested he apply to a military academy in France. While there, he declined a parachuting excursion in Morocco with friends, staying behind because he was supposed to be organizing a marketing seminar that week as part of an internship with a computer company.

He was miserable and vowed not to let a once-in-a-lifetime experience pass him by again.

A month later, he received a fax from someone in Russia. Was he interested in joining a business that involved digging for woolly mammoth ivory in Siberia?

Mr. Lockwood said yes.

The woolly mammoth venture was a flop, but Mr. Lockwood met people in Russia involved in the fledgling tourism business. That led to his next job running rafting, hiking and helicopter tours for travelers eager to explore a Russia that was newly opened to the West. He also met a Russian woman who became his wife.

Over the next decades, Mr. Lockwood worked all over the world in a variety of jobs: as a contractor to the U.S. military in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan and managing oil contractors in Russia and South Korea.

He worked in Zambia on a project to provide drinking water to rural villages and in Mozambique to construct and run a training center for small businesses. In 2023, he moved to Ukraine to help rebuild damaged schools. He now lives in Moldova.

“This is all because I didn’t get a job with Price Waterhouse,” he said.

Naturally, when his daughter, Anita Lockwood, started thinking about college, she wanted to study international relations.

Ms. Lockwood, 21, attends the Australian National University in Canberra and aims to work in humanitarian aid.

But U.S. federal funding cuts have limited those opportunities. Jobs in Australia are difficult to come by, especially for foreigners. A listing for a job at a pub near the university received over 1,000 applicants, she said.

With her graduation coming up in December, she is mulling a second degree in nursing to improve her chances of getting a job.

Mr. Lockwood wonders if he led his daughter down a fruitless academic path. He has encouraged her to apply to as many jobs as she can and to have a backup plan.

He also views any setback as an opportunity.

“His main advice to me so far has been pretty much to persevere,” Ms. Lockwood said.

“As difficult as it is, it does get better,” he tells her.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.