By LOUIS UCHITELLE

GRAFTON, Massachusetts - The daily routine seldom varied for Scott Nicholson, a 24-year-old unemployed graduate of Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, where he was the winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence. He spent his mornings at his parent’s house where he lived searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a resume and cover letter - four or five a week, week after week.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job. Rather than waste early years in dead-end work, he reasoned, he would hold out for a corporate position that would draw on his college training and put him, as he sees it, on the bottom rungs of a career ladder.

“The conversation I’m going to have with my parents now that I’ve turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job,” he said at the time. He was braced for the conversation with his father.

While Scott Nicholson viewed the Hanover job as likely to stunt his career, David Nicholson, 57, accustomed to better times and easier mobility, viewed it as an opportunity. Once in the door, the father has insisted to his son, opportunities will present themselves - as they did in the father’s rise over 35 years to general manager of a manufacturing company.

“You maneuvered and you did not worry what the maneuvering would lead to,” the father said. “You knew it would lead to something good.”

Complicating the generational divide, Scott’s grandfather, William S. Nicholson, a World War II veteran and a retired stockbroker, has watched what he described as America’s once mighty economic engine losing its pre-eminence . The grandfather has encouraged his unemployed grandson to go abroad - to “Go West,” so to speak.

“I don’t think I fully understood the severity of the situation I had graduated into,” Scott said, speaking in effect for an age group - the so-called millennials, 18 to 29 - whose unemployment rate of nearly 14 percent approaches the levels of that group in the Great Depression. And then he veered into the optimism that, polls show, is perhaps perversely, characteristic of millennials today.

But for young adults, the prospects in the workplace, even for the collegeeducated, have rarely been so bleak. Apart from the 14 percent who are unemployed and seeking work, as Scott Nicholson is, 23 percent are not even seeking a job, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The total, 37 percent, is the highest in more than three decades and a rate reminiscent of the 1930s.

The college-educated are better off. But nearly 17 percent are either unemployed or not seeking work, a record level (some are in graduate school). The unemployment rate for collegeeducated young adults, 5.5 percent, is nearly double what it was on the eve of the Great Recession, in 2007, and the highest level - by almost two percentage points - since the bureau started to keep records in 1994 for those with at least four years of college.

So far, Scott Nicholson is a stranger to the triumphal stories that his father and grandfather tell of their working lives. They said it was connections more than perseverance that got them started - the father in 1976 when a friend who had just opened a factory hired him, and the grandfather in 1946 through an Army buddy whose fatherin- law owned a nearby brokerage firm and needed another stockbroker.

From these accidental starts, careers unfolded and lasted. David Nicholson, now the general manager of a company that makes tools, is still in manufacturing. William Nicholson spent the next 48 years, until his retirement, as a stock broker.

Many hard-pressed millennials are falling back on their parents, as Scott Nicholson has. In 2008, the first year of the recession, the percentage of the population living in households in which at least two generations were present rose nearly a percentage point, to 16 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. The high point, 24.7 percent, came in 1940, as the Depression ended, and the low point, 12 percent, in 1980.

Before the recession, Scott’s brother, David Jr., 26, did land a good job at a Boston insurance company, three years ago. He is earning $75,000 - a sum now beyond Scott’s reach.

Early last month Scott moved in with his brother, with his parents paying Scott’s share of the $2,000-amonth rent until the lease expires on August 31.

And if Scott does not have a job by then? “I’ll do something temporary; I won’t go back home,” he said.