For millennials, the White House's monthly job reports haven't contained anything positive in a long while.

The same can be said of the latest report released Friday that showed employers added 288,000 jobs in April and that last month saw unemployment fall to 6.3%.

Both those numbers are much better than what was expected—but they're hollow. The unemployment rate dipped primarily because many people gave up trying to find a job, according to experts, which is not a trend the White House wants to see. Millennials, the generation born roughly from the early 1980s to the early 2000s, make up a significant chunk of the group no longer trying to find work.

The unemployment rate for anyone age 18-29 officially stood at 9.1% as of the April jobs report, according to Generation Opportunity, a national organization with libertarian ties that represents millennials. That number is a bit misleading, though, as the organization points out. If the data included millennials who stopped looking for a job, unemployment in that age group would be 15.5%.

That's not much better than the 16.1% of young people without jobs in April 2013, which highlights the agonizingly slow rate at which the United States economy is recovering.

Young people are always disproportionately affected by terrible job conditions, according to experts. People with job experience have connections that allow them to find other jobs more than a person looking for their first gig. But there are two employment issues that the Great Recession has exacerbated in a way that could make the economic plight of millennials worse than any preceding generation.

First, of the roughly 6.2 million Americans who are eligible for employment but not seeking it, 1.4 million of them are under the age of 25, roughly one quarter of the total.

“The one thing that is troubling that I saw with young workers is this lack of improvement in the share of young workers who are not employed and not enrolled in school," Heidi Shierholz, labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told Mashable.

This means that those 1.4 million either can't afford a higher education, can't find a job that would help pay for higher education, or can't find a job altogether. In this case, the downtrodden economy has combined with the high cost of college to gut opportunities from a disproportionate swath of millennials.

Second, experts say that difficulty finding a job now is going to have lasting effects on the lives of millennials in a way that economists say other generations—except anyone trying to join the labor force in the early 1980s—likely avoided. Young people have not been able to "wait out" the bad economy in college or at a master's program. The economy has simply been in a rough place for too long.

“When young people graduate from high school or college into a bad labor market, that has very important implications for salary and for advancement," John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Mashable. “People are having that initial decade of relatively rapid wage growth postponed or lost altogether.”

When millennials pick up jobs here and there to get by because they can't find anything else, they are delaying the potential wage gains that come with something more in line with a long-term career.

And for anyone with college loans, lacking a steady salary can be devastating. A study on job prospects for young people conducted by Shierholz and two others at the Economic Policy Institute found that the price of going to college has increased much more quickly than median family income, meaning students are often forced to pay for their education with loans. When those students transition into a bad economy, they might not have the money to pay off their debt.

One potential way to avoid that is trying to get a job related to science, technology, engineering or math. A recent report produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that anyone with a STEM job earns, on average, 1.7 times the national average. The good news for young people is that jobs in the 'T' portion of that acronym are growing and not likely to go anywhere. The information technology sector is taking off, as is software engineering, and cities far outside of Silicon Valley are trying to bolster their number of tech jobs.

But for people without any of those specific skills, the prospect of getting an early jump on a career looks bleak.

“The best bet is you get back on the trajectory that you would have been on," Shierholz said. "So you have 15 years of reduced earnings, so your lifetime earnings will be lower.”

That is, perhaps, the best news for millennials. Though the job market is rough right now, they can reasonably hope that the initial trouble will not translate to later success.

But the news is still far from rosy.

“By and large, people will get back on the trajectory that they would have been on," Shierholz said. "But it can take a long time. It can take 15 years. And you don’t make up those earnings—ever.”