How long are these people going to keep pretending that the elephant isn't in the room with them?
The upheaval in the early career job market has caught higher education flat-footed. Colleges have long had an uneasy relationship with their unofficial role as vocational pipelines. When generative AI burst onto campuses in 2022, many administrators and faculty saw it primarily as a threat to learning — the world’s greatest cheating tool. Professors resurrected blue books for in-classroom exams and demanded that AI tools added to software be blocked in their classes.
Only now are colleges realizing that the implications of AI are much greater and are already outrunning their institutional ability to respond. As schools struggle to update their curricula and classroom policies, they also confront a deeper problem: the suddenly enormous gap between what they say a degree is for and what the labor market now demands. In that mismatch, students are left to absorb the risk. Alina McMahon and millions of other Gen-Zers like her are caught in a muddled in-between moment: colleges only just beginning to think about how to adapt and redefine their mission in the post-AI world, and a job market that’s changing much, much faster.
What feels like a sudden, unexpected dilemma for Gen-Z graduates has only been made worse by several structural changes across higher education over the past decade.
First, a huge surge of undergraduates shifted to majoring in fields now being upended by AI. In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008, a long-running survey of college freshmen by UCLA found students much more focused on going to college to “get a better job” than on what they previously wanted most: to learn more about things that interested them. That new mind-set showed up in what they picked as a major in college. Between 2010 and 2020, fields such as philosophy, history, and English saw a big drop in popularity. The latter two majors fell by one-third in that ten-year period while overall humanities enrollment declined by almost a fifth. Where did they go? A lot pivoted to computer science and related fields.
Last year, the number of students majoring in comp-sci alone topped 170,000 — more than double the number from 2014, even as overall undergraduate enrollment fell. Many were responding to a steady drumbeat of advice from groups like Code.org and Girls Who Code, amplified by tech celebrities such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and echoed by presidents from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, all urging young people to learn computer programming. Now, ironically, many of those same students are struggling to find work, as the entry-level positions they are seeking tend to be ones that are among the most affected by AI. College graduates in their 20s with computer-science and computer-engineering majors have one of the highest unemployment rates, according to a report last year from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — double that of pharmacy, criminal justice, and biology. Undergrads seem already too aware of this new state of affairs: Enrollment in computer- and information-sciences programs is down nearly 8 percent this academic year compared to last.
What Is College for in the Age of AI? Young graduates can’t find jobs. Colleges know they have to do something. But what?
You can keep pretending that it's all just a plot by meanie corporate types, but increasingly these jobs are going away and aren't coming back.The technology is in the early stages and the bugs are being worked out, but the clerical/coder/desk work apocalypse is here. More human jobs will be lost to AI scripts every year. You can adapt to that reality, or pack your bags to move back in with your parents. The scripts will kill more desk jobs every year. If AI can do your job, then at some point, it will:
Employment growth for young workers has been stagnant since late 2022. In jobs less exposed to AI, young workers have experienced comparable employment growth to older workers. In contrast, workers aged 22 to 25 have experienced a 6% decline in employment from late 2022 to September 2025 in the most AI-exposed occupations, compared to a 6-9% increase for older workers. These results suggest that declining employment in AI-exposed jobs drives stagnant overall employment growth for 22- to 25-year-olds.
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