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CultureIs AI putting graduates out of work already? - If you are studying coding, we might have some bad news
“There’s no sign in the data that AI is costing anybody their job right now,” Kevin Hassett, a White House adviser, said on May 11th. Someone should tell America’s class of 2026. “It’s grim,” one professor says of the market for graduate jobs. Artificial intelligence is the popular villain. At a recent commencement ceremony in Florida a speaker was booed for mentioning it. And not without reason: our analysis suggests AI may indeed be harming some graduates’ job prospects.
A university degree no longer seems to offer much protection from joblessness: recent graduates are more likely to be unemployed than the average American worker. The current cohort feels particularly gloomy. Less than a fifth of them think this is a good time to find a good job—the lowest proportion since 2013, and well below the figure for Americans overall, at over a quarter. It does not help that on-campus recruiting has slumped. Job postings on Handshake, a search platform for university students, are 50% below their peak of 2022.
Many suspect AI is to blame. More than half of employers say they have considered replacing entry-level workers with the technology. A recent poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School found that, similarly, more than half of young Americans see AI as a threat to their job prospects.
Economists are more divided. A paper by Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University and colleagues, published in 2025, examined employment among young workers in AI-exposed jobs, such as software development. The authors found it had fallen by 16% more than in less-exposed fields. But a paper published this year by Zanna Iscenko and Fabien Curto Millet, two economists at Google, casts doubt on the idea that young workers in particular are being displaced by AI. They found that job postings in AI-exposed occupations have fallen just as sharply for senior workers as for juniors, and that this trend predated the launch of ChatGPT. Another study, by Morgan Frank of the University of Pittsburgh and colleagues, showed that labour-market outcomes have deteriorated for AI-exposed workers, but that this trend also began before ChatGPT was released.
The Economist has conducted its own analysis, using a largely overlooked source of data: ten years’ worth of surveys of recent college graduates from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Each year American universities ask new alumni whether they are working, unemployed or in graduate school. Using their responses, we compared labour-market outcomes in fields with differing levels of exposure to AI before and after the arrival of large language models.
We found that graduates in fields more exposed to AI have suffered markedly worse outcomes. Between 2022 and 2024 graduates in the least-exposed quintile—studying subjects such as education, philosophy and civil engineering—saw their average full-time employment rate fall by just 1.5 percentage points. Those in the most exposed quintile—including computer science, computer engineering and information science—suffered a 6.6 percentage-point drop (see chart 1).
We updated these figures for the most exposed fields, using data from 13 universities, and found that the trend continued for the class of 2025 (see chart 2). The rate of full-time employment fell from nearly 70% to 55% in three years—notably, the three years following ChatGPT’s release in 2022. Prior to that, it had been stable.
Students are already changing course. Data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a research group, show that undergraduate enrolment in computer science fell by 11% in 2025. Enrolment in computer programming, which focuses on coding skills rather than theory, dropped by 26%.
The work done by computer-science graduates is changing, too. Less time is spent writing code; more is devoted to designing and organising software systems at a higher level. Lana Yarosh, director of undergraduate studies in computer science at the University of Minnesota, says she understands students’ anxieties. “It’s always hard when things change. But computer science is a field where everything changes all the time.”
The idea of AI competing against graduates is a meme journos wish for. If you got out of uni and your job can be done by AI then you absolutely fucked up and just wasted money and time.
We've also been producing far more college graduates than we have available jobs for, many of who cannot do collegiate level scholarship, and we also import millions more from abroad. At this point, if you're in your teens, I would tell you to go to a vocational high school and forget about college.
I don't really think AI is taking that many jobs, I think there are a LOT more factors going on and AI hype is just one in a total fucking shitshow of other stuff.
I don't really think AI is taking that many jobs, I think there are a LOT more factors going on and AI hype is just one in a total fucking shitshow of other stuff.
The idea of AI competing against graduates is a meme journos wish for. If you got out of uni and your job can be done by AI then you absolutely fucked up and just wasted money and time.
Isn't the whole point of AI to do anything you can do but better? I never understood the logic that if AI can replace you that you weren't actually good enough for the job, when the whole point is to eclipse all human proficiency.
I understand now AI has come up short of actual professional ability, but this is the argument people have been making since the beginning when AI was expected to have no performance ceiling.
The only way this line of reasoning makes sense is if the argument being used isn't the real point and it's some ironic jab at "adapt or die" rhetoric from people who lost their factory job to automation as a "see how it feels?"
Yeah, get a degree in philosophy and psychology because you can make a living spouting out profound sounding psychobabble in the soft sciences. Luckily AI is utterly incapable producing profound sounding psychobabble.
If you have a degree in STEM and you cant get a job its entirely your own fault. I am convinced that a lot of these people just aren't very charismatic or social, autism isn't an excuse in mid-20s, and they don't know how to get a job or how to network. How many of these people just submit 100 applications on Indeed and pretend that's a backbreaking job search? Indians are a problem but there are no shortages of people looking for engineers or techs.
Minoring in computer science and majoring in mechanical engineering or mathematics sets you up very well. Computing knowledge is still very prized, but you don't want it to be the focus of your education. It's like majoring in nuclear engineering—very cool subject, but mechanical engineering is applicable to many more fields and is therefore a safer investment. Minor in nuclear, then you could study your interest and you can use that extra education in the future if an opportunity comes by.
Imagine making computers, one of the most overinflated and overhyped majors, your entire job market holy shit. It's another issue of people not thinking ahead or asking questions/looking at statistics. If someone majors in computer science its because they weren't smart enough for engineering or mathematics. If you going to spend thousands of dollars on something (which if you end up having more than 20k in debt for a Bachelor's you're already retarded), you need to do research.
Isn't the whole point of AI to do anything you can do but better? I never understood the logic that if AI can replace you that you weren't actually good enough for the job, when the whole point is to eclipse all human proficiency.
I understand now AI has come up short of actual professional ability, but this is the argument people have been making since the beginning when AI was expected to have no performance ceiling.
The only way this line of reasoning makes sense is if the argument being used isn't the real point and it's some ironic jab at "adapt or die" rhetoric from people who lost their factory job to automation as a "see how it feels?"
The main difference is that AI can't extrapolate, so any algorithms or complex calculations are completely beyond it. If you went to uni then you are expected to be smart enough to not repeat what people did in stack overflow a million times.
But coders who's job is very basic design and functionality are going to eat shit.
The main difference is that AI can't extrapolate, so any algorithms or complex calculations are completely beyond it. If you went to uni then you are expected to be smart enough to not repeat what people did in stack overflow a million times.
But coders who's job is very basic design and functionality are going to eat shit.
That really strikes me as boomer "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," "just work harder" & "fuck you I got mine" rhetoric. Why is everyone so comfortable giving the finger to entry-level workers?
This is nothing new, thousands of kids my age got an IT services degree in the belief that 1995-1998 would last forever as the average person would surely remain completely computer illiterate going forward and wouldn't be able to set up their own email accounts or just reboot a frozen windows machine, nope, they'd need specialists for that, specialists that would always be worth millions.....
Jeets are still hiring jeets everywhere they get a toehold, but no, let's blame the computers. Its not uncontrolled immigration. I didn't see an author. AI probably wrote the article which makes me think a jeet somewhere signed off on it. Disgusting little people.
I think people are becoming more aware that this isn't an AI problem and that the job market is not great for a combination of reasons. Any competent STEM degree holder who can weather the storm and stay on top of things will ultimately be fine but it's bleak for now. It's also demoralizing to get your degree and then be told you need to stay on top of your skills when you struggle to get a relevant job, all while cost of living is shooting up.
As for graduate degrees, the real problem there is oversaturation and no real value from the degree itself. Most graduate programs, especially in STEM, are immigration programs where everyone passes. This is true almost everywhere, it's free money for the schools. What this means is the degrees don't say "this person is more qualified" or "this person has more skills" and even if it did, they can and will hire a foreigner with that degree so they can pay them less compared to domestic peers from the same program.
