For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here – The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has jumped as companies try to replace entry-level workers with artificial intelligence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/ai-jobs-college-graduates.html
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From the article
This month, millions of young people will graduate from college and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence.
That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job-seekers, many of whom pointed to an [emerging crisis for entry-level workers](https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/04/job-market-youth/682641/) that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in A.I. capabilities.
You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8 percent in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York [recently warned](https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market) that the employment situation for these workers had “deteriorated noticeably.” Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where A.I. has made faster gains.
“There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates,” the firm wrote in a [recent report](https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/educated-but-unemployed-a-rising-reality-for-us-college-grads/).
But I’m convinced that what’s showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I’m hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work, and that A.I. companies are racing to build “virtual workers” that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have [encouraged managers](https://www.fastcompany.com/91325384/companies-adopting-ai-first-strategies-environmental-impact-duolingo-shopify) to become “A.I.-first,” testing whether a given task can be done by A.I. before hiring a human to do it.
One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by A.I. coding tools. Another told me that his start-up now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company.
I imagine one of the best ways to address this sort of existential threat is government intervention – perhaps through an AI-related tax that funds UBI or something like that – but of course the current administration seems to loathe limiting private profit for public good
Yeah my son just took a marketing certificate at a local college and I showed him how to do everything they taught him over 6 months in about 5 minutes with ai. He was like, but then what do we do when we graduate?
Literally just typed this article out in a previous post on another thread. These AI articles skimming reddit are good.
Luckily I picked culinary class over IT class. To be fair I suspect I cannot force myself to IT class, so I pick culinary instead.
Is there a list of job that normally require 4 year degree but is currently being done by LLMs.
The article was paywalled.
If all the entry level positions get replaced with AI, where do they think they’re going to get experienced people for the higher level positions that can’t be replaced?
This article is pure hype and just plain nonsense. It hijacks a perfectly explainable 5.8% recent grad unemployment rate (a figure that’s consistent with what’s historically average and amounts to nothing more than mid-cycle noise) and shoehorns it into an “AI apocalypse” narrative without a single shred of evidence that proves any sort of cause-and-effect relationship. Its sources are nameless anecdotes, unverifiable claims (“1 person replaced 75”), and cherry-picked tech exec soundbites with zero methodological backing. It doesn’t control for sector variation, macroeconomic slowdown, or even basic historical context. No Fed data. No BLS data. No academic research. Just vibes.
This isn’t reporting. It’s doomer fan fiction dressed in NYT formatting. Worse, it dilutes real discussions about AI and labor with cartoon-level extrapolation. If you want to understand the future of work, throw this in the trash and start with someone who can tell correlation from causation and headlines from analysis.
What this really means is that other employees will be expected to do the work of the juniors using AI 😑 which will only do like 30% and everything needs to be double checked anyway. My job role already passes on so many admin tasks to us now – the number of admin systems I need to learn for my supposed technical role is ridiculous – and now they’re going to pass on even more responsibilities to remaining workers. No wonder our productivity is going up – I feel like I’m already juggling what used to be multiple roles and now more to come ….