I have told my students, ever since early 2023, "add value to AI content if you want a job." It seems that recent Computer-Science grads have found this out the hard way. Companies are hiring far fewer entry-level coders as AI takes on that task.
A story in the New York Times today reports on the troubles faced by this cadre of coders; some of them interviewed had applied for thousands of jobs, without a single bite. One story ended well: a young woman who had been rebuffed again and again for coding jobs found one in sales for a tech firm, probably because of her communication skills honed as a TikTok influencer.
The numbers for these students are depressing:
"Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."
I don't know that others are doing much better, though I was encouraged to see that History majors have an unemployment rate of 3%. My recent students contact me for letters of reference and they are taking part-time teaching jobs, going to Law School, planning to work abroad. The job market is rather grim for them, something I experienced for very different reasons in 1983, when I moved back in with my parents, took two part-time jobs paying minimum wage, and I waited for times to improve. Friends went to the Peace Corps, the military, or grad school.
What is different now? On the positive side, these young people know how to build professional networks (and have technology for that I'd could not have imagined). They get internships, something unheard-of except for Engineering and Business majors at Virginia in the early 1980s. On the negative side? They have been groomed from birth to get into the right school, then promised a six-figure salary. I see that among the Business-school students I teach too. I fear they too will face a round of rejections, and soon, as AI continues to evolve and companies deploy it for jobs once thought secure from automation.
Those interviewed by the Times note how rejections can come in minutes by email; AI scans the thousands of applications for AI-related skills. None? Instant round-file for that application. I got that treatment too from firms where I naively thought I might be of service as a tech writer. With a flimsy one-page resume that consisted of grocery-story work primarily, I got snubbed.
My Humanist side says "welcome to the club" of under-employed but bright people. My my humane side says "you worked hard yet you have been replaced by a machine." The answers are elusive, because as the story notes, universities are slow to implement AI-coding into their CS curricula, the one area where some new grads find work. And to be honest, that's simply the result of an industry that caught so many of us flat-footed two and a half years ago. It takes years to change a curriculum.
I fear all those Accounting and Finance majors are next on the chopping block, as companies scale up their AI efforts.
So what do I tell my students this term? Learn to be flexible? Hone those value-adding human skills? Get ready to have side-gigs? Volunteer? Build a robust professional network? I suppose that may work...for now. I'll know more when I begin to use ChatGPT 5 soon. I fear it may be the creative genie that takes away even more jobs.
This moment marks where their and my experiences differ. When I graduated, the Federal government was not axing hundreds of thousands of jobs and no software was replacing entry-level workers wholesale. We had inflation then, but the country was run by a competent, avuncular President and sane and independent Congress. No more.
Before going to Europe for a year in 1985 and after so many rejection letters, though an aunt's contacts I managed to land a professional-writing job for the parole division of Virginia's Department of Corrections. It was soul-draining work, but it paid well. I picked up a volunteer gig tutoring ESL to Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees; that ESL experience helped me land a teaching gig in Madrid. Then grad school, then...where I am now.
Keep at it, graduates.
Creative-Commons image: Wallpaperflare.com
