Every year, it seems, there’s a crop of articles published sometime in May and June bemoaning the lack of jobs available for recent college graduates. They blame the pandemic, the economy, or politics, and assure us that these poor students — who have just finished shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars and are now shouldering massive amounts of debt — are out of luck.
This year is no different, except this time the scapegoat is artificial intelligence.
Oxford Economics released a new report at the end of last month analyzing the differences between the unemployment rate for the country (4 percent) and the unemployment rate for recent grads (6 percent). As it turns out, it’s particularly high for tech and finance grads. (READ MORE: College Is Too Expensive These Days to Allow Students to Fail)
Kevin Rose observed in the New York Times that “Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to become ‘A.I.-first,’ testing whether a given task can be done by A.I. before hiring a human to do it.”
Admittedly, in my own conversations with software developers, I’ve heard the same story. One told me that, given a few months of further AI development, all he will need is project managers to feed the AI bots detailed requirements and check the work after the fact.
Companies that once spent hours preparing grads to work in their offices are now choosing not to bother. “Employers are saying, ‘These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants,’” Molly Kinder of the Brookings Institution told Rose.
Leif Weatherby noted (again in the pages of the New York Times) that AI has the potential to entirely remove the need for software developers to actually be involved in coding. Coders are engaging in something they’ve dubbed “vibe coding” — giving AI requirements, tweaking the output, and pushing to production, all at an absurdly fast pace.
All of this means that entry-level software developers are out of a job. Sure, the resulting AI code is messy and needs someone to revise it, but that was also true of those entry-level programmers.
We all knew this — the “job apocalypse” — was coming. First, AI could write our essays, then it could research for us, and now it’s taking our jobs. If you’re feeling a rising sense of doom (perhaps heightened by the fact that AI will now apparently rewrite code to avoid being shut down), you shouldn’t.
AI will wipe out jobs, especially if those jobs involve writing reports, crunching numbers, or outputting simple code. At the same time, the very people who would have done those kinds of jobs — entry-level recent college grads — are also the people who are best at using and integrating artificial intelligence into workflows. After all, by all accounts, they’ve been doing it on their own throughout college.
Maybe a recent computer science grad isn’t ready to come up with and implement complicated requirements for product development, but he’s probably already had AI code for him to meet a deadline for a project he procrastinated on. He knows its limitations (his professor found them) and when to step in and do the job himself. Perhaps most importantly, he’s not attached to doing it himself. The veteran may believe it’s faster (not to mention better) to program the thing himself than figure out how to do it with a large language model; the recent grad is under no such illusions.
To be fair, it will take some time for college degrees and recent grads to catch up to the demands of the market. There will be several years — perhaps even a decade — where few of us know what to tell the recent grads who spent four years learning coding languages what to do with that degree. But at some point, society will be amazed that anyone got anything done without the aid of AI.
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