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It’s easy to understand why so many graduates are booing commencement speakers who tell them how great AI is. They face a brutal job market, with unemployment for recent college graduates nearing recession levels, and AI is often cited as the reason they can’t find jobs or have to drastically reassess their career plans.
I have a message for the class of 2026: AI is not ruining your job prospects, at least not yet. A better explanation for the tough job market may be the prevalence of WFH, not the rise of AI.
Two new studies, one from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and one from the London School of Economics, look at the recent rise in unemployment among young workers. The authors of the LSE study looked at 243 million new hires and 407 million online job postings from 2017 to 2025 in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. They observed a notable decline since 2022 in the hiring of new graduates. AI was presumed to be the reason, since the falloff tends to be in the sort of industries that are adopting AI.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.