I would postulate that there are two reasons why this is happening.

1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.

2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.

I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.

Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless.

I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.

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WarOnPrivacy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise.

Is your assertion that if fewer graduates struggled with these things, companies would post more jobs? Asking because there aren't enough actual¹, realistic² jobs to employ the current pool of job seekers.

¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.

² Qualification requirements that align with what the position actually needs.

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827a an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Broadly, every company is on their own journey and makes their own discoveries in their own time, but Yes. I work with a swath of large employers in the midwest, workforce and economic development stuff, and there's a growing feeling among hiring managers that, the best way to put it is: the people they're interviewing out of college are, on the net, less equipped to succeed in the roles they're posting than their expectations on what level of capability college graduates should be at.

This doesn't mean there aren't great candidates.

This could be less on the individual and more on: colleges are getting worse at instruction/preparation (I'm bullish on this explanation among my colleagues; colleges never adapted to computers, let alone AI, the impacts of this just took a decade or so to shake out, which you should expect given the 16 year latency on education most students undergo) (though, again, ultimately its very complicated. multiple factors at play.)

For a lot of these companies this is all surfacing as: They're posting fewer entry level positions than they normally would (oftentimes not zero; just fewer), and if they have money in the budget available due to that, its going into AI.

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rfgplk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> ¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.

Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates?

	▲	WarOnPrivacy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates? Yes but I can't promise Hard Data about Estimates (for anything): https://kagi.com/search?q=data+on+ghost+jobs&r=us&sh=RKCfaG9...