From Semafor, May 15:
The Scene
When the Class of 2026 arrived on campus four years ago, ChatGPT hadn’t been released. Computer science was among the fastest-growing majors and words like vibe coding and tokenmaxxing hadn’t even entered the lexicon.
Times have changed.
Twentysomethings leaving college this May face a radically different world. AI has contorted hiring, especially at tech companies, which have slashed 100,000 jobs this year. Cloudflare axed a fifth of its staff after realizing that thousands of AI agents can handle the humans’ old tasks.
“Every other day, a new AI agent is being released in the market,” said Vaishali Hireraddi, 23, a University of California, Davis, graduate student who’s applied to 500 jobs so far. “What am I doing with my life?”
Hireraddi is among the dozens of students, companies, and economists who told Semafor they fear the Class of 2026 is, well, cooked. Some graduates say they’ve ditched hopes of landing their dream jobs for anything that pays. Others are settling for unpaid roles. Postings on LinkedIn are getting twice the number of applications compared with 2022.
It’s a “hair-on-fire moment,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in an interview at Semafor World Economy last month, predicting recent graduates would face an unemployment rate of 30% in the next two years. “Boy, oh, boy.”
Know More
AI doom has spread from TikTok and Reddit to commencement stages. One executive even got booed by students at the University of Central Florida earlier this week after she tried to tell a crop of arts and humanities graduates that AI was the “next Industrial Revolution.”
“We know that AI exists,” one student told the local TV station. “We’re just having a hard time acknowledging that it’s taking away job opportunities.”....
....MUCH MORE
