By Eric Johnson

CHAPEL HILL (August 20, 2025) – As unsettling headlines go, it’s hard to do better than “No Country for Young Grads.”

That’s the title of a recent report from the Burning Glass Institute that highlights a worrisome decline in hiring for recent college graduates.

The job market for young degree holders has gotten shakier through a combination of broad economic uncertainty; the lingering effects of a post-pandemic hiring binge in many industries; and early warning signs that artificial intelligence is encroaching on entry-level work in accounting, consulting, software development, marketing and other fields that usually hire new college grads.

“Generative AI excels at precisely the kind of foundational work that junior employees traditionally perform: research, first drafts, basic data analysis, and routine communications,” Burning Glass warns. “As AI takes on these tasks, the traditional stepping stones for junior employees erode.” 

The million-dollar question for students, families, and higher education is whether this round of job disruption will be fundamentally different from those that came before. Economic uncertainty is always hard on the young, and periods of reduced hiring create outsized anxiety about whether we need more college graduates. 

I still remember the grim headlines when I graduated into the teeth of the Great Recession in 2008, just as the bottom was falling out of the American financial system and overall unemployment was rocketing toward 10%, more than double what it is now. You could hardly pick up a newspaper – there were still newspapers back then – without seeing stories of recent graduates spending their days behind a Starbucks counter, slinging frappuccinos and deferring loan payments in an economy that suddenly had less demand for credentialed young people.

“Young workers always experience disproportionate increases in unemployment during periods of labor market weakness,” concluded a 2014 report from the Economic Policy Institute, analyzing years of employment data for graduates following the Great Recession.

Back then, The Wall Street Journal lamented the “curse of the class of 2009” and declared an entire half-decade of graduates to be a “lost generation,” doomed to low wages and underemployment for decades to come.

“An entire generation is putting off the rituals of early adulthood: moving away, getting married, buying a home and having children,” the Journal reported in 2013. “Many young people are losing hope of matching the prosperity of their parents’ generation.”

Blessedly, those projections proved too dire, especially for college grads. The Great Recession was miserable and the recovery was slow and grinding by historical standards, but the cursed classes of the 2010s eventually caught up. Millennial incomes and wealth now outpace the Boomer generation at the same ages, with college-educated Millennials doing particularly well.

SO WILL THE AI ERA be similar to a normal contraction in hiring, with a normal recovery in the years ahead? Or are we on the cusp of job displacement on a far greater scale, something more like the industrial automation that hit the manufacturing sector a generation ago? Is AI poised to create a historic shift in the nature of human labor, or are we going to muddle along with “good enough” chatbots that create some productivity gains but can’t quite match human employees?

Either way, the right strategy for anxious and ambitious young people is not to skip higher education — it’s to get more out of it.

“General skills, sometimes called ‘soft’ skills, are especially valuable because they survive changes – technical disruption, shifts in production processes, offshoring, firms moving and closing – all the things that can happen in a person’s career,” explains David Deming, a prominent Harvard economist and current Kenan Institute fellow at UNC Chapel Hill who studies education and labor markets.

“As educators, the best way we can prepare people for these disruptions is to give them a broad tool kit that’s transferable and useful everywhere.”

One of the paradoxical outcomes of the Great Recession was a lingering anxiety about leaving high school or college with specific, “job-ready” skills — things like coding, data analysis, marketing and finance expertise. As economic worries rose, many people’s conception of college narrowed. There was a marked rise in students looking for pre-professional pathways through programs and certifications that would guarantee entry into a designated career.

AI is upending those assumptions, with formerly “safe” fields like computer science and business accounting now seeing some of the sharpest declines in new hiring. Robots, it turns out, are very good at math and data. And in an economy as vast and vibrant as ours, there has never been a guaranteed path to lifetime stability.

THAT’S WHY college, done right, is meant to deliver something much broader than a set of technical skills or resume badges. It is meant to make you think better and harder; to focus your attention on questions that matter; to build relationships with other humans and figure out meaningful ways to spend your time. 

Students and educators should focus a little less on AI’s potential to impact jobs and worry a little more about its potential to undermine thinking. 

No one knows with any confidence how AI is going to reshape the professional world in the decades to come. But it’s a pretty safe bet that it will sharpen those fundamental questions about how to be a decent person in an always-uncertain world, and that people who have honed their capacity for focused thought will be better off for the effort.

Even the career-focused wonks at Burning Glass are taking the long view on education.

“From the post-war boom to the tech revolution, America’s economic dominance has been built on human capital,” concludes the Young Grads report. “The nations that harness, rather than waste, their educated workforce will dominate the next era.”

There’s no predictive algorithm for the future of learning and work. We will have to think our way through, as uncertainly as ever.

Eric Johnson is a writer in Chapel Hill. He works for the UNC System and the College Board.