AI was supposed to hit new grads hard. So far, unemployment data says otherwise.
Ars Technica Kyle Orland
AI was supposed to crush entry-level jobs. A new CESifo paper says recent college grads still aren’t seeing that hit. That cuts against a Stanford study and shifts the worry to later grads.
Based on reporting by Ars Technica, Kyle Orland — read the original for the full story.
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AI panic has been following new graduates around for months, but the latest labor-market paper points the other way. Researchers at Munich’s CESifo say they see no sign of a broad drop in hiring for recent college grads, either in absolute terms or relative to other workers.
That is a direct rebuttal to a Stanford study we covered last month, which found entry-level employment in so-called AI-impacted jobs lagging behind other fields. CESifo’s Robert Fairlie and Jane Wu took a different approach in “The Early Impacts of AI on Employment Among Recent College Graduates,” arguing that new graduates are the right group to watch because employers often change hiring before they start cutting existing staff.
Their logic is simple enough. If AI can already handle the standardized tasks common in entry-level office work, companies may trim hiring for those jobs rather than go after people who already know the system. But when Fairlie and Wu looked at the data, they concluded there was “no evidence of any significant, widespread displacement or reduction in hiring of recent college graduates in absolute or relative levels.”
That does not mean the risk has vanished. The paper argues 2026’s graduates could face a worse market than people who finished just one or two years earlier, pointing to a recent jump in firms saying they are replacing a large number of employee tasks with AI in a Census survey. The researchers also cite broad increases in AI spending per employee and in ChatGPT Enterprise token use over the past 12 months. In other words, the machines may still be warming up.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the usual AI story: the scary chart arrives before the actual labor damage does. Companies love to talk about replacing tasks, because it sounds cleaner than admitting they’re just waiting to hire fewer humans. The real test is whether that caution turns into a habit before the next class of grads hits the market.
Read more about this at: Ars Technica
