Recent graduates report difficulty landing 1st jobs amid AI concerns
Landing that first job is proving harder than ever for recent grads.
Irene Chang, a 21-year-old Georgia Tech graduate, has sent out about 450 applications since last September with no luck.
Jacqueline Kline, who finished her master's degree at Florida State, has applied for more than 500 roles since December but keeps hitting dead ends too.
Both say they think AI may be part of the reason finding a job in their respective fields has been such a challenge.
Economists split on AI hiring effects
Economists can't quite agree on what's behind this trend.
Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson points to a 16% relative employment decline in early-career workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed jobs since late 2022, saying AI now handles a lot of routine work.
Harvard's David Deming thinks remote work is making companies less willing to train newbies from afar.
But here's an interesting twist: some companies using AI heavily have actually boosted entry-level head count by 12% over the two years following AI adoption.
So while AI is definitely shaking things up, its impact isn't the same everywhere, and competition for those first jobs might only get tougher as tech evolves.