NEW: There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment. I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged: Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay. ft.com
In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium. Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women.
What’s going on? At first glance, this looks like a case of the growing masses of male computer science graduates being uniquely exposed to the rapid adoption of generative AI in the tech sector, and finding jobs harder to come by than earlier cohorts. But, plot twist: The much-discussed contraction in entry-level tech hiring appears to have *reversed* in recent months. In fact, relative to the pre-generative AI era, recent grads have secured coding jobs at the same rate as they’ve found any job, if not slightly higher.
This suggests tech’s hiring contraction of 2023-24 may not have been primarily a story of AI job displacement, but rather the downslope of the sector’s meteoric post-pandemic hiring boom, with recruitment now rebounding from that trough. To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean AI is not taking any coding jobs, but at the very least it may be creating as many new openings in tech as it is erasing old ones. So if an AI “job-pocalypse” for computer science graduates doesn’t seem to explain the graduate male malaise, what does? For that answer and more, you can read the full article here: ft.com
www.ft.com