Climbing Without a Ladder
How Can We Help Young People Thrive in an Unstable, AI-Driven Job Market?
The data coming out of 2025 is sobering for young people:
“I see the bottom rung of the career ladder breaking,”
warns Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer, in The New York Times.
A new report from Oxford Economics reveals that recent college grads, especially in tech, are entering one of the most challenging job markets in over a decade.
The unemployment rate for college grads aged 22 to 27 has surged to nearly 6%. The Federal Reserve reported that “labor conditions for recent college graduates have “deteriorated noticeably” in the past few months,”
Harvard professor David Deming observes that the tasks generative AI excels at are precisely what entry-level college grads are usually hired to do.
It’s not just AI though.
The economic terrain is shifting. Post-pandemic contractions, volatile markets, and shifting global dynamics are making it harder across the board for young people to start careers.
AI acts as an accelerant, reshaping not only what jobs are available, but how they’re done and who gets hired to do them.
These shifts are already being felt in tech:
More than a quarter of all U.S. computer programming jobs vanished in the past two years
The share of jobs posted on Indeed in software programming has declined by more than 50 percent since 2022.
Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, projecting that AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level U.S. jobs in the next five years.
But it’s not all negative, for students graduating into this new reality, the message is mixed.
AI is also opening up new fields and possibilities: opportunities that young people, “AI natives,” may be uniquely positioned to seize.
The jobs might be changing, not disappearing:
"We're in the flux of dramatic change," said Lynn Wu at the University of Pennsylvania. "… in the long run, they'll be fine. They're AI natives."
But how these shifts and changes will play out in the near term is unknown.
How painful will that transition be? If AI-driven job cuts make it harder for graduates to land that crucial first professional role, the long-term impact could be severe, especially for those without family connections, financial safety nets, or the flexibility to navigate an uncertain job market.
What will employers really expect? Perhaps rather than replacing jobs, AI will demand a higher level of productivity: “If a robot can do most of the coding for you, a junior software engineer, then you should be producing five times the amount of code as before, they may say.”
At AI4ALL, these are the questions we wrestle with daily, in team meetings, strategy sessions, and conversations with students.
This spring, we enrolled our largest-ever AI accelerator cohort: 430 students not just learning how to build AI and develop problem solving and critical thinking skills, but how to build AI responsibly, with humans and social impact in mind.
We’re acutely aware of the market our students are entering.
What will they need to succeed in this shifting landscape?
What should they be learning in college—or in programs like AI4ALL, as the shifts in the market accelerate?
We don’t have all the answers yet. But we’re building the infrastructure to help find them.
Introducing Two New Initiatives:
The Future of AI Education Council
With support from a $2 million grant from Google.org, we’re partnering with university-level faculty to develop guidelines for teaching AI in ways that are rigorous, inclusive, and ethically grounded, so that tomorrow’s AI leaders are prepared for what’s coming.
The Future of AI Salon Series
A series of intimate, off-the-record dinners bringing together leaders from industry, policy, academia, nonprofits, and philanthropy to explore essential questions:
What is an AI job?
How do we build equitable career ladders in the age of AI?
How can we build more human-centered AI?
How can we build AI that helps more than harms?
We know the road ahead is uncertain, but with collaboration, curiousity and bold imagination, we can help shape a future that works for everyone.
Reach out if you want to know more and collaborate with us!