Once seen as the safest bet in the economy, the bachelor’s degree has quietly lost its promise—and nobody warned the kids.
For the first time in modern history, a college degree apparently no longer guarantees a professional job. New data from a study titled ‘No Country for Young Grads’ by the Burning Glass Institute confirms what Gen Z has suspected all along—school is no longer a ladder, it’s a loop.
Graduates apply, get rejected for lacking over three years of work experience, and go back to studying. An entire generation is trapped in a broken simulation.
While the economy grows, white-collar jobs are disappearing—especially for the young and educated. In a world where AI can write, code, analyse, design and even conduct interviews, junior roles are no longer seen as essential.
Read: Young Indians Are More Likely to Be Jobless if They’re Educated
In a recent conversation with entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said that college degrees are becoming useless. “If every child in India has a free AI tutor—something entirely possible today—it would be better than the best education a rich person can buy,” Khosla said, in reference to CK-12, an ed-tech company founded by his wife Neeru Khosla.
Khosla called AI “a societal equaliser”, arguing that “degrees and gatekeepers are relics of the past”.
The Kids Were Right to Be Worried
Edtech platform BrightCHAMPS recently released what it calls the world’s most extensive student-led report on AI in education. About 38% of Indian students surveyed expressed concerns about job security in an AI-driven world. Meanwhile, a staggering 75% believe AI should be formally taught in schools as a survival skill, and not merely as a buzzword.
According to the report, the US is experiencing a structural—rather than cyclical—collapse in the value of a college degree. The data is brutal: one year after graduation, more than 52% of graduates from the Class of 2023 found themselves working in roles that didn’t require a degree in the first place.
What makes this worse is the context. This isn’t happening during a recession. GDP is up, companies are profitable, and older workers are struggling to find jobs. In fact, in sectors like finance, professional services and tech—once considered safe havens for degree-holders—employment has stalled even as revenues continue to grow.
This is not a dip. It’s a redesign.
At the heart of the redesign is generative AI. A framework titled The Expertise Upheaval, developed by Burning Glass Institute, along with the Harvard Business School, lays it out clearly: the first tasks to be automated are the ones typically performed by junior employees.
In fields like marketing, project management and financial analysis, where roles are traditionally filled by fresh graduates, AI is simply good enough to do the grunt work. That leaves companies hiring only for senior roles. The result is a “flipped pyramid” workplace, where the need for experts increases while freshers miss out on a chance to acquire training.
This has created a very specific extinction event: entry-level white-collar work.
This phenomenon was highlighted in the recent State of Talent report by SignalFire. Only 7% of Big Tech hires are now new graduates. In the US, the number of fresh graduate hires at big-tech firms has plummeted over 50% since 2019.
In India, the story is much the same. IT hiring is down 7% year-over-year, and freshers are facing widespread campus hiring freezes, despite promises of hiring one lakh freshers this year.
According to the report, even top computer science graduates are struggling to land jobs six months after graduation, as coveted roles at big tech companies shrink faster than ever.
Even internships, a reliable gateway for students, are no longer the safe bet either. Indeed’s data from last year shows that internship listings have now fallen below 2019 levels, despite peaking in 2022. The number of job openings for mid-level and fresh engineers has decreased as well.
An Economy That Grows Without Hiring
Data from the No Country for Young Grads report is almost surreal. Since 2021, job postings in AI-exposed roles requiring less than three years of experience have declined sharply. At the same time, postings for senior roles in the same fields have either grown or held steady.
What’s driving this is not just AI. It’s the lingering hangover from the pandemic. During the Great Resignation, many employers, faced with high churn and low loyalty, got burned. Today, many are risk-averse, reluctant to train juniors and prefer experienced hires who can hit the ground running.
But that’s a short-term fix with long-term consequences.
Postings for “entry-level” jobs now regularly ask for three to five years of experience. And hiring managers have started actively avoiding new graduates altogether. According to a survey by Intelligent, one in four managers say fresh graduates are unprepared for work, even as many admit to skipping them during hiring.
Moreover, as per anecdotal reports, new hires are either “too online, lack soft skills or don’t want to come to the office”. Yet, blaming the workers is easier than acknowledging that the world they were trained for no longer exists.
A college degree has quietly become what high school was 20 years ago—a baseline. With more people now enrolling in college than ever, a bachelor’s degree no longer signals distinctiveness. It’s table stakes. And as AI devalues rote knowledge, that degree might not even get you a seat at the table.
By the time today’s students finish college, many will enter a job market that no longer needs what they were trained for. Notably, 20% of coding jobs and 30% of freelance writing gigs have already ceased to exist. Companies are now aiming to write more than 90% of the code by AI.
The bachelor’s degree is now a minimum viable credential—necessary, but no longer sufficient.
The post For the First Time, a Bachelor’s Degree Doesn’t Guarantee a Job appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
