As debate rages over whether AI’s effects on the job market are real or illusory, one thing is clear: recent college grads are entering a labor force that has no room for them regardless.
In a poll conducted by Gallup over the final three months of 2025, a whopping 72 percent of respondents said it was a “bad time” to find a quality job. From December of last year to March, the labor force participation rate fell from 62.4 percent to 61.9, a drop of 0.5 percent. For a stark sense of perspective, it took the decade between 2012 and 2022 for that figure to decline by 2.1 percent — indicating that the situation today is highly volatile.
The horrifying labor market is emerging at a time when tech companies and their investors are in a frenzy over AI automation. Whether those things are directly correlated is one of the burning questions of the AI boom, but recent college graduates say the timing is too good to be a coincidence.
Take Gillian Frost, a quantitative econ major set to graduate from Smith College in Massachusetts in May. The 22-year-old senior told the Guardian that she’s been struggling to find a job since September, with little luck.
“Every weekend, I dedicate over two hours to job applications,” Frost said. “As of today, I’ve applied to over 90 jobs. I’ve been ghosted by nearly 25 percent of them and rejected automatically from around 55 percent.”
The effort has secured her 10 interviews, but “many of them don’t even bother to tell you you’re not a good,” Frost explained. “I feel helpless… how do you prepare for a tight labor market coinciding with the emergence of AI and direct US involvement in war? Most generations have dealt with maybe one of these but our generation is the first to deal with all three.”
Whether AI is taking jobs from new graduates, it’s certainly become inseparable from the job search.
“For every job, especially ones for larger entities who are likelier to use AI in the hiring process, it’s essential to tailor my resume explicitly for that position and include as many keywords as possible,” an anonymous 25-year-old communications major from New York University told the Guardian. “It’s aggravating and exhausting, but sadly a necessity in this f***ed-up market and point in technological development.”
“I hate that I have to worry about passing a machine’s arbitrary and unknowable tests before anyone considers my human capability and what I could bring to a given position as an individual,” the NYU grad added.
Whatever’s causing the bone-dry job market, it’s clear these grads have plenty of hustle. Their failure more or less comes down to bad luck, having been born into an economic system with little to offer — and nothing to break their fall.
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