Amid fears that artificial intelligence will devastate entry-level hiring, there has yet to be an AI-powered spike in unemployment for recent college graduates, according to a new working paper by two professors at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Over June, July and August, the unemployment rate for college graduates age 22 to 25 was 7.3 percent — higher than the same period last year but within the normal range of variation, the paper said. Unemployment rates for college graduates tend to spike in June and then dip over the course of the summer.
The authors did not find statistically significant evidence that unemployment rates for recent college graduates rose for jobs supposedly vulnerable to AI, like customer service workers and computer programmers. An expanded metric they called “sidelined unemployment” — young graduates who want jobs but may not be actively looking — also did not see statistically significant effects.
The paper is among the first attempts to examine the impact of AI on the graduating class of 2026, whose students gained access to ChatGPT by the end of their first college semester. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.)
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