Post-Thanksgiving Follow Up
Breaking etiquette by commenting on Morgan's coverage of AI impact on early-career job market changes
Phil Hill
December 01, 2025
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Starting at the end of August, Morgan has covered the situation where analyses of the early-career job market (i.e., damn it’s hard for new college grads to get jobs) too glibly assert THE explanation of Gen AI as the driver. Last week Morgan extended this coverage beyond the Stanford research to include part of the Burning Glass report No Country for Young Grads, specifically questioning the AI-modeling and explanation.
The Burning Glass account is compelling. Hiring of new graduates is undeniably way down, and we see growing evidence of companies using AI to automate less skilled tasks.
But the argument is also, if not wrong, at least premature. Among other issues, the falloff in new graduate hiring predates the widespread adoption of generative AI. Despite these problems, it is an account that has gained a lot of traction. Because of this, there is a real danger that efforts to address the issue will be focused on the wrong thing.
I’d like to address another angle to this story, both because it’s so important to the question of higher education outcomes (i.e., the ROI mindset) and because Morgan is off enjoying Christmas markets and wurst plates in Berlin for OEB.
Let’s look at the question of timing and alternate explanations, particularly for computer science / programming majors and jobs. tl;dr - AI changes are real, but financial markets are more important.
Nov 2022 ChatGPT Release Was Not the Computer Programming Turning Point
In the Stanford research, the report anchored itself to October 2022 as the origin of market changes, as seen in this chart.
