sEptember is the beginning of many young people's lives. This is because the cars will be transported along the 18- and 19-year-old highways to new university accommodations. I remember my own journey to Exeter in 2022. Little did I know before this was the calm before the storm, and before someone could hear ChatGpt or imagine the confusion that generative AI was trying to trigger new alumni.
Fast forward to 2025 and I realized that some of the young people I began this journey have spent the last three years of training for nonexistent graduate work. Today, many companies are significantly reducing the number of new hires. Large accounting companies have cut their graduate recruitment. Deloitte cut the scheme by 18%, while EY cut the number of graduates by 11%. According to data collected by job search site Adzuna, entry-level employment opportunities for finance have decreased by 50.8%, while entry-level employment opportunities for IT services have decreased by 54.8%.
The main cause of this is artificial intelligence, destroying much of the entry-level work that is open to recent graduates. Now, businesses are relying on AI to replicate junior-level tasks, eliminating the need to hire humans. It feels like kicking teeth at students and recent alumni who have already entered the challenging labor market. The alumni, who once suffered multiple interviews, hopes to fight other applicants at the assessment center, advance to the final round and get jobs in sectors like consulting and accounting. These historically safe, solid, and (some say) boring options have ensured you have a beneficial, well-paid employment and a clear career path.
Now those safe opportunities feel as if they are evaporating. As applicants can no longer see jobs that do not exist, this intense competition experience for this little job is often limited to a series of disappointments and rejections. If a student or recent graduate applies for any of these elusive opportunities, their applications are frequently evaluated and are often rejected by the AI system before humans read it. A recently graduated friend tells me the emotional sacrifice of talking to their webcams in an AI-generated interview in the hope that the system can judge them in their favor and repeat them over and over again.
So far, creative fields, and fields with real human contact, appear to be more impermeable to this trend. Perhaps professions that rely on true creativity, such as a doctor or nurse, or painter or performer artist, will be replaced by AI models. Still, as people are unable to find AI and businesses continue to embrace it, there is a risk that professions such as art and illustration will be devalued over time and replaced with dark AI-generated cocktails of creepy, familiar “creative” works.
Conservative politicians and right-wing presses suggest that to some degree of value, those who do clear work at their end (and those in more creative fields such as the humanities suggest that meaning is less valuable. As the columnist recently wrote, students who earn a “not practical” degree “live at home, engage in script/novel/music/art portfolio, working on pocket money/art portfolio” without occupation or useful skills.
But what is the use of your accounting degree after that? Why is this course worthwhile than studying something that teaches critical thinking and transferable skills, anthropology, for example, or (in my case) Arabic and Islamic studies? The reduction in higher education means that we already see the end of some of these degrees, which are often labelled “useless,” but when replaced by an AI model that took three years to learn these skills, “useless” subjects will begin to be less valuable.
The end of college is already a terrifying time. Three or four years of preparing a BulletProof LinkedIn profile and creating plans for the future will suddenly become reality. The last thing a 21-year-old needs is to get a job where AI models are said to be essential to their degree. The arenas that exist today are different from the arenas a year ago, and when me and many other students graduate a year later, it will definitely be different again. Adults who beg us to accept AI to streamline everyday tasks and improve workday efficiency are already I have it Business days, a promise that feels like it's drifting further away.
