If there is one setting designed to trade in optimism about the future, it is the American college commencement ceremony. Yet this May, that optimism appeared to falter. At several institutions, graduating students audibly booed visiting speakers who mentioned artificial intelligence (AI). At the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comparison of AI to the rise of computers drew jeers. At the University of Central Florida, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield’s remark that “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution” was quickly shouted down.
A justified rage
It would be easy to dismiss this as garden-variety student angst. But it is in fact the tip of an iceberg: a cohort whose college years and career prospects have been shaped by the AI boom in ways that feel unfair, even punitive. For much of their time on campus, students were penalised for using AI or warned against it by their college departments. Now, on graduation day, they are being lectured on its monumental importance to the world they are entering and their role in it. And what is the world they are entering? The worst entry-level job market in the US since the pandemic, with an underemployment rate as high as 41.5% in Q1 2026, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. AI is widely seen as part of the explanation for this. According to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Future of Jobs Report 2025, 41% of employers expect to reduce headcount where AI can automate tasks like drafting documents and preparing reports—precisely the work that has traditionally sustained junior roles.
From the graduate perspective, the backlash is not irrational. AI is not viewed as the technological marvel changing the world in unimaginable ways, as it is to Schmidt and Caulfield, but as an immediate set of economic and social pressures. It is associated with a narrowing of openings at the bottom of the career ladder, and with broader anxieties about community disruption and environmental costs. Even AI’s most marketable promise—productivity—translates, in practice, into a simple message for a new entrant: if you are fortunate, you will be required to do more work, and not only your own. The implication for graduates in enterprise adoption is that efficiency gains are realised by compressing roles, not by enriching them.
Fears for the future
A longer-term concern here is social mobility. Research published in 2025 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has highlighted the “scarring” effects of weak early-career employment on later outcomes. Graduates are not just worried that AI is eliminating roles but eroding the broader apprenticeship model that careers have been built upon for decades. Their boos are less about the technology itself than about a generation that feels increasingly locked out of an economic bargain it was told to trust.
Nor should this backlash be mistaken for blind technophobia. There is clearly a widening gap in the language and mindset of tech-optimist executives and the firsthand experience of young graduates and workers, epitomised by the confusion of speakers like Caulfield at their audience’s boos. For many graduates, AI has come to embody a familiar economic system, where the financial gains are privatised—captured by large technology companies and distributed among their investors—while the risks are socialised, felt through layoffs, hiring freezes, and ballooning student debt.
Lastly, many graduates see AI as a direct challenge to the value of the credential they have just earned. A 2026 Harris Poll conducted for Indeed found that 45% of Gen Z respondents believe AI has made their college degrees completely irrelevant. An Indeed Flex study found that 79% of recent graduates think AI is actively reducing entry-level jobs in their chosen field. To them, the promise that education is an investment looks less secure when the path to employment is shifting in real time.
