We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young).

We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.

However it happened, the absolute maniacal obsession with job experience has ruined the market. Yes the more involved jobs in information security do require widespread knowledge that can't necessarily be taught on site. A lot of the entry jobs in tech though are not complicated and can easily be taught on site but even then, companies have defaulted to requiring years of prior experience even for those positions.

I lived through lots of "offshoring frenzies" that never went very far in the past, but things are different this time. Like in the fallout from the .com bust in the early 00s, there was all this talk about how we'd ship all software development to India, and a lot of companies did try to do that, and it was kind of a disaster. And top companies were still paying crazy high salaries for entry level top talent in the Bay Area because they knew it was worth it.

Now, though, I feel like companies are smarter. They know time zone overlap is key, so I've seen a lot more offshoring to Latin America, Canada and Europe where there is sufficient overlap with US time zones. Since even US folks spend so much of their time on Zoom etc. anyway, it doesn't really matter if your Zoom colleague is in your same city or thousands of miles away. I've worked with excellent colleagues from Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland etc. before, and the network speed was good enough so that videoconferencing quality was great. And this is a far cry from the early 00s when I was on choppy voice-only conference calls with a team in India.

So new grads are not only competing with other new grads, they're competing with highly competent, experienced grads from all over the world, most of whom have salary expectations much lower than US new grads.

That shifting distribution would somewhat reduce the advantage of a college degree against the average member of the labor force.

> New grads have not fallen behind their peers who skipped college, either. Young workers without a degree sit at 7.2% unemployment, well above the grads' 5.6%. A degree still beats no degree. What it no longer does is beat the average.

College doesn’t prepare you for work as effectively as work, but it also teaches interesting things and prepares for academia (graduate school).

Another part of it is of course the prestige of the institution. If everyone has a degree it's not what it used to be.

I definitely agree with other posters though that once you're in a remote work environment is South America really that different than another neighborhood or City if that same amount of money could bring in a more senior person with experience why hire the green? I think a key part of hiring green folks was culture and having young people around the office but that just isn't what it used to be.

The vibe shift seem to correlate with the general feeling that we're all busy and we really want to spend time babysitting a new grad versus all working hard with experienced people it's almost like once you're too busy it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that it's hard to spend time ramping people which is such a short-sihted thought.

Still I think in the fullness of time people will realize that eventually you do need to be bringing the next generation into the company and so this might be a temporary fad.

1. Pessimistic, harsh, etc: the quality of US graduates has been falling. Reading comprehension has been on a downward trend over the past decade. Mental illness, depression, and attention disorders are on the rise. Grade inflation, social media, AI availability, we spent years talking about how all of these things would be bad, and now the experimental cohort of kids growing up in this world are graduating and can't find jobs; maybe its not a coincidence.

2. AI automates processes. It doesn't just "do stuff" broadly speaking. AI has increased the leverage that process experts bring to the table: Doing 100x more of the right thing is infinitely more valuable than 100x more of the wrong thing, and with AI proliferating at the rate it is, the differentiator actually isn't in the 100x; its in the driver. Companies need senior talent; its like low-background steel.

I doubt we will see reversal on this in the near term. If anything I expect the "unemployment in their field" chart for every seniority bucket to continue up-and-to-the-right, just lagging behind new grads. But, whether that surfaces in general unemployment remains to be seen: Generally, I think the value of a college education is just going to drop.

Like, legitimately: AI automates college for 85% of college graduates and degrees. The true benefit of college was always immaterial and unrelated to the degree you got; it was in the liberal arts, unfurling your wings, making social connections, just stressing your brain out, hard, for four years to build neuroplasticity, that was always the point. But at some point along the way college became about the little piece of paper they gave out at the end and the words it said on it. All of our capitalistic forces beat college into "the optimal pipeline for that degree"; kill liberal arts, online classes, screw social connection, grade inflation, maximize enrollment, make it easy. Great. And then AI comes along and makes that one thing we optimized everything around pointless.

I'm very much a "it'll all work out in the end" kind of guy, and I think in this case: the societal benefits of a college degree being available for $25/million tokens will far outweigh the societal costs. But we're doing a very bad job of managing those costs, and the first thing we need to be realistic with on this cost management is: about half as many people who currently attend college should actually be there.