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Remote Work, Not AI, Has Sidelined Recent College Graduates, Research Finds (npr.org) 99

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The buzz on college campuses is that AI is disrupting the job market for young college graduates. But new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the culprit may be something else: remote work. An analysis of federal employment data, paired with a deep dive into the flexible work arrangements at one unnamed Fortune 500 tech company, reveals that companies are less likely to hire recent college grads into occupations that can be done remotely.

Researchers speculate that employers are reluctant to put such workers in a setting where it's harder to absorb lessons from coworkers. The researchers found the unemployment rate among younger college grads -- those under the age of 29 -- rose 20% after the pandemic, while unemployment among older college grads fell slightly. The study compares unemployment rates pre-pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, with unemployment rates after the pandemic, from 2022 to 2024. Unemployment rose as remote work grew fourfold, the researchers write. "Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees." Regardless of the cause, the New York Fed report warns that a high unemployment rate among young college grads is concerning.

"Early-career experiences can have lasting consequences," the researchers write. "Research finds that individuals who began looking for jobs in slacker labor markets tend to have lower earnings and slower career progression relative to comparable peers who began their job search in better market conditions."

Further reading: Why Is the US Job Market So Tough, Especially for Recent College Grads?

Remote Work, Not AI, Has Sidelined Recent College Graduates, Research Finds More | Reply

Remote Work, Not AI, Has Sidelined Recent College Graduates, Research Finds

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  • Yeah.... no (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bubblyceiling ( 7940768 ) on Monday June 01, 2026 @11:41PM (#66170444)
    Oh come on guys. No one is that dense. We can all see the multi-million dollar record profits that companies are making, in a bid to shore up their stock price. Then putting in the profits into stock buyback to further shore up the stock. Hiring has simply been frozen and more & more work is piled on-top of existing employees.

    The existing employees donot dare rebel, and simply do as they are told, as they have seen the firings and are just doing whatever they can to scrape by. The situation does not seem very stable currently

    • Hiring has simply been frozen

      Unemployment figures disagree. As do job opening figures, which while they are down over the past 2 years they are still higher than at any point in the decade prior to the COVID pandemic.

      The existing employees donot dare rebel, and simply do as they are told

      People are changing jobs constantly. If you see some significant trend of people who don't rebel then it's a feature of your specific employer, not one in the wider industry.

      • How are those job opening figures corrected for phenomena like positions corporations have no intent of filling whatsoever? It's estimated that up to half of posted jobs are fake.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Oh come on guys. No one is that dense. We can all see the multi-million dollar record profits that companies are making, in a bid to shore up their stock price. Then putting in the profits into stock buyback to further shore up the stock. Hiring has simply been frozen and more & more work is piled on-top of existing employees.

      The existing employees donot dare rebel, and simply do as they are told, as they have seen the firings and are just doing whatever they can to scrape by. The situation does not seem very stable currently

      Yes, but the "AI good, worker bad" narrative must be maintained. If they can blame remote work for something remotely bad they will.

    • about $100B revenue by the top 5 companies [isaiprofitable.com]. It's amazing, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle have raked in billions since 2022. And all they had to do was spend about $1T to do it.

      So if you want to get into an amazing investment opportunity, I can help you turn $10 into $1 without the use of AI. Without needing to build data centers or boil the oceans. Simply mail me any amount of money you wish to invest. And I will within 5 business days send you the profit back. Up to 10%!

      • all they had to do was spend about $1T to do it

        Do you believe they will ever pay those $1T? They won't, and they won't go bankrupt either. They're "too big do fail" as they're "need" for "national security", so they'll get the taxpayer to cover the bill, and absorb the revenue as profits.

        Remember: socialize the costs, privatize the profits.

  • Slashdot: (Score:3)

    by Sydin ( 2598829 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @12:21AM (#66170454)

    Why be news for nerds when it pays so much better to be propaganda for Wall Street bigwigs?

    • Re:Slashdot: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @12:44AM (#66170460) Journal

      Young people aren't getting hired. That's a problem. We need to find out what the cause is.

      TFS/TFA have a new take on what that cause might be. I see that as possible enlightenment, not propaganda. A way forward to achieving a solution, though I'm not sure what it might be.

      • The report was written by Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Of course they're going to blame remote work because their commercial property might decline in value.

        • ...blame remote work because their commercial property might decline in value.

          Yep. The Fed report is total nonsense. It's yet another opportunity for the business real estate owners to try sabotaging remote work. I remember when my boss converted us from fully remote during the pandemic (which worked wonderfully!) to a hybrid schedule after the pandemic. His justification was that our office space was going to be reclaimed for the executives if we're not using it. A few months after we went hybrid, the executives reclaimed our office space for themselves anyway. They moved us to a d

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I'm no economist, but this is slashdot, so we'll all have a go anyway...

        IMHO, the world was already "running over the top of the curve" before the war in Ukraine. It wasn't a done deal at that point, and we could have had a new lease of life and gone up some more, but we were gradually flattening off, economically speaking. I suspect this was in part because lots of governments (especially) and private orgs had previously spent big on the exit of covid lockdowns. There wasn't money just sat there waiting to

      • Young people aren't getting hired. That's a problem.

        I agree. Now go ask them a question that requires actual thought.

        * buffering *

        * buffering *

        (I know. I never thought I'd see the literal physical embodiment of the spinning wheel of death either. But here we are.)

        Now start demanding answers about the denied side-effects of replacing proper parenting with a fucking prescription bottle. Because the evidence is mounting.

      • The cause is that we are in a deep deep recession that is being masked by ridiculous amounts of AI spending and a news media that is dedicated to propping up this administration at least through the midterms.

        There isn't a single serious economist who will tell you that we aren't in a recession if you take out AI spending and AI spending doesn't create jobs. The work is almost entirely automated except for a handful of highly specialized construction jobs that don't last very long and the typically are d

    • Re:Slashdot: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:33AM (#66170482)

      Obviously we're in a world where young people do not know how to communicate via messaging systems, online web apps and email. They need to be physically sitting on a file cabinet in my cube while I slam obscure commands into a terminal and swear semi-silently at every typo.

      I don't know who writes all this shit, but my experience is that our new hires have less desire to be in an office, in a strange city far from home, than I do.

    • So every website on the Internet ?

  • Look at Nvidia. Grown headcount by 50% in the last many years yet they've gone up 20x or more. Look at an AI focused company. They could care less about human employees. Anyone posting otherwise is lying for the AI system.

    • Re:trillions of dollars to AI, but AI not hiring (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:53AM (#66170492)

      Mindyou Nvidia may well be skewing young with its headcount. Prior to the AI boom NVIDIA had a very generous vested share program for its engineers, and suffered a rather unique problem when the AI boom shot their shares through the stratosphere when suddenly all their senior engineers where sitting on, in some cases, upwards of 20 million USD worth of shares each. And like normal people instead of wall street suits, they pretty much collectively said "Well, fuck this working shit" and cashed their chips and retired with their millions, gutting their ranks of senior engineers.

    • They could care less about human employees.

      The other day I saw a speech by Donald Trump about oil prices where he said (direct quote) "I couldn't care less". Let the fact that Donald J Trump, infamously bad at speaking and incoherent at the best of times, knows how to use that phrase better than you do sink in for a second.

  • They want you to blame everything from immigrants to remote work for your troubles.

    • Personally, I'm blaming the remote-working immigrants!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ffkom ( 3519199 )
        Indeed if the possibility to work remotely is brought up as a reason for local graduates not finding jobs, it would be strange not to mention that companies appear to be very willing to hire inexperienced colleague graduates in low-income countries for such "remote jobs". It is not that companies demand "more seniority and experience" from their new hires than "before remote work", they just want them cheaper.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Work-from-home immigrant AI workers are eating the pet-bots! I saw it on TV!

  • This sure leaves me wondering where the fuck did all these seniors willing to take junior positions come from, though, huh? They probably just suddenly popped out of the ground like mushrooms, right?

    This isn't even a psyop, this is just propaganda. This is just "the incident at the Chernobyl NPP is contained and there's no danger"

    • All those job ads asking 7 years of experience in a product that's only been out 3 are real! Illegal pet-eating time-travelers are working multiple jobs in parallel using Flux Capacitors smuggled from Uyghur child labor camps in Jiiihna!

      Seriously, though, I met a couple of coders who admitted they lie on their resumes about stack experience and even volunteered tips on how to fake it. Lying makes me even more nervous during interviews such that I prefer to avoid it. I don't have the calm and cool genes to p

  • I get it. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:52AM (#66170490)

    If I had a remote position to fill, all else being equal I would be more likely to hire a more experienced worker over a new grad. I wouldn't leave the position unfilled if I only had new grad applicants, but if I have options...

    In-person roles? I have hired a new grad over a more experienced person. Multiple times. My teams always had a good mix of senior and junior folks.

    I just don't buy the idea that remote work doesn't come with a mentoring and growth penalty. And I'm not interested in arguing that point. I offer my own mindset as a concurring example.

    • Except you have different levels of employee. I see teams hiring entry level people remotely... if they are hiring an entry level position.

      What's really going on is senior people are not leaving, there's only so many senior slots, which means the people below them do not move up. That means the "junior" doesn't move up. That means no new junior person is hired. The static situation hurts entry level people most of all groups because they have the least flexibility. A senior person can stay the same or mo

      • I'm not sure how your point dovetails with or counters mine. I am saying exactly why I would choose the experienced worker for a remote position. It's because I believe that the growth I accept as valuable for new grads is stunted in remote work. So the cost benefit skews.

        Sure, senior roles remaining filled does limit mobility, but it's outside of this tangent.

        We could back this discussion out even further, though, and point out that what we have now is gross oversupply of workers for the field. And I think

    • all else being equal I would be more likely to hire a more experienced worker over a new grad ... I just don't buy the idea that remote work doesn't come with a mentoring and growth penalty.

      Agreed. For as far back as I've known it, companies are reluctant to hire less experienced workers, and mentorship is seen as a high cost rather than valuable.

      In smaller environments, hiring an inexperienced worker or recent grad was seen as a cost to repay your own mentorship; everyone was expected to take at least one new person under their wing, sometimes multiple. Mentoring is generally considered essential, and it's part of the transition from senior worker into leadership. Seniors train juniors, an

  • Bezmenov:

    They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.

    • His comment is reasonable, but I don't understand what it has to do with demoralization.

  • Global competition (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lleroy ( 10503286 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @05:02AM (#66170620)
    I you're working fully remote, you're competing with the whole world. They could just as well hire someone from Bangalore, Singapur or Czechia to do the job.
    • I'm three hours off timezone from most of the account that I work on. That is in the same country but it is painful enough. Then add culture differences and lack of education on top of that. Nor have I seen workers from other countries that are great at multiple tasks. Yes they will learn one product and do it but if you need them to write a script or think about preparing data for the next product or otherwise think of of the box they are sunk. I'm sure there are smart people from that country but the

    • Re:Global competition (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @06:34AM (#66170662)

      Well, not quite....

      Time zone alone is enough to make them dislike that arrangement.

      Another is that navigating foreign employment, or perhaps even worse dealing with a middle man to take care of that for you is a nightmare.

      Now you *are* in competition with people who might be later career and are happy to take a more basic salary in exchange from being able to maintain their lifestyle while living wherever they like. I know a few people that said they decided to commit their last decade or so to some rural living and taking just whatever job that goes with that, to keep their benefits alive and mostly keep letting their passive income grow.

      • That's pretty much what I'm doing. I pass on demanding, high-powered roles and take more laid-back positions. I'm hardly coasting, but I do have better flexibility and work-life balance than my Director and VP and, overall, make at least as much as they do.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

        Time zone alone is enough to make them dislike that arrangement.

        It should be, but it is not. Sooo many companies think they can hire a senior engineer in the US, then 5 cheaper engineers in India, and just hold a "morning meeting" and everything is fine. It's really crazy how naive companies are to the time zone issue. I've told them to hire in Brazil, Mexico, or Argentina instead of India but there are so many fewer contractors there. One company had a lead in Hawaii!! I had a team split between California, Ireland, India, and Kuala Lumpur and the upper management

  • Remote work may be giving older workers a leg up, to some extent.

    Older workers are usually less able to move for a job, and less likely to want to move. They are more likely to have kids, and/or disabled family members who depend on them being around.

    Remote work lets employers choose older, more experienced workers who otherwise might not be competing for a given position. (Of course, it also lets them hire someone in Mumbai instead, but that affects old and young alike.)

    So, yeah, it's easy to picture th

  • If this AI craze plays out only half as intense as often predicted, the disruptions are going to be much bigger than just the current graduate job crisis.
    Which, btw., is happening _all_ over the world right now(!). Yeah, let that sink in for a moment.

  • Companies will hire under skilled cheap foreign labor just fine and not worry about them learning from more skilled in office domestic workers.

    Companies are lying as per the usual.

    Companies think AI makes up for incompetence when in reality, it just magnifies it.

    • This is the real tie to "remote work" and unemployed young Americans. Once corporations got past the idea that people had to work under the visual supervision of a manager, it wasn't much further down the slippery slope to contracting a foreign company on a task-by-task basis for much less. Executives see how successful Apple has been at creating the workforce they desire in China, and the opportunity for more profits today has overcome the fear of spreading intellectual property across foreign nations.

  • Stands to reason (Score:3)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @09:18AM (#66170864)
    A fresh graduate, no work history, and no experience is going to a an extremely risky hire.

    I've been working around new hires for decades. Some hit the ground running, some fail miserably, abut almost all need a lot of peer group interaction before they become proficient employees.

  • This is from my own pile of experience in the past 6 years:

    When you interview with us over teleconference, do not remain in your PJs. Do not remain in bed. Put some damn effort into your appearance. And stop using ChatGPT to answer questions, we can see your eyes moving from screen to screen, and we hear your keyboard.

    At least put on a shirt and comb your hair. We've had interviews where the person being interviews is still in bed. No joke, no hyperbole.

    No, they didn't get hired. Mainly 'cause they k

  • Bull fucking shit (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @10:34AM (#66171008)
    You have not been able to get ahead in a company by schmoozing in a very long time. The way you get ahead and the way you have gotten ahead for the last two decades is you go to another company that pays you more than you come back to your old company with a higher salary and you keep bouncing from company to company. That's because companies stopped promoting from within and stopped training ages ago. They will only train you and give you new skills for a brief period of time during your new hire period so to move up that's what you need to do. That's exactly what my kid had to do in order to move up and it's why their income kept going up.

    Networking doesn't work when companies randomly bring the ax down or hell the motherfucking chainsaw every few years when there's a blip in the stock price. You don't know who did not work with because you never know who is going to survive the next round of layoffs.

  • plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

  • These large companies are each hiring tens or hundreds of thousands of people in India and similar places and not hiring in the US right now.

    They are not outsourcing, these orgs are hiring themselves directly for the company in these countries. These are huge, fully fledged offices owned by these companies. They are not working remotely. These workers are expected on-site 5 or more days a week and are treated essentially like garbage, just like the employers like it.

    This has nothing to do with remote work.

  • Each day we read reports about thousands and thousands of people losing their jobs--or we can believe some astroturfed report.

  • H1-B Killed American IT work. It was "specifically" never meant to replace American Workers with cheaper foreign labor, but that's EXACTLY what it does and has done for over 20 years, with the help of sketchy Indian Companies. The minimum pay of 60K was set in 1989, was meant to help prevent this. Before the trump era, multiple bipartisan attempts were made to raise that, but always got buried in subcommittee. It made IT bleeding edge in becoming the first professional 'gig' work with little to no benefits

  • The anti remote lobby all work remote.

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