Neil Freiman

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It's a tough job market out there for recent college grads.

The unemployment rate for these whippersnappers climbed to 5.6% this March, up from 3.6% in March 2019.

And if you listen to the booze rain down at commencement speeches, many blame AI for taking entry-level jobs.

But something else really big happened between 2019 and 2026, the pandemic and remote work.

Remember that?

And a couple of brand new studies found that the shift to remote work, not AI, has created the miserable job market conditions recent college grads find themselves in.

In a paper published yesterday, New York Fed economists estimate that remote work accounts for nearly two thirds, 64 percent of the rise in recent college grad unemployment.

That follows another fresh study where authors Peter John Lambert and Yannick Schindler of the London School of Economics in Oxford blame remote work for the entry level job wipeout.

Both papers offer the same reasoning.

Essentially, remote work favors more experienced workers than junior ones.

When you hire a young employee, they require teaching, training, and mentorship.

Did this with Toby a couple years ago, which has made all the more difficult when you're at the other end of a Zoom call instead of in person.

So in the remote work era, hiring teams are prioritizing veteran workers who require less hand-holding and can get up to speed more quickly.

Neither of these papers rules out AI being hugely consequential to the job market going forward.

But they do argue that a huge transformation occurred in the workplace over the past couple of years, remote work.

And we don't really talk about it that much or sufficiently consider its impacts.

Toby, are you convinced?

And here's the thing, Gen Z doesn't even want fully remote jobs.