Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
A funny thing has been happening at college graduations this spring. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. What happened? Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?
Chapter 2: Why are college students reacting negatively to AI at graduations?
A lot of commencement speakers are getting booed when they bring up AI. This time it was the architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting. This reaction is happening all over the place, from Florida to Tennessee to Arizona. Why are all these college students booing commencement speakers when they bring up AI?
Well, you're expecting people to have a positive reaction to something that's an existential threat, kind of, to their careers. Our colleague Allison Poli covers the workplace.
You have a commencement speaker and you're waiting for them to say something inspiring and then they tell you that AI is the future and it's this inevitable thing that you need to accept and it's gonna radically change the world.
Well, that message isn't really going over with a bunch of people who have been told that AI is going to take away entry-level jobs and going to change their entire future. They have no clue how it's going to shape their careers because employers themselves don't even know how AI is going to shape their workforces.
And for people who are just getting in at the bottom level, yes, that can be an opportunity, but it can also be really anxiety-inducing, too.
Hi, my name is Bella. I'm going into my junior year of college. I'm studying economics with a minor in journalism.
We asked college students and recent graduates, beyond the booing, how are they really feeling about AI? And we got a lot of responses.
I am both nervous and optimistic about AI. Hey, journal team.
My name is Elon Rosenbaum. Hi, this is Michael. I'm a recent grad.
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Chapter 3: How has the class of 2026 integrated AI into their education?
My name is Ben Cole. I'm a recent grad from NC State. Overall, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about AI and feel confident heading into the workforce full time.
AI is going to lock a lot of people out of entry-level jobs, which might mean locking a lot of people out of the job market entirely.
Being a medical student in this age of easy AI access has been amazing for education. It has also opened my eyes to how incorrect it can be.
It's important to understand how to use AI to your advantage and get the most out of it. Do I remain a little scared? I think that's on everyone's mind.
There's still so much uncertainty, and that is what's somewhat terrifying.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Friday, May 29th. Coming up on the show, the class of 2026 confronts their AI futures. When ChatGPT was released, the class of 2026 were freshmen. They're the first class to have had access to AI for almost their entire college career. Allison calls them the class of AI.
And so people start experimenting with it. They're like, what is this? You know, what can it do? Some students I talked to were using it to do some last-minute study prep. Others were just playing around with it, looking for recommendations for books and movies. Nothing related to finals, they said.
And pretty quickly, college administrators realized, okay, this is a really powerful chatbot or research tool that can provide answers very quickly. And that can write essays. And that can write essays. And so colleges pretty quickly put into their syllabi, you cannot use ChatGPT. This is plagiarism. This is cheating. Don't use it. One of our colleagues spoke to a student named Emma.
Emma studied finance and marketing, and she was pretty skeptical of AI when it first started rolling out her freshman year.
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Chapter 4: What are the concerns students have about AI and their careers?
Colleges, and even a lot of students like Emma, worried that using AI would make them dumber because they wouldn't have to think for themselves anymore. I don't want to outsource my critical thinking, which is something that we hear from a lot of different students, that they're worried about what using AI will do to their ability to really retain information.
So how successful were colleges at getting students not to use AI? So broadly, of course, it varies by the individual, but they didn't listen, you know, and they were still using it. They're like, okay, well, maybe I won't use it to write my paper, but I'll use it to do all the research and then I'll write it.
Or I'll use it to outline what the paper should say and then I'll write each paragraph myself. Exactly. Oh, I'm taking a really hard calculus class. Well, let me just see what the answer is and then I'll figure out how to solve it later, you know, that type of thing. I mean, I can imagine just to say, like, it's just, it's so tempting. When you're in college, you're so busy.
You've got so many things going on. It's hard to sit there and spend an hour or hours trying to solve a problem or write an essay when, like, there's just this button you can press that will do it instantly for you. Right. And you just take, it takes so much will to resist it. Yeah.
And in the backdrop, there's all this pressure to get an internship, to start working your way toward eventually being able to get a job. And when you're applying for internships, people look at grades. And so if there's something that can help you achieve a better grade or get that outcome, yeah, it is really tempting.
It didn't take long for colleges to realize that trying to fight AI was like trying to fight gravity. Students were going to use it, and colleges needed to adapt. There are professors who are saying, yes, you can use this, but within reason and with limits.
And so they're changing their coursework and they have started encouraging students to experiment with AI and really learn how to use the tool in class as part of class assignments. Emma, the University of Vermont student, said she first started using AI when her professors started asking her to.
I don't remember like actually using Chachapetier, any kind of LOM until probably my junior year. That's when I think it started to show up in class syllabi. And I was like, okay, like maybe I'm kind of interested in checking it out.
Like I don't want to be missing out on the opportunity. So I think I first started using it kind of in a class context. And then since then, especially this past year, I've had professors who are Emma says that one of her professors incorporated AI in class in a way that she found really effective. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How are colleges responding to the rise of AI in education?
I use AI in my everyday life, and I genuinely believe it's meant to make our lives easier when it's used in the right way. I use AI nearly every day in my life, whether it's to bounce ideas up, learn, write code, or to talk through a decision with. That being said, I'm very optimistic about AI, but with a degree of caution.
I think it is an incredible tool that makes it so I can get certain tasks done a lot faster.
Overall, I think AI is creating many, many job opportunities for young people who are willing to learn these new skills that are not very well mapped out yet Others are more wary To be brief, the thought of AI scares me quite a bit I see ChachBT doing all these things that I've been learning to do, and it does it so easily, and it appears that it does it so much better than I ever could.
Being early in my career, there's a very real fear of being replaced by the technology that I'm being told to embrace.
If new methods of attaining artificial general intelligence are successful, I'm just going to hope that they come after I get tenure.
I think a lot of us are going into the into the workforce and seeing AI as just this looming threat. I mean, people have been telling us since it's come out, AI is going to replace you. It's going to replace your job. It's going to replace your function, your utility. And that is a terrifying thing to hear.
And some of the college graduates we heard from said they're using AI to try to get jobs. Now, AI really was helpful in the job application process. So I would run a lot of my application answers Through ChatGPT, it helped me through best practices of how to write a cover letter.
I ran my resume through there and it helped me cut things down, what feels redundant, what's professional, what's helpful, what's necessary. I think a lot of my interviews when I was job hunting were, how have you used AI? How do you plan to use AI? And I think that's something that's exciting because a lot of these companies don't have people that have any AI experience.
Our colleague Allison says the confusion grads are feeling makes sense, because right now, a lot of companies don't even know what they want from AI. Employers themselves don't even know how AI is going to shape their workforces. They're still trying to figure out what positions they need, who they should hire for, what those people should be doing.
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Chapter 6: What challenges do recent graduates face in the job market due to AI?
And a big thank you to all of our listeners who sent in their thoughts about AI. Congrats on graduating. And good luck out there.
The show is made by Evelyn Fajardo-Alvarez, Laura Benshoff, Catherine Brewer, Pia Gedkari, Max Green, Sophie Codner, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Jessica Mendoza, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singey, Jeeva Gavirma, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamis, and me, Ryan Knudsen.
Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Katherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapak, Griffin Tanner, and Durat Sessions. Fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis and Najwa Jamal. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.