A study by The Economist looked at how the employment prospects of college graduates have changed over the past few years as AI use by potential employers has increased. The concern is that firms will hire fewer people if they can use AI to complete the tasks that otherwise would have been handled by entry-level workers. Data about this has been mixed, so The Economist conducted its own study based on surveys of recent college graduates from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The surveys ask new alumni whether they are working, unemployed or continuing in school. “Using their responses, we compared labour-market outcomes in fields with differing levels of exposure to AI before and after the arrival of large language models.” Their main finding is that “graduates in fields more exposed to AI have suffered markedly worse outcomes.” Philosophy, according to their study, involves relatively little exposure to AI, and the percentage change in employment during 2022-2024 for college graduates with degrees in philosophy was actually positive—around +4%. Fields like computer science, communications, electrical engineering, and information sciences, saw changes from -7% to -14%. They then used some more limited data from 2025 to extend the analysis and found that, for the most AI-exposed fields (such as computer science and information sciences), “the rate of full-time employment fell from nearly 70% to 55% in three years—notably, the three years following ChatGPT’s release in 2022. Prior to that, it had been stable.” The full article is here.

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