Is college still worth it as AI changes hiring?

TL;DR

Should families reconsider the assumption that college will pay off?
Yes. Traditional data, reports, and assumptions about education need to be tested against more current signals, including changes in hiring, AI adoption, and the ways beginners gain experience.

Is AI already affecting job opportunities?
Some employers are changing hiring practices and using AI to replace work previously assigned to beginners. The size of the wider employment effect remains uncertain.

Can historical college outcomes answer today’s questions?
They provide context, but cannot show every recent change in hiring or training. Check when the underlying observations were collected.

Are trades and physical work automatically safer?
No. They deserve consideration, but advances in robotics mean hands-on work also needs to be examined by task and occupation.

Where should a parent begin?
Choose two or three careers that fit the student’s interests, then check current beginner requirements and compare education routes. Speak with people hiring and training in those fields.

What should a college be able to show?
How its students learn, obtain supervised work experience, and enter relevant jobs. Ask what has changed since its published graduate outcomes were collected.

A family choosing a college for fall 2027 could be preparing a teenager for a first graduate job in 2031. Tuition, applications, and deposits arrive on a much shorter schedule. Students and their families must decide before anyone can show them what that hiring market will look like.

College may offer exactly what a student needs. It can also be an expensive commitment built on assumptions that deserve a second look. Historical earnings, graduate employment rates, and a familiar major cannot carry the decision on their own while employers change the work.

What clients are telling us

More than once a week, client conversations turn to what other employers are seeing. Some describe saving time and money by leaning into AI and automation instead of junior hires. Others worry that experienced people will leave the workforce when no one has been trained to replace them.

These are recurring observations from our recruiting conversations, rather than a representative survey. They still describe decisions students and families should investigate: will employers connected to a program still hire beginners, and who will teach them?

That is a reason to pause before committing. A family can ask for a current explanation of the program’s value without waiting for a national study to establish the full effect of AI.

What last year’s reports can tell us

A report’s publication date can conceal a much older observation period. Microsoft’s July 2025 study of AI and occupations examined Copilot conversations collected from January through September 2024. Its findings concerned where an AI chatbot could assist with work, especially knowledge and communication tasks. The researchers explicitly cautioned that the study did not establish job displacement.

By October 2026, Anthropic was reporting changes inside its own workforce: juniors’ share of technical hires had fallen from 27% to 9% since early 2025, even as total technical hiring grew. These studies measure different things. Together, they show why a finding about AI’s usefulness needs follow-up questions about what employers subsequently do.

Stanford’s August 2026 payroll study supplies another warning. Employment among workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations, meaning occupations whose tasks AI may assist with or perform, was 19% below the comparison path based on less-exposed peers. The gap operated mainly through reduced hiring. This is a descriptive comparison, with AI’s causal role unsettled.

Those findings leave room for different employer responses. Strada’s May 2026 survey found more talent leaders expected AI to increase entry-level hiring than reduce it. Those were expectations, not completed hiring results. Yale’s October tracker also found no clear broad labor-market effect aligned with AI exposure. A family should investigate its intended field rather than assume every employer is following the same course.

How beginners become experienced

A job can continue to exist while the work that helped beginners learn it disappears. If an employer automates routine tasks and stops hiring trainees, a student may face a harder transition even when the occupation still needs experienced workers.

The longer-term concern is knowledge transfer. Beginners learn by doing work, making mistakes, and receiving feedback. If those opportunities disappear, experienced employees may eventually leave without people prepared to take over. Recruiting replacements becomes harder if other employers have also reduced training.

Employers can redesign learning as they automate tasks. Families should ask what practice, supervision, and responsibility replace the former assignments. A program teaching students to produce work with AI should also explain how they learn to recognize a faulty assumption, check a result, and decide when expert review is needed.

Trades and physical work also need scrutiny

Choosing a trade or studying physical sciences does not settle the question of future opportunity. Physical AI, meaning AI used by machines to perceive and act in the physical world, extends the discussion beyond writing, coding, and analysis.

Industrial automation already operates at scale. The International Federation of Robotics reported in September 2026 that five million industrial robots were operating worldwide in 2025. The report describes how AI, machine vision, and sensing are expanding robot capabilities and applications. That robot count measures deployment, not the number of workers displaced.

As capabilities improve, families should expect to reassess which physical tasks can be automated. Humanoid robots still face reliability, productivity, cost, and safety requirements, as IFR’s 2026 trends report explains. A demonstration cannot establish that a machine can economically perform an entire occupation.

Trades can be a strong choice for students who enjoy the work and can access good training. Examine the actual duties, working conditions, local employers, and routes to advancement. Apply the same questions about automation and learning that a family would ask of a university program.

Choosing a career before choosing a major

Students and their families don’t need to understand every industry to start. Start with a small set of jobs the student might enjoy, then work back to the education and experience those jobs require.

Identify interests. Use My Next Move’s interest questions with the student. Treat the suggested careers as options to explore. A job shadow or small project can help test the interest.
Choose two or three occupations. Accounting, electrical work, and software development are specific enough to investigate. Broad labels such as business, STEM, or the trades hide important differences.
Read current employer vacancies. Look where the student could realistically work. Record whether beginners qualify, which credentials are required, and what training is offered. Separate jobs that accept no experience from those that require several years.
Ask about actual hires. Speak with someone doing the work and someone hiring for it. What changed in the past year? Who gets hired now? Do beginners without a degree actually enter through the advertised alternative? Who supervises them?
Compare the routes. Ask colleges, technical programs, and apprenticeship providers how students reach those jobs. Compare required qualifications, supervised practice, completion, cost after grants, and opportunities to change direction.

Marketing, accounting, and computer science each lead to several kinds of work. Ask which first jobs a program prepares students for and which tasks in those jobs are changing. BLS describes automation of routine accounting tasks, along with greater attention to analysis and higher-level responsibilities. Whether beginners get the training to reach those responsibilities is a separate question.

A weak hiring period today should not decide a student’s entire education. Interest, ability to complete the program, transferable knowledge, and room to move between roles also deserve weight. Current evidence helps a family test a plan and revisit it as conditions change.

Resources for checking what is changing

Employer career pages: Use job boards to discover roles, then verify the employer’s own listing. Save dated examples to see how requirements change. Postings show advertised opportunities; actual hires provide stronger evidence of access.
Indeed Hiring Lab: Its Job Postings Index has daily observations refreshed weekly, with occupational-sector and geographic trends. Use it for direction, then check beginner vacancies separately.
Handshake Network Trends: Its early-career and internship research can help identify changing recruiting practices. Check the observation period and remember that findings reflect its platform.
Anthropic’s Economic Index and Artificial Analysis: The first examines use of Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant; the second compares AI performance on standardized tests. They help identify questions about changing tasks. Neither measures a student’s employment prospects.
Apprenticeship.gov: Investigate paid training alongside college. Check an actual available opening, the employer, instruction, wages, and credential earned.

Costs and questions for colleges

College Board’s latest national pricing report available for this review covers 2025-26. Its average annual published tuition and fees were:

Public two-year, in-district: $4,150.
Public four-year, in-state: $11,950.
Public four-year, out-of-state: $31,880.
Private nonprofit four-year: $45,000.

These are sticker prices, excluding living costs and preceding grants. College Board also reports that inflation-adjusted net tuition has declined over longer periods. Compare individual offers and updated 2027-28 prices. Neither a high published price nor an affordable offer establishes a program’s educational value.

Ask the intended program to show current assignments, access to required courses, and how students obtain supervised experience. For graduate employment claims, ask which cohort was measured, how many responded, what jobs they entered, and what has changed since then.

For each route, get an answer to this question before committing: how will this student gain the knowledge, practice, and employer access needed to begin working, and how is that preparation changing?

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