The $300,000 barista problem

The $300,000 barista problem

It's peak college admissions season, with all the associated stress for high school seniors and their parents. Years of AP classes, SAT prep, and campus tours, all funneling toward the same desperate bet: get into a prestigious school, and you're set for life.

But what if the bet no longer pays?

Underemployment among recent college graduates has hit 42.5%. That's a lot of baristas holding a $300,000 diploma. Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently predicted "AI will destroy humanities jobs." Hyperbolic? Sure. But he’s directionally correct, and the job market receipts are piling up.

Consider Harvard's undergraduate faculty: of 730 professors, 273 teach social sciences, 193 teach arts and humanities…and just 96 teach science and engineering. The academy is selling a curriculum designed for 2005 to students who'll compete in 2030.

So what? Two things.

• First, students need to stop outsourcing their futures to brand-name diplomas and start taking agency over what they actually learn. The academy won't pivot fast enough to save the current crop of graduates from an AI-reshaped job market. 

• Second (and here's the real signal) the university's growing misalignment with the AI economy is a mirror of your own workforce. Most companies don’t know how their future workforce will be structured, but they know the current model is wrong and are already voting on what they don't need. 

The org chart of the AI era is still unwritten, but the layoff notices and non-hires are telling us what won't be in it. And, as you reconfigure your workforce, thank your lucky stars your managers don't have tenure.