The numbers now come from enough independent sources that they stop being a debate and start being a fact. Young workers, those between roughly 18 and 25, are finding it significantly harder to get hired than they were three years ago, while workers over 29 are doing fine. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis confirmed the pattern using government labor data. Stanford confirmed it using payroll records from millions of workers. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York confirmed it with a separate dataset. They do not all agree on the cause, but they agree on what is happening.
AI is one part of the story. The Stanford team found a 13 to 16 percent relative drop in employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in the jobs most exposed to AI tools, fields like software development, customer service, and accounting. Workers aged 30 and over in those same roles either held steady or grew. A Harvard study found something sharper: at companies that had adopted AI tools, entry-level hiring fell roughly 80 percent per quarter since 2023. Critically, that drop was driven not by layoffs but by companies simply not posting or filling those roles anymore. Workers who left were not replaced.
The mechanism matters. AI does not fire junior workers. It reduces the demand to hire them in the first place. Senior workers, paired with AI tools, can handle more of the output that previously required a team of juniors. So companies stop recruiting at the bottom. Salaries for the roles that do exist have not fallen, which suggests the bar has risen: fewer openings, higher expectations, same pay.
But AI is not the primary driver of the overall rise in youth unemployment, at least not yet. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimates that the shift to remote work since the pandemic accounts for nearly two-thirds of the increase in unemployment among young college graduates. Their finding is straightforward: in jobs that can be done from home, the unemployment gap between young and experienced workers is large and has been growing since 2020. In jobs that require physical presence, like nursing, the gap barely exists. Companies are reluctant to hire inexperienced workers onto distributed teams because it is harder to train someone you rarely see.
The two forces compound each other. AI reduces the total number of junior roles needed. Remote work makes companies less willing to fill the ones that remain, because the informal mentorship that turns a new hire into a productive one does not travel over video calls.
The part of this story that matters most to business operators is not about young people. It is about the pipeline. Entry-level jobs are how every organization grows its own experienced staff. When you stop hiring juniors today, you reduce the pool of competent mid-level and senior workers available in four to seven years. A global survey of 415 CEOs found that 43 percent now plan to cut junior roles over the next two years, up from 17 percent the year before. The insurance sector offers a concrete example: job openings in finance and insurance fell to their lowest monthly level in a decade by December 2025, even as a retirement wave was building in the same industry.
Some businesses are drawing the opposite conclusion. IBM announced plans to triple its U.S. entry-level hiring. Law, consulting, and private equity firms are increasing junior intake, seeing today's graduates as people who have grown up with technology and arrive ready to work alongside it. The AWS CEO called replacing junior workers with AI one of the least intelligent decisions a company could make, arguing they are both the cheapest and most adaptable resource a firm has.
The clearest practical takeaway for any organization: if your business depends on having experienced people in 2030, the decisions your competitors make about junior hiring in 2025 and 2026 will affect your ability to hire from the outside market at that point. Fewer juniors now means fewer mid-level candidates later, and salary competition for the ones who do exist.