Gen Z is booing AI at graduation. The economists say the robot’s barely involved. Here’s the part nobody wants to hear.
On May 15, 2026, Eric Schmidt — former CEO of Google, a man who has personally profited from every wave of tech disruption since dial-up — stood in front of University of Arizona graduates and got booed for saying AI would “touch everything.” A week earlier, a Tavistock real estate executive named Gloria Caulfield told University of Central Florida grads that AI was “the next Industrial Revolution” and got drowned out before she finished the sentence. She actually paused and said, “Okay, I struck a chord.” At Middle Tennessee State, record executive Scott Borchetta got booed too, and his response was basically a shrug: deal with it, he told them, “it’s a tool. You can hear me now, or you can pay me later.”
Three schools. Three speakers. Same reaction. That’s not a mood — that’s a data point.
The Boo Heard Round the Group Chat
Here’s the thing about booing a guy at your own graduation: it feels like activism, but it’s actually a press release. And the message was pretty clear — this generation thinks AI is the reason the job search feels like screaming into a canyon.
They’re not wrong that the canyon exists. Unemployment for college grads aged 22 to 27 sat at roughly 5.6% to 5.7% in the first quarter of 2026, a full point and a half above the national rate, according to the New York Fed’s own tracker — the same institution that’s been measuring this since 1990. Underemployment, meaning “working a job that didn’t need your degree,” is hovering around 42%. That’s not a vibe. That’s a chart with your name in the sample size.
What’s a little more complicated — and considerably less comfortable — is why.
The Economist Who Ruined Everyone’s Villain Origin Story
Torsten Slok is the chief economist at Apollo Global Management, which means his job is to be right about the economy in a way that costs a lot of money if he isn’t. In a research note that’s been making the rounds, he said flatly: there is zero evidence of job losses because of AI — and pointed out that the gap between grad unemployment and everyone-else unemployment started widening around April 2022, a full six months before ChatGPT existed.
Sit with that for a second. The alleged murder weapon hadn’t been invented yet when the body started showing symptoms.
The AI didn’t get here early enough to take the blame. The divergence started before the technology did.
Slok’s actual argument is that the sectors these grads cluster in — tech, media, consulting — are also the sectors most exposed to Fed rate hikes, trade-war uncertainty, and slower immigration, which is a less satisfying explanation because you can’t boo an interest rate.
What Gen Z is blaming vs. what the data actually shows:
| The story | The receipt |
|---|---|
| “AI took the entry-level jobs” | Unemployment gap for grads opened up 6 months before ChatGPT launched |
| “Companies are automating us out” | NY Fed found remote work explains ~64% of the rise in youth unemployment since 2019 — more than AI |
| “My degree is worthless now” | Communications majors: 53% underemployment. Nursing majors: 2%. Same AI exposure, wildly different outcomes |
| “There just aren’t jobs for people like me” | Bachelor’s-holders among 25-29 year-olds jumped from 32% to 40% of that age group in just over a decade — more competition, not less demand |
You Weren’t Automated. You Were Outbid.
Picture the version of this that’s playing out in a thousand apartments right now: a communications degree, a LinkedIn banner that says “brand storyteller,” three months of applications, zero offers, and a part-time job at a coffee shop that absolutely did not require four years of tuition. That’s not a fringe case. That’s the median outcome for the major.
Communications graduates carry a 53% underemployment rate — more than half of them working jobs that never needed the degree at all. Nursing majors: 2%. Both cohorts graduated into the exact same AI moment. The difference isn’t the robot. It’s that one program has spent decades quietly not mentioning to 18-year-olds what the actual placement odds look like, while the other can’t hide behind vibes because the licensing exam won’t let it.
That’s not a personal failing. It’s an institutional one — a curriculum that sold “brand storytelling” and “content strategy” as durable careers without ever printing the underemployment number on the brochure. The share of 25-to-29-year-olds holding a bachelor’s degree jumped from 32% to 40% in just over a decade, which means more people than ever are competing for the same short list of “creative but stable” roles that were already oversubscribed before AI showed up to take the blame.
AI-Native Is Not On Anyone’s Org Chart
You know the genre. The LinkedIn post that opens with “unpopular opinion” and closes with three bullet points about being an AI-native, adaptable, future-of-work kind of person — posted, often, by someone who has been quietly job-hunting for four months and hasn’t said so out loud once. It’s not dishonest, exactly. It’s just two true things that can’t both be the headline: I am being replaced by this and I am extremely good at this don’t fit in the same bio.
And the data backs up how common that split is: 51% of Gen Z now describe generative AI as a coworker or a friend, a higher share than any other age group — the same cohort that showed up en masse to boo it three weeks earlier. You can be scared of a thing or you can be casual with it. Performing both at once, for an audience, isn’t nuance. It’s an unresolved argument you’re having with yourself, in public, with your name attached.
Meanwhile the tech CEOs can’t even agree on the messaging, so borrowing their confidence isn’t much of a plan either. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang told a crowd at the Milken Institute that “you’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI” — competence panic, dressed up as motivation. Sam Altman, weeks later, said he’d feel like the luckiest kid in history if he were 22 right now. Same industry, same month, opposite emotional instructions.
If the people building the technology can’t agree on whether you should be terrified or thrilled, maybe the honest answer is that neither feeling is actually about the technology.
The Plot Twist Nobody Marketed Correctly
The stat nobody’s booing about: New York Fed researchers found remote work accounts for roughly 64% of the increase in youth unemployment since the pandemic — more than AI’s estimated share. Their theory: it’s a lot harder to train a 23-year-old you’ve never met in person than one sitting six feet from you.
The actual disruptive force in the room isn’t a chatbot. It’s that nobody wants to spend the time training juniors anymore — remotely or otherwise — and AI is just the more dramatic thing to point at. Blaming a distributed Slack workflow doesn’t get you booed at graduation. Blaming AI does.
There’s No Villain Here, Which Is the Actual Problem
If AI were really the culprit, there’d be a clean fix: legislate it, unionize against it, wait for the bubble to pop. Comforting, even. Instead the honest diagnosis is a pile-up — a communications degree that never disclosed its own odds, a labor market that’s stopped training juniors in person, and yes, some AI, sprinkled on top like it’s the only ingredient anyone tasted.
None of that resolves with a group hug. You can’t boo your way out of an underemployment rate, and you can’t out-post a hiring freeze. The uncomfortable version of “harness your fears” isn’t a TED-talk platitude — it’s closing the LinkedIn tab and asking, honestly, whether the thing you’re mad at is the thing that actually happened to you, or just the version of the story where it wasn’t your call to make in the first place.