I am completely lost.

I’ve just graduated from college with a degree in a field I’m passionate about, that unfortunately doesn’t offer longevity or much financial stability; it’s a common story. So, I’ve set out on attempting—poorly and half-heartedly—to find a field I feel relatively passionate about, that I’d enjoy working in for the rest of my short life. However, it’s been a while since I last attempted to find a new passion—never as it happens—as my passions in youth tended to find me. I actually seem to be finding out that I have zero passion for anything work related at the moment, if I’m being completely transparent. Does passion even matter anymore? I’m not entirely sure, but that’s a separate issue. So, I thought I’d try finding entry-level work and shift around until I settled on one that I enjoyed the most, since paying for more school at the moment isn’t exactly a feasible option. The struggle is, those positions don’t seem to exist anymore. I’m not lazy, I’m a hard worker and a fast learner and every job I’ve ever had has left the door open to me, should I want to return. I’m not saying this to brag—just to explain that I have a clear, solid resume with a wide variety of abilities. But that seems to be the issue I keep running into, that wide variety isn’t what people want. Turns out, if I want an entry level position I either have to work for nothing, or have been developing my resume since I was about twelve years old (if I seem to be reading some of these descriptions clearly). So, what happened to entry-level work?

I’m going to attempt to stay away from the ‘jobocalypse’ prose (yes, jobocalypse is apparently a real word—it even autocorrected to be so), but there does seem to be a developing concern over the state of the job market as a whole. I personally wonder where this problem began, what the field looks like now, and how exactly entry-level positions should be defined if they don’t really mean ‘entry-level.’

The Rise of AI

The most current development seems to be the rise of AI, now I’m going to attempt to be unbiased but in all honesty, I have seen Ex Machina and I was scared, but I’ve also read Whoever You Are, Honey and did rate it a full 5 stars, so take that as you will. Daniel Stouffer in his book Broken Ladder: The Collapse of Entry-Level Jobs in a World Transformed by Autonomous AI Agents explains this disconnect between real-world needs not being filled and entry positions that seem nearly impossible to land is due to the entire structure of the workplace shifting, not just the bottom level. He states:

That seems to be exactly the root of what I’m talking about here, isn’t it? That corporate-ladder we’ve all heard about just isn’t a ladder, I’m personally not convinced it ever really was. The entire structure of the workplace has shifted, most noticeably after the introduction of AI, where middle-management is too overworked to handle the additional, time-intensive process of in-depth training, routine tasks can often be outsourced to AI, and true in-house promotions have decreased so significantly that they’re almost a rarity, with talent often being outsourced for higher-level positions—to once again avoid the additional labor that comes with training. This ladder seems to me more like a stack of trading cards, where the high value items stay stacked on top, and the bottom layers act as fodder and filling (those adjectives might be a bit fatalistic, I’ll admit, but nonetheless accurate). However, realistically, AI has simply accentuated and exposed these underlying issues, not caused them.

Oversaturation (AKA Layoffs & Desperation)

In writing this, I went into a slight rabbit hole about the history of layoffs and the shift in work culture surrounding them, very interesting stuff, but not necessarily relevant to this topic. However, one key shift I want to highlight that does feel relevant is the theoretical economic shift from layoffs marking the failure of a company, to representing a failure of the worker, as well as job security losing its tangibility for middle-upper class white men—never having existed on a structural level for anyone else. Loss of security naturally progressed to a loss of loyalty, the natural consequence of a flawed system (this coming from a super interesting shift from a worker-centered economy to a consumer-based one, If you’re interested in learning more about this you should check out this video by Prof Jiang Xueqin, he explains it better than I ever could: https://youtu.be/4pG-8XLLaE0?si=quJPdPC3wgsFdFoY). Now that seems dense, and it is. I won’t pretend to be an economist, but this issue seems relatively straightforward to attack. Layoffs happen and suddenly your job is no longer secure. As talented long-time professionals are laid off in masses without enough openings for everyone, you’re desperate, as there aren’t enough openings for you, so you apply to jobs you’re severely overqualified for. Obviously you manage to land the job (that you’ll work despite being severely underpaid for your qualifications) while simultaneously knocking out actual entry-level candidates. But this isn’t your fault, everyone suffers, everyone but the company.

The Myth of Education

A college education simply isn’t enough on it’s own to land you a job anymore. Nowadays, your resume is pretty much thrown out immediately if you haven’t been interning and working while in school or on breaks. Now, on a surface level, this makes some sense. Knowledge without understanding how to apply it can in some ways render it useless. However, after four years of majoring in a specific field, studying only that one thing, hyper focused to every aspect of conceptual learning, believing that at the end you’ll be guaranteed a job, only to be deemed completely unqualified is the worst blow—I’d know. So what exactly is the issue? The schooling, or the job? Could schools modify their curriculum to focus more on real-world application of learning? Many schools attempt to do so, requiring an internship credit before graduation. But it often still isn’t enough. Now I know this may be a controversial opinion, but after going into (often times) crippling debt to recieve an education, I think that education should be enough to qualify you for a job where you can work to pay it off. Wild idea, I know. Stanley Aronowitz makes an interesting point in his book Against Schooling: For an education that matters; he states, “the credential signifies not the necessary knowledge but the willingness of the student to submit to the controls that have been imposed by the chronic shortage of good-paying jobs.”

The Issue

The truth is, this issue is a problem of greed. Corporate greed and flawed systems established in this system of capitalism has made it impossible for entry level positions to exist, so to attempt to re-define them would be useless. That rung of the “ladder” is simply gone in many corporations. False promises of trickle-down economics does nothing but widen the gap between hard working people and the one-percent. Unfortunately, the only people hurting from this system are the people working in it—or attempting to anyways. Like I said, I’m not an economist and I don’t claim to be, but I do wonder how this is going to affect the future job market, when young people aren’t able to gain the experience and skill needed to develop themselves and when all the higher-level positions have died off. I wonder how long we can stand comfortable in blindness because the truth is, this isn’t just an issue for young people, this is a problem for every person in America, not stepping on the backs of others to get to a point of real financial stability. I wonder if even that truly exists anymore, stability—what I’m really searching for. But that is what capitalism is built on, that, not shying away from the darkness of truth, is what America was built on—stepping over others to build unnecessary and inordinate amounts of wealth, wealth that does nothing but distance you from reality. I wonder how wide the gap will become before anything is done about it—what we, the people will take until we can’t take anymore.

References

Aronowitz, Stanley. Against schooling: For an education that matters. Routledge, 2015.

Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn. “Causes and consequences of layoffs.” Economic Inquiry 19.2 (1981): 270-296.

Uchitelle, Louis. The disposable American: Layoffs and their consequences. Vintage, 2007.

Stouffer, Daniel. Broken Ladder: The Collapse of Entry-Level Jobs in a World Transformed by Autonomous AI Agents. Balboa Press, 2025.