It's the Brian Lera Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. So it's March 25th, spring break for some of you,

opening day of the baseball season, a national holiday for some of you.

We'll give that a few minutes at the end of the show today. But if you're a senior in college or even

finishing grad school, by this time of year, many people are starting to think about the job market,

obviously, and so are employers. Well, if you're about to finish school or if you've graduated from college

in the last couple of years, you probably already know it's rough out there. We're seeing that

message across a bunch of recent reporting. A headline in the New York Times just yesterday,

maybe you saw it, reads, young graduates face the grimmest job market in years.

The Financial Times called it a job apocalypse a few months ago.

And this has been building for a while now.

My guest, Lindsay Ellis, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal last year with a headline,

AI is wrecking an already fragile job market for college graduates.

So this is not from one thing.

Tariffs, now the war, still relatively high interest rates,

which specifically tamped down hiring to fight inflation.

That's what high interest rates do.

And definitely that AI might already be chipping away at the bottom rung

of the career ladder hitting entry-level white-collar jobs more than anything else.

Entry-level white-collar jobs. So what happens if that entry point disappears? And what does that

mean, not just for this year's grads, but for the entire workforce

pipeline, for who knows how many years as AI takes deeper route? Lindsay Ellis is a reporter

at the Wall Street Journal, and she joins us now. Lindsay, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

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