The college class of 2025 is entering one of the most challenging job markets in years.

The first three months of the year, the unemployment rate for recent college grads jumped to 5.8%.

That's the highest it's been since 2021 and well above the overall unemployment rate.

One of the challenges they're facing is artificial intelligence,

which is increasingly doing tasks that used to be assigned to entry-level workers.

Anish Rahman is chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn. He wrote a New York Times op-ed,

headline, I see the bottom rung of the career ladder breaking. Anish, what do you mean by that? The bottom rung of the career ladder

breaking? I wrote this piece because entry-level jobs, that first rung on the career ladder,

are breaking down a bit, and I think we all should be talking about that more. What we're seeing

right now for new grads is sort of this perfect storm between the uncertainty in the macro environment

and the disruption we are starting to see play out more and more day by day from AI taking on

more tasks of entry level work. Those are tasks like reviewing documents. If you're at a law firm,

debugging code, if you're at a tech company, handling basic customer service across so

many sectors, those tasks are going to AI. And so together, that with the macro uncertainty is

creating, as you said, one of the most challenging job markets for young people in decades.

Are there consequences of someone who has a hard time trying to find that first job in their chosen field?

Huge consequences. I mean, all of us who aren't in our first job now can go back to our first job and think about the lessons you learned, the mentorship you gain, just being able to understand how work worked at the place you were at and how you could think about what that next job was.

We also know in terms of economic mobility that the effects of a stalled out career at the start

can last for decades, lower lifetime earnings. But also companies, as long as they're going to need

humans leading these companies in the future, they're going to risk losing that pipeline if they

don't reimagine entry level work, increase're going to risk losing that pipeline if they don't

reimagine entry-level work, increase the value of the tasks that entry-level workers are

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