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New college grads are doing better than the vibes suggest

Why a college degree is still worth it, even in 2026.

There are many ways to bomb a college commencement speech.

You can tell everyone you composed the talk while high on ayahuasca, like Chris Pan at Ohio State. You can deliver the entirety of your speech in the voices of your incredibly annoying cartoon characters, like Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke at the University of Vermont. You can even, like my graduation speaker in 2001, admonish the graduating class for depending too much on their parents and generally being an ungrateful lot, before later being convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault and undergoing a dramatic fall from grace. (Yes, that was none other than Bill Cosby, whose convictions were later overturned.)

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But the surest way to turn your graduate audience hostile in 2026 is to refer positively to AI, as speakers ranging from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona to real estate executive Gloria Caulfield at the University of Central Florida to record label honcho Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State University discovered. And that’s because AI has — not unreasonably — become the symbol of growing fears that a college degree is no longer as valuable as it once was, and that today’s college grads are uniquely screwed. (The only speaker I could find whose comments on AI were well received was The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng at Harvard, probably because they included the line: “fuck AI, fuck AI, fuck AI.”)

The end of “college for all”

In a late-2025 NBC News poll, 63 percent of voters said a college degree isn’t worth it, against just 33 percent who said it was. A Gallup poll found that the share of Americans who say college is “very important” had fallen to 35 percent in 2025, a huge drop from 75 percent in 2010. And that pessimism has real grounding. Recent graduates ages 22 to 27 had an unemployment rate of about 5.7 percent in early 2026, above the national average of 4.3 percent. Hiring has slowed to the lowest rate outside the pandemic since 2014, while entry-level postings have fallen roughly 35 percent over the past 18 months.

How can you prepare your kids for AI’s disruption to the job market?

So there’s no doubt that 2026 will be a rough launch for new college grads. But a rough launch doesn’t mean a rough life, and while the longer-term impact of AI is unknowable, it’s........

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