By Mariah Levin
Higher education is facing unprecedented disruption as artificial intelligence reshapes the global workforce. Mariah Levin examines how AI is breaking the link between university education and secure employment, urging a shift toward innovation, entrepreneurship, and adaptable skills. Her analysis highlights why universities must evolve to prepare students for an AI-driven economy.
Last month, the CEO of Anthropic shared the expectation that approximately 50% of today’s entry level jobs are likely to disappear in the next five years, lost to AI. This is going to affect university-educated young people in particular. With AI breaking the link between education and the labour market, young people are going to be faced with fewer ways in which to prepare for a competitive workforce and a shrinking jobs market.
University education has previously been a way to secure better working conditions, wages, and career options. Young people around the world have aimed for social mobility through university systems, enabling an expanded middle class and for workers to leave low paying, precarious jobs for secure, predictable professions.
Today, this pact has broken down. In some parts of the world, such as Kenya, university graduates struggle to find employment after investing time and money into additional education. Education for its own sake is a valuable good, but it comes at an exceedingly high cost; education for employment is not currently fit for purpose and needs a revamp as we face new realities of AI.
We face at a critical moment in preparing young people for future work, to ensure that they have access to decent livelihoods. In today’s world, the critical skills for today’s economy are innovation and entrepreneurship. We cannot fully know what the economic future holds and how AI will evolve, but we can equip young people with the tools and mindset to adapt readily to change and create value from it. The ability to critically evaluate market needs, create services and products that fill gaps, face risks, and solve problems through creativity and networks are future- and AI-proof skills. It is daunting for young people to face such an unknowable, changeable future, as well as the entry-level jobs declining for white collar, university-educated people.
Entrepreneurship and self-employment will become the most promising path to income generation for the rising workforce, as it already is for many. As young people are an incredible source of productivity and innovation to any economy, it is our task to develop imaginative and practical training to direct their motivation and build their capabilities to take on unknowns with an entrepreneurial mindset.
As AI changes work opportunities for young people, there are three key ways in which to support them to forge new pathways to decent work and liveable wages:
- Earlier exposure to labour markets: The best way for young people to make sure they are developing skills that matter and translate to the workforce is to remain consistently exposed to what the workforce needs. AI will require all types of skills, including those beyond coding and prompting, to further develop its relevance to various industries. Young people are well positioned to help existing companies to experiment and help establish new companies to drive value. Regular and effective exposure to existing labour market deepen understanding skills gaps and confidence in one’s ability to fill them.
- Opportunities to fail: exposing young people to early and productive opportunities to fail means that their courage to pursue a great idea grows stronger. No entrepreneur or innovator has created something great without experiencing and overcoming many setbacks. Testing, piloting and re-doing is a critical part of the learning process. Too often, traditional education disincentivizes failure through grading. No student wants a failing grade, so find it better to stick with easy materials that guarantee success. This type of model will never produce a winning new idea. Instead, the courage to fail and keep learning should be rewarded. Just as a product is never completely perfect or finished, the aim of innovation training is to open space, build confidence and fine-tune skills for a mindset of constant improvement.
- Connections to global peer network: failure is much easier to swallow when young people see others around them taking similar risks, learning and growing. What works in rural Kenya might also work in rural Italy, so collaboration across countries and communities sparks new applications of tried and tested ideas.
New technologies and global realities will affect the work environments of future generations at faster and faster speeds. We need to do our most to prepare them to land on their feet, with the best experience and education possible in this brave, unknown new world we are stepping into.
Mariah Levin
