College graduates struggling to find work should blame the prevalence of remote work rather than artificial intelligence, according to commentary published June 2, 2026 by Allison Schrager, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The analysis cites two new studies—one from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and one from the London School of Economics—that examine the recent rise in unemployment among young workers. Unemployment for recent college graduates is nearing recession levels, and while AI has been widely blamed for the tough job market, the real culprit may be work-from-home policies.
The London School of Economics study analyzed 243 million new hires and 407 million online job postings from 2017 to 2025 across the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. Researchers observed a notable decline since 2022 in the hiring of new graduates. The falloff has been particularly pronounced in industries that are adopting AI, which initially led researchers to assume artificial intelligence was the cause.
According to Schrager, "AI is not ruining your job prospects, at least not yet." The analysis points out that graduates face a brutal job market, with many unable to find jobs or forced to drastically reassess their career plans. Recent graduates have been booing commencement speakers who tout AI's benefits, reflecting widespread anxiety that automation is destroying entry-level opportunities.
The report suggests that remote work offers a better explanation for why recent graduates can't find jobs than AI does. When companies shifted to work-from-home arrangements, it fundamentally changed how they hire and train new employees. Entry-level positions traditionally required in-person mentorship and on-the-job training that's difficult to replicate remotely. The timing of the hiring decline—starting in 2022, when remote work policies became entrenched after the pandemic—supports this theory more than AI adoption patterns. While the industries seeing reduced graduate hiring are indeed adopting AI, they're also the same sectors that have embraced remote work most aggressively, creating a correlation that's easy to misinterpret.
Schrager's message to the class of 2026 reframes the current job market crisis away from technological displacement and toward workplace structure. The prevalence of WFH, not the rise of AI, appears to be the primary barrier keeping recent graduates out of the workforce. For young workers who've been told to fear robots taking their jobs, the real problem may be that employers simply can't train them effectively from behind a screen.