AI Disrupting College Education & Job Market. What Can College Students Do?

Lately, I have been hearing more concerns from friends about their children’s futures after graduation. These students attend some of the top schools in Boston. Additionally, numerous articles report that current college graduates are struggling to find jobs, and large companies are reducing their hiring for entry-level positions.

AI is disrupting both the corporate job market and college education simultaneously. Instead of knowledge or skill-based, education is going to orient towards more execution and leadership based. College students must now consider entrepreneurship as part of their education to compete for a decreasing number of job opportunities upon graduation. 

Early and briefly in my career, I taught high school and college and conducted corporate training. Learning and helping others learn holds a special place in my heart.  I also provided debt financing as a banker to hundreds of entrepreneurs, observing first-hand how entrepreneurs were learning in real time.  I am now an entrepreneur myself and have built Sbur and Sbur Decision Lab with hundreds of entrepreneur members. 

Understanding entrepreneurship affords me in-depth perspectives on knowledge acquisition through doing, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, and rapid goal or objective-based learning.  Instead of subject matter-based classroom learning that takes a semester, learning through doing becomes interdisciplinary mini-task or project-based self-directed activities that happen in rapid spurts continuously.  Skill or knowledge-based learning is shifting to context and situational based learning, more practical and suited to today’s fast changing environment.  

Learning is becoming doing.  Doing is the learning. 

College students today need to add entrepreneurship to their learning.  This will help make them more employable at graduation. 

The Learning Institution

Plato established Plato’s Academy in 387 BC, after twelve years of traveling the world and finally returning to Athens.  That was 2,400 years ago.   Fast forward, some 937 years ago, the first university appeared in Europe - The University of Bologna in the city of Bologna, Italy.  It was structured training in law.   By comparison, Harvard, established some 390 years ago, is relatively young, despite its outsized influence in the world today. 

The thousand-year tradition and utility of this institution is to preserve, expand, and transmit knowledge while preparing individuals to contribute meaningfully to society.  The foundation of this institution is now under attack by AI, as AI can perform all three basic functions in preservation, expansion and transmission of knowledge quite well already, if not better.

What is the meaning of higher education then?  What are the practical reasons why people go to college currently? 

Why College?

People go to college primarily for the following three practical reasons:

 · Access to High-Paying or Stable Careers. Certain occupations are essentially locked behind a degree: medicine, law, pharmacy, architecture, K-12 teaching, etc.

· Structured Skill Development and Certification.  College provides four years of concentrated time, expert instructors, labs, and peer groups that are expensive or impossible to replicate on one own.

· Networking and Credentialed Social Capital.   Colleges give access to alumni networks, internship pipelines, and recruiters who only visit campuses.

AI Disruption

AI is fundamentally challenging the above three main reasons of going to college. 

 · AI accelerates skills-based hiring and direct performance prediction. Employers, such as Google, IBM, Accenture, already drop degree requirements for many roles in AI-exposed fields.  AI makes verifiable skills cheaper and more predictive than a four-year signal.  Can such relaxation of degree requirements expand to other fields?  Highly likely. 

· AI delivers hyper-personalized, on-demand mastery at near-zero marginal cost. Customized agents act as 24/7 Socratic tutors that adapt in real time, simulate labs, and provide deeper feedback than most professors.   The “structured four years” becomes optional when an AI can guide you to expert level in months for $20/month.

· AI weakens institutional gatekeeping. Remote AI-enabled work and collaboration tools (Discord communities, AI-matched mentorship, virtual “campus” platforms) create global networks based on contributions rather than pedigrees.  As AI agents handle more junior work, the “old school tie” matters less.  Elite schools may survive as luxury brands/clubs, but their monopoly on high-finance/consulting/Big-Tech pipelines is cracking.

 Given the tectonic shift in higher education, what can a college student do to survive and thrive in the new job market? 

Employer’s Perspective

A good place to figure this out is with employers.  Why do employers hire colleges graduates? 

The reason is simple - value.  There used to be many repetitive simple jobs that need to be done in a cost-efficient manner and college graduates were the answer.  The new hires typically work with more senior employees on such tasks. 

Now, AI enables senior employees to work directly with AI agents for such tasks. The value of hiring college graduates is no longer apparent. AI does not require training and will likely do a better job than young graduates. Employers now depend less and less on college graduates. College education is largely skill-based training for professional jobs. If basic skills can be handled by AI, why do employers still need college graduates? This shakes the very foundation of college education, particularly in the technical and professional arenas. 

Employers will be increasingly looking for two new dimensions/attributes in graduates: execution and leadership, as these represent reassessed value in the age of AI.  These will become new value that they are looking for in a college graduate.

 · Execution.  Employers now expect a new graduate to operate immediately at a senior level with demonstrable skills and without training.  A graduate needs to hit the ground running.  If the graduate does not have the required skills, the person needs to demonstrate prior experiences, resourcefulness, and examples of learning fast and figuring things out on the fly.  The verifiable examples and results are more important than grades.  This is practical value to an employer. 

· Leadership.  This encompasses a wide range of skills, such as critical and innovative thinking, communication, working with others, and overall demonstrated agency as an employee.  Such demonstrated skills allow a new hire to take initiatives, identify untapped opportunities, rally talents and resources, chart out an execution plan, and lead the team to success.  This composite skillset needs to be amply demonstrated and proven with examples of accomplishments while in college.  This is real high value for an employer. 

 The employability has become an extremely high bar.  What can a student do?

Startup is the Answer

Entrepreneurship can be a short-cut answer to this new employability reality.  Starting up a company as Founder can help fulfill the two valuable dimensions/attributes:  Execution and Leadership. 

A student founder must learn to shoulder many responsibilities.  The founder must see a problem, come up with a solution, lead a team to develop a product, talk with potential customers, find product-market-fit, figure out go-to-market strategies, bootstrap or raise capital, set the tone/culture, develop a strategy and execute, communicate mission and vision, and motivate the team to work towards a common objective. 

The student founder must be a leader and executioner at the same time and is technologically competent and visionary leader at the same time - a very difficult task, but an indisputable demonstration of value to potential employers.  Because it is so difficult and hard, entrepreneurship in college becomes a differentiated learning and accomplishment, arguably more important than grades.  It is more than classroom learning.  It is learning by doing. 

Most important of all, it is character-building based learning - resilience, discipline, perseverance, all qualities superbly important to employers and career success.  These are the qualities a student cannot learn from books or classroom.  They can only learn from doing something extremely difficult.  Adversity and failures are the best teacher.  Entrepreneurship can teach these qualities super-fast. 

The entrepreneurship in college gives a student versatility, breadth and depth of experiences, unmatched by classroom teaching.  The broader adaptability and relevancy of such experiences should put a graduate head and shoulder above his fellow graduates and secure a career path at graduation successfully.

If you are a college student, start your company today.  If you are a parent, encourage your kids in college to do so sooner than later.