Join/Renew
Through a recent research project on student employability in the age of AI involving employers, higher education professionals, and workforce development leaders, the author uncovered a shift in the college-to-career transition, which raises important questions about entry-level roles and training.
For generations, the transition from college to career followed a relatively stable script. Students graduated with a degree and maybe some internship and part-time job experiences, and secured an entry-level job. Entry-level jobs were not just jobs; they were training grounds, spaces where graduates made mistakes, developed judgment, and grew into professionals.
That stability is breaking down.
Across industries, entry-level roles are shrinking, redefined, or disappearing altogether. Advances in artificial intelligence have automated many of the routine, technical, and administrative tasks that once formed the backbone of junior positions. At the same time, economic pressures have made employers more selective, more risk-averse, and less willing to invest in training.
In my recent research project,* where I interviewed employers, higher education professionals, and workforce development leaders, a major theme was a great shift in hiring. According to those I interviewed, organizations are choosing to hire fewer, more experienced workers, often augmented by AI, rather than onboarding and developing early-career talent. The result is a growing gap at the very point where college meets the workforce. A participant described that employers are no longer deciding between two entry-level hires, but between “two junior developers or one senior developer… and they’d rather hire one senior developer who uses AI than two juniors who are still learning.” This shift is not just about efficiency. It reflects a deeper reconfiguration of how work and learning are structured.
But if employers are no longer providing that first layer of professional development, a pressing question emerges:
If entry-level jobs are disappearing as sites of learning, whose responsibility is it now to prepare these graduates for work?
The Vanishing Training Ground
Entry-level roles have long functioned as the workforce’s informal training system. They offered something higher education alone cannot fully replicate: immersion in real-world ambiguity, feedback from supervisors, and the chance to learn through doing and failing.
These early experiences matter. They are where graduates begin to develop judgment, communication skills, and the ability to navigate complex workplace dynamics. As one of my research participants observed, people build long-term career capacity by “making mistakes… and improving,” gaining the kind of practical wisdom that does not emerge from coursework alone.
But that developmental stage is becoming harder to access.
Employers are not just hiring differently; they are thinking differently about talent. In many organizations, the expectation is no longer that new hires will grow into the role—it is that they will perform immediately. Even at large companies, the mindset has shifted toward hiring candidates who can contribute on day one, with little tolerance for a learning curve.
From an employer’s perspective, this logic is understandable. Training is expensive. Employees leave. And AI can now perform many of the tasks that once justified junior roles. Why invest in developing talent that may not stay?
Yet this logic creates a paradox: If no one is willing to train early-career workers, how do those workers ever become experienced?
Not a Skills Gap: A Structural Shift
This moment is not a skills gap. It is not simply a gap between student knowledge and employer needs. This is a structural shift in how early-career development happens, or no longer happens. Entry-level jobs have historically functioned as the connective tissue between education and employment. As those roles erode, so does the system that translates academic learning into professional capability.
Several participants in my research pointed to this disconnect. Employers continue to emphasize the importance of experience, even as they reduce the number of roles where that experience can be gained. Workforce leaders described a growing bottleneck: Graduates struggle to enter the workforce, while employers report difficulty finding “qualified” candidates.
In other words, the problem is not simply that students lack skills. It is that the pathway for acquiring those skills is narrowing.
A Growing Burden on Higher Education
Addressing the workforce alignment is the entire university's burden, not just the career services. Universities that align their curricular activities with the relevant industry will see more success. Most colleges and universities still operate within a model where career preparation is distributed rather than fully integrated. Students gain disciplinary knowledge in the classroom, while career services offices (centralized, decentralized, or a combination) provide support with résumés, interviews, job searches, and other career-related support. This model worked when entry-level jobs completed the picture.
Today, its limitations are increasingly visible.
Career services leaders themselves acknowledge the scale of the challenge. As one national leader shared, “one department can’t do it … a career services office can’t service and touch 20,000 students.” The expectation that a single office can bridge the gap between education and employment is unrealistic, especially as that gap widens.
At the same time, students continue to approach college with a clear expectation: that their education will lead to meaningful work. When that outcome becomes uncertain, questions about value are inevitable, not because higher education lacks purpose,
but because the pathway from learning to earning has become less reliable.
What Higher Education Can and Cannot Do
Many institutions are already adapting. The leadership has prioritized student post-graduation outcomes. They are expanding internships, embedding experiential learning into curricula, and building stronger partnerships with employers. Some are investing in project-based learning and simulations designed to approximate workplace conditions.
These are important developments. But they cannot fully replace the role of entry-level employment. What makes those roles distinctive is not just the tasks performed, but the context: the duration, the level of responsibility, and the experience of being embedded within a team contributing to an organization’s mission. It is through this sustained participation that individuals develop foundational competencies, judgment, accountability, and professional identity that they carry into future roles.
Higher education can create structured opportunities for applied learning, but it cannot fully replicate the sustained, iterative development that occurs in real workplaces over time. Nor can it absorb the full burden of workforce training without fundamentally reshaping its mission and resources.
Expecting colleges to solve this problem alone risks misdiagnosing the issue. This is not simply an educational challenge. It is a systemic one.
A Breakdown in Shared Responsibility
For decades, the development of early-career talent has been a shared responsibility. Higher education provided foundational knowledge and analytical skills; employers provided context, application, and continued development. Entry-level jobs were the bridge between the two.
That bridge is weakening.
What is emerging instead is a misalignment of expectations. Employers want graduates who are immediately productive. Students expect that a degree will lead to opportunity. And higher education is caught between these demands, increasingly held accountable for outcomes it does not fully control.
This is not sustainable.
If every employer seeks “job-ready” candidates without investing in how that readiness is developed, the collective system for producing that talent begins to erode. The result is not greater efficiency, but increasing friction in longer job
searches, underemployment, and growing skepticism about the value of a degree.
The Question We Are Avoiding
The central question is not whether higher education should adapt: It has to. The question is whether other actors in the system will adapt as well.
If employers no longer train in the ways they once did, what replaces that function? Do colleges expand their role further into professional formation? Do employers reinvest in training, perhaps in new, more targeted ways? Do public institutions or new intermediaries step in to support early-career development?
Right now, there is no clear answer only a quiet redistribution of responsibility, happening without coordination.
That silence is part of the problem.
As long as this shift is framed narrowly as a “skills gap,” responsibility will continue to fall disproportionately on higher education. But if we recognize it as a structural change in how work and learning are organized, a different conversation
becomes possible one that acknowledges the interdependence of education and employment.
What Is Next?
Higher education could do better to integrate career development into curricula and prioritize student outcomes. However, we must recognize that this is a shared responsibility with employers. Higher education cannot rebuild the bridge between college and career on its own. It is not designed to. But it can make the gap visible and build partnerships to find solutions.
Because the reality is this: A system that expects graduates to be job-ready while simultaneously reducing the opportunities for them to become job-ready is not just inefficient. It is incoherent. There are potential implications for the talent pipeline.
Until that contradiction is addressed collectively, the transition from college to career will remain uncertain, not because students are always unprepared, but because the system designed to prepare them is no longer aligned with the world they are entering.
* Conducted between June 2025 and April 2026, the study employed a constructivist grounded theory approach to examine student employability in the age of artificial intelligence. Data were triangulated through in-depth interviews with nine participants representing employers, higher education professionals, and workforce development leaders. This material is based upon work supported through the Student Success Research Grants for Staff Program of the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience & Students in Transition and University 101 Programs at the University of South Carolina. Opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center and University 101.
