In late 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, and within months the bottom rung of the tech-industry career ladder started to disappear. Graduates who majored in computer science and other AI-exposed fields are increasingly missing out on the jobs they trained for, and a chunk of them are landing behind restaurant counters and retail registers instead, according to two Census Bureau papers.
An April 2026 Census paper tracked matched employer-employee records and found that hiring of workers ages 22 to 24 fell sharply in the industries most exposed to AI, while hiring in less-exposed industries held steady. Employment for early-career workers in the most AI-exposed fifth of industries dropped 12% over the ten quarters after ChatGPT’s release. Lee Tucker, one of the coauthors of the paper, said “the decline in hires is the primary cause” of that rate of unemployment, not people losing jobs they already had.
