For years, colleges have used occupational growth, annual job openings, and wages to evaluate whether programs prepare students for promising careers.
Those measures remain important. But they may no longer provide a complete picture of opportunities for new graduates.
Employers may be hiring senior workers, requesting more experience, consolidating junior-level responsibilities, or using technology to perform tasks once assigned to new employees.
The result is a labor-market distinction that colleges cannot afford to overlook:
Occupational demand is not always the same as demand for entry-level workers.
As institutions evaluate academic programs, revise curricula, and advise students, they need to understand not only which fields are growing, but also whether those fields still offer a realistic first step into a career.
Employers May Be Favoring Experience
Recent job-posting trends suggest that hiring demand can recover without benefiting workers at every career level equally.
Indeed Hiring Lab reported that U.S. software development postings increased by nearly 15 percent between late February 2025 and June 2026, even as overall job postings declined. However, 71 percent of the increase in software development postings between May 2025 and May 2026 came from senior roles. Jobs with AI-related titles also accounted for a significant share of the rebound.
In other words, the software market showed signs of recovery, but the recovery was concentrated among experienced and AI-fluent professionals.
Earlier Indeed research found a similar imbalance. In February 2025, postings for senior and managerial technology positions were 19 percent below their February 2020 level, while standard and junior technology postings were down 34 percent.
This does not mean colleges should stop preparing students for technology careers. It means institutions should ask better questions:
- Is employer demand increasing for all workers or primarily for experienced professionals?
- How frequently do postings request one, three, or five years of experience?
- Are employers still using titles such as assistant, associate, junior, or trainee?
- Which skills distinguish the entry-level openings that remain?
- Are internships becoming an informal prerequisite for full-time employment?
Without this additional analysis, institutions may mistake senior-level hiring demand for a strong entry-level market.
AI Is Part of the Story, but Not the Entire Story
Artificial intelligence is changing how some organizations distribute work.
Tasks historically assigned to junior employees, such as basic research, coding, document review, data cleanup, drafting, and routine analysis, can now be accelerated with AI. Employers may respond by redesigning entry-level positions, expecting new hires to manage more complex work, or hiring fewer junior workers to complete the same volume of tasks.
However, it would be a mistake to attribute every challenge facing new graduates to AI.
Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests remote work has also affected younger college graduates. Its researchers estimated that remote work could explain 64% of the recent increase in unemployment among young college graduates. One possible explanation is that managers find it more difficult to train, mentor, and evaluate inexperienced workers when teams are distributed.
The researchers also noted that the rise in unemployment among younger graduates began before the rapid adoption of generative AI.
Other factors may include slower hiring, economic uncertainty, employer cost controls, and the unusually strong competition that follows periods of rapid expansion.
The lesson for colleges is not that one technology has eliminated entry-level work. The structure of early-career employment is being reshaped by several forces at once.
What Colleges Should Track
To understand whether students can realistically enter a field, colleges need a broader set of labor-market indicators.
1. Experience Requirements
Institutions should measure how often employers request:
- No prior experience
- Less than one year of experience
- One to three years
- Three to five years
- More than five years
Changes in these percentages can reveal whether an occupation is becoming easier or harder to enter.
A program may align with a growing occupation, but if most available positions require several years of experience, students will need a clearer bridge between graduation and employment.
2. Entry-Level Job Titles
Colleges should track the volume and direction of postings that include words such as:
- Entry level
- Junior
- Assistant
- Associate
- Trainee
- Coordinator
- Apprentice
Titles are imperfect, but they can help institutions distinguish general occupational demand from demand that is more likely to be accessible to a recent graduate.
3. Skill Changes Within Entry-Level Jobs
The first job in a field may still exist, but its requirements may be changing.
An entry-level marketing role may now require analytics, automation and AI-assisted content skills. A junior accountant may be expected to interpret information that software has already processed. A new software developer may need to review, test and improve AI-generated code rather than write every line manually.
Colleges should compare the skills requested in current postings with the skills requested two or three years earlier. This can help faculty identify emerging expectations before they become standard.
4. Internship and Work-Based Learning Expectations
If employers are hesitant to hire inexperienced workers, internships, clinical placements, apprenticeships, and applied projects become more important.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that employers expected to hire nearly 4 percent more interns during the 2025-26 academic year. The organization also reported growing use of skills-based hiring, with 70 percent of surveyed employers saying they used the practice.
This suggests that colleges should examine whether students leave a program with opportunities to demonstrate what they can do, not simply a transcript showing which courses they completed.
Work-based learning should not be treated as an optional enrichment activity, especially as employers increasingly expect evidence of applied experience.
5. Employer Concentration
A market may appear strong because one or two employers are posting a large number of openings.
Colleges should identify:
- Which employers are hiring
- Whether demand is distributed across many organizations
- Whether postings are coming from staffing agencies
- Whether the same jobs are being reposted
- Whether local employers actually hire recent graduates
Employer concentration is particularly important for regional institutions. A program built around a single employer’s temporary hiring cycle may face more risk than one supported by steady demand across several industries.
6. Hiring Velocity
The number of postings alone does not show whether positions are being filled quickly, remaining open for long periods, or repeatedly advertised.
A high number of postings may signal strong demand. It may also reflect high turnover, hard-to-fill jobs or employers searching for candidates with unusually specific qualifications.
Institutions should combine posting volume with information about hiring, employment, and workforce movement whenever possible.
7. Early-Career Outcomes
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York tracks both unemployment and underemployment among recent college graduates. It defines underemployment as working in a job that typically does not require a college degree.
This distinction matters.
A graduate may be employed yet still unable to access a role aligned with their education or career goals. Colleges should evaluate:
- Time to first career-related position
- Job relevance
- Starting wages
- Employment stability
- Advancement after one to three years
- Differences in outcomes by program and student population
Placement rates alone may conceal whether graduates are successfully entering the careers their programs were designed to support.
Programs Must Prepare Students for a Different First Job
When entry-level work changes, colleges have more than one possible response.
Rather than building entirely new programs from the ground up, colleges can combine existing courses across departments to respond more quickly to changing workforce needs. Institutions might pair technical coursework with communication, business, healthcare or AI-related courses to create new interdisciplinary programs, concentrations or certificates. Applied projects, internships, and employer partnerships can then give students opportunities to use these blended skills in real-world settings while developing the judgment needed to evaluate AI-generated work.
Institutions can also design assignments that produce evidence of ability, including portfolios, analyses, simulations, presentations, and completed projects.
The objective should not be to train students for one narrowly defined job posting. Job requirements will continue to change.
Instead, programs should help students develop three kinds of value:
- Technical and occupational skills that allow them to contribute quickly.
- Human judgment and communication skills that remain valuable as routine tasks become automated.
- Evidence of applied experience that reduces the perceived risk of hiring someone new to the field.
Career Advising Must Become More Precise
Career advising also needs to move beyond lists of occupations with strong projected growth.
Students should understand whether a career typically requires them to begin in a different role. They should know which employers hire recent graduates, which experiences matter, and which skills are appearing more frequently in postings.
For example, a student interested in management may need to begin in operations, sales, finance, or project coordination. A student interested in data science may need to enter through an analyst role. A student pursuing software development may benefit from experience in quality assurance, implementation, or technical support.
These pathways may be less direct than students expect. Making them visible can help students make better choices about electives, internships and first-job searches.
Colleges Need a Clearer View of the First Rung
The disappearance of all entry-level employment is unlikely. Employers still need new talent, and the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that surveyed organizations expected to increase hiring from the Class of 2026.
But the first rung of the career ladder may be getting narrower, moving, or requiring different skills.
That change creates both risk and opportunity for higher education.
Institutions that rely only on long-term occupational growth may miss important changes in how graduates enter a profession. Institutions that examine experience requirements, skill changes, employer behavior, and early-career outcomes can respond sooner.
The most useful labor-market question is no longer simply:
Will jobs exist in this field?
Colleges must also ask:
Can our graduates realistically get the first one?
