College grads shut out of AI-exposed majors since 2022 are ending up in retail and food service instead of the white-collar jobs they studied for

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.

That mattered most for one type of graduate.

The most AI-exposed industries, Tucker found, cluster heavily around software and information-technology work, which are the very fields computer science and other highly AI-exposed majors are built to feed into.

A second paper from last week, also coauthored by Tucker, follows the graduates of the most AI-exposed decile of college majors.

Their odds of holding a job one quarter after graduation fell by five percentage points, and full-quarter initial earnings dropped 13% following ChatGPT’s release.

A 13% earnings decline is roughly the size economists would expect from graduating into a severe recession—except there wasn’t one, since the rest of the labor market held up fine.

It’s lower-paying jobs, not no jobs at all Young grads still need to work and still have jobs, even if they’ve received highly exposed degrees.

So the decline in earnings is less about a lack of employment and more about pursuing lower-wage occupations to make ends meet.

About half of the earnings loss came from graduates earning less within the industries that did hire them.

The other half came from a shift into different industries altogether, mainly lower-wage sectors like restaurants and retail.