The Death of Entry-Level Positions: A Systemic plot Squeezing Out U.S. Recent Graduates

Every year, roughly two million American college graduates are pushed into society like products into an assembly line.They eagerly hope to secure a desk in a gleaming corporate office with the degrees they got. Yet, what awaits them is the absurdity of the modern American labor market: "To gain work experience, you must already have work experience." Today, as we can see, nearly 40 percent of positions labeled "entry-level" actually require three to five years of relevant work experience; in the fields of technology, that figure exceeds 50 percent.

Data shows that in the past year alone, job openings for recent graduates have plummeted by about a third. These young people played by all the rules society and their schools told them to do. They have been studying hard, shouldering student debt, and earning their degrees and playing the role of a good student.However, their employment prospects are even bleaker than those of the general population.

Entry-level positions are being completely redefined. Previously, "entry-level" meant a door truly open for you. It represented a company's willingness to accept a fresh graduate, to bear the costs of training new employees and learning from their mistakes, in exchange for your future loyalty and the long-term rewards of your growth.

It has completely changed. Now, the subtext of "entry-level" is: we expect you to be perfectly capable of working independently from day one, while we're only willing to pay the lowest possible base salary for the new employees.

One driving force came from a shift in the nature of corporate employment practices. Over the past four decades, the business world has collectively drifted away from "cultivating new employees" toward "harvesting mature skills." Companies greedily demand a ready-made workforce, which means companies are not willing to invest into the personal development of new employees.

Moreover, today’s recruitment process is full with cold algorithms including various AI screen tools. While these multi-layered hurdles were originally intended to identify talents and optimize the recruitment process, however, in practice, they systematically keep the promising candidates out the game .

The third reason could be absolutely lethal: the advent of AI. It was known to all that Generative AI has taken over some of the basic jobs. The more serious consequence could be , it could also destroy the bridges connecting the campus with the workplace.

The demise of "entry-level" positions did not begin with the birth of ChatGPT, nor with the COVID-19 pandemic, nor even with the rise of LinkedIn. Like many deep-rooted economic ills in the United States, the seeds of this collapse were sown long ago in the corporate boardrooms of the 1980s.

Let's look back at the golden age.

The personnel philosophy followed by American businesses in the three decades following World War II seems ridiculously naive today. Back then, the economy is growing. They maintained massive internal training systems and were accustomed to promoting talent from within. It's estimated that up to 90% of job vacancies were filled through internal promotions; external recruitment was only a last resort, never the preferred option.

At the time, retaining existing employees was far more cost-effective than recruiting new ones. The loyalty that built up over time from old employees, was a real competitive advantage from a human resources perspective.

That was an era when the "corporate ladder" truly lived up to its name. It was an edifice built solidly from the ground up, step by step; Scenarios like those seen in Wall Street dramas where someone rises from the mailroom all the way to the boardroom were by no means the stuff of fantasy back then.

Later, the thing changed.A massive structural shift happened in the workplace.

The shift began in the late 1970s and accelerated rapidly throughout the 1980s. The stagflation of the Carter administration shattered the post-war consensus on prosperity. Subsequently, the Reagan administration championed deregulation and supply-side economics, radically redefining the role of the corporation in extremely narrow terms.

The primary or even the only mission of a corporation became the maximization of shareholder value; it was no longer viewed as a complex social institution tasked with balancing the competing interests of employees, the community, and shareholders.

In 1970, when Chicago School economist Milton Friedman famously declared that "the only social responsibility of a corporation is to increase its profits," his statement was considered somewhat extreme. However, by the 1980s, it had become an unshakeable golden rule for company development.

General Electric (GE), under Jack Welch's leadership, became a model: it implemented annual performance-based layoffs, ruthlessly eliminating the bottom 10% of employees and putting the savings into shareholder pockets. Employees were no longer seen as long-term "assets" but rather as "variable costs" that had to be minimized and even eliminated. When layoffs benefited shareholders, the potential harm to living people was disregarded.

Reagan's "American Dream" perfectly catered to this survival-of-the-fittest mentality: companies only care about profits, not sentiment. Under the catchy slogan of "hard work pays off," if you can't find a job? Sorry, it's entirely your own fault for not working hard enough. 

In this new paradigm, internal training systems naturally became the first to be eliminated: since employees are merely replaceable production materials, not assets that appreciate in value over time, spending money to train them is a waste. If you can hire a ready-to-use, experienced worker from a competitor, why wasting 18 months and the associated costs training them yourself?

Economist William Lazonick summarized this shift as: companies have completely moved from a "retention and reinvestment" model to a "downsizing and distribution" model, which means, endlessly reducing staff, squeezing every last drop of cost surplus, and then transferring excess profits upwards to executives and outwards to shareholders.

This shift in mindset has been brewing for the past four decades. And those who have suffered the most severe blows are precisely the newcomers at the bottom of the career ladder. If a company's core hiring logic is "plunder" rather than "training," then fresh graduates are no longer valuable assets, but rather money-losing opportunities to be avoided at all costs. Today, half of the companies openly admit that they have no intention of hiring or training any inexperienced new employees. This is why many positions ostensibly open to fresh graduates require candidates to have 3-5 years of work experience.

(To be continued)