Entry-Level Jobs Are Disappearing. The Public Sector and Higher Education Can Rebuild It.
The class of 2026 walked across the stage into the worst entry-level job market in nearly four decades. How can the public sector and higher education reverse that?
At commencement this spring, graduates booed. Not the speakers - the future.
The first rung of the career ladder is disappearing. This started before AI, but AI is accelerating it. Entry-level job postings in the U.S. are down about 35% since January 2023, according to Revelio Labs. At the biggest tech firms, new graduates made up just 7% of hires in 2024 - down from roughly a quarter only a year earlier. Anthropic’s CEO has warned that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. He has since softened that prediction, and reasonable people argue about whether the number is right. What is harder to argue with is the logic underneath it: when a tool can do the foundational task at almost no cost, the business case for paying a junior person to learn that task starts to fall apart.
So here is the problem. Employers still want experience - work-based learning, in-school experience, and the kind of judgment you only build on the job. But they have stopped paying to create it. They are hiring people who already know the work rather than training the people who don’t. And AI is making that choice easy to keep making- in an uncertain economy, cheaper, faster technology is a rational choice for any employer.
We keep waiting for the private sector to fix a problem it has little reason to fix. Imagine, however, that there is an employer in every county, in every state, in nearly every field of the economy, and it is staring down the exact opposite problem; experienced employees are leaving and retiring in droves.
Government.
City, state, and federal agencies employ contract negotiators and road crews. IT technicians and epidemiologists. Accountants, planners, foresters, engineers, grant writers, and gardeners. And right now, state and local governments have been carrying hundreds of thousands of open positions, just as “Peak 65” - the largest wave of Americans ever to turn 65 in a single stretch - pulls experienced public servants out the door.
So, look at the two problems side by side. One is a generation that can’t get the experience it needs. The other is a sector that is losing the experience it has. Each one is the other’s answer.
None of this is a new idea.
In 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps began putting young people to work building the parks, trails, and infrastructure we still use today. Close to three million served before it ended, and it remains one of the most popular things the federal government has ever done. AmeriCorps has run on the same logic since 1994, and more than 1.2 million members have served through it. The Public Lands Corps still places young people on conservation work and hands them two years of non-competitive federal hiring eligibility when they finish.
But a connection to public jobs is only half of the answer. The other half is a connection to learning.
Picture a public works residency. Colleges and universities partner with state, county, and city governments to build real public work into the degree - not a summer internship bolted onto the side, but a paid, structured term where students do the work the public actually needs done. The planning student helps a county redo its zoning. The data student rebuilds the permitting system that still runs on paper. The engineering student inspects the bridges that no one has the staff to inspect. Think of it less like a class trip and more like a medical residency - you learn the work by doing the work, supervised, on real cases that matter. Students graduate with a credential and a year of genuine experience. Government gets work done and gets an early look at its next generation of talent. And higher education does what it was built to do - prepare people for a working life and serve the public good while it’s at it.
These partnerships exist today, just not at scale. Co-op schools like Northeastern and Drexel run partnerships with government agencies. New York City’s schools, the teachers’ union, and CUNY already bring graduates back as career and technical teachers after they get paid work experience. Several states braid federal workforce dollars into apprenticeships that build all the way to a bachelor’s degree. The pieces are on the table. What’s missing is someone deciding to assemble them - paid, credentialed, and aimed squarely at the experience gap in front of us.
To be effective and worthwhile, we need to ensure that these opportunities truly serve as a bridge between knowledge and skill-building.
The work has to be paid, the learning has to count toward a credential, and the supervision has to be real. Done at scale, that costs money, and I won't pretend I have the funding mechanism worked out yet. But the payoff lands on every side: learners get a real on-ramp to a career, public employers get talent and work they can't otherwise staff, and the public gets services it's currently going without. That is a connection worth figuring out how to pay for.
We are about to watch a generation of capable graduates stall at the starting line, while the public sector that serves all of us empties out at the other end. We have solved a version of this before. The question is whether we assemble the pieces now - before the class of 2027 walks across the same stage, and boos a little louder.