The emergence of generative artificial intelligence is eroding the gateway to first jobs, and there is evidence to support this. In the US, companies that adopted AI reduced junior hiring by 22% and increased senior hiring. The decline is most dramatic in wholesale and retail (up to -40%) and also affects professional services and knowledge-intensive industries (Harvard, 2025). At the same time, youth unemployment in Chile reached 21.6%, while employment barely reached 22.8%, well below pre-pandemic levels (April-June, INE, 2025).

Until recently, studying for a university degree in Chile was synonymous with economic security. Today, that promise is in question: there are many graduates with debts, precarious jobs, or degrees with no job prospects. Among other things, technological change is rendering much of the training they receive obsolete, perpetuating the mismatch between what is taught and what the market demands.

Another critical issue is the shortage of graduates in STEM fields, which coincide with the highest-paying jobs in the formal market. Unfortunately, the interests of our young people do not follow this trend, and the number of graduates in information technology fell from 22% to 14%, and in exact sciences from 9% to 7% in the last decade (CNEP, 2024).

Some also attribute the first job crisis to the lack of flexibility in our labor market, the rise in the minimum wage, or the lack of specific subsidies; others warn that the challenge is deeper, because we continue to train for a world that no longer exists, when what is urgently needed is to develop critical thinking, creativity, resilience, leadership, and entrepreneurship. These latter skills are essential when we consider that almost 60% of Generation Z prefers alternative projects or startups as a path to independence (Harris Poll, 2025) and that in Chile, 87% of young people say they are willing to become entrepreneurs (UGM, 2025).

Despite everything, there are also great opportunities in this scenario, as described in the August edition of the Wall Street Journal, which confirms the challenge facing recent graduates but also describes a notable exception: “young people in their early 20s with AI skills who are earning astronomical salaries.” Without going any further, José Joaquín Brunner proposed last week in El Mostrador that third and fourth year high school students should be intensively oriented towards the use of artificial intelligence, advocating for greater curricular flexibility and trajectories adapted to the talents and interests of young people, thus restoring “meaning to an educational level that has been losing it.”

The first job crisis is a reflection of a system that has lost coherence and relevance. Reversing it requires a profound educational redesign that trains in skills and opens up real opportunities, as only then will education once again be an engine of mobility and not the broken promise of a generation.


Mónica Retamal F.
Executive Director at Kodea