Remote work has sidelined younger college grads, research finds
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests the reason unemployment has been rising for new college graduates is the prevalence of remote work. NPR's Andrea Hsu reports.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: The study began with a deep dive into what was happening at one Fortune 500 tech company, which is not named in the report. Emma Harrington is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Virginia and one of the authors of the report. She says they first looked at how much feedback employees got when they were not in the office.
EMMA HARRINGTON: What we saw was this pretty striking pattern that software engineers got 20% more feedback if they were sitting near their colleagues than if they were distant from them.
HSU: So the next question was, as remote work became the norm, was the company still keen on hiring fresh college grads who might need more training, more mentoring? Turns out...
HARRINGTON: They really switched away from hiring young people when they went remote. So they used to hire a bunch of new grads for their software engineering jobs. Then they shifted really towards hiring much older people.
HSU: But then the company called folks back to the office, and they resumed hiring the younger grads. That got the researchers wondering.
HARRINGTON: Well, can we see this in the entire economy? Like, is this company weird?
HSU: Turns out, no, it's not weird. Data from the Labor Department showed after the pandemic, unemployment among recent college grads grew by 20% and fell slightly for older grads - those 29 and up. The age gap in employment was most pronounced in jobs that can be done from home. What the research team did not find was that AI was a big driver of this gap - yet anyway.
HARRINGTON: It's always hard to make guesses about what's going to happen with generative AI, but I think it's certainly possible that this story could really change over the next few years.
HSU: In fact, it may already be changing now. Andrea Hsu, NPR News.
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