Across the world, including in India, graduates – even from the most elite universities – are finding it difficult to get jobs. This is partly because there are fewer graduate-level jobs. Whilst there is no definitive answer on why this is happening in economies as disparate as America and India, it is widely speculated that AI is taking away some graduate jobs. However, Rose Horowitch’s piece focuses on a separate and more interesting – supply-side – explanation for fewer graduate jobs. She says that it has increasingly difficult for employers to figure out which graduates to hire:
“Grade inflation and the rise of AI are making it impossible for employers to evaluate recent graduates….The hiring process is starting to break down. In the past, companies looking for fresh entry-level talent could rely on a college graduate’s GPA as a mark of their intelligence and work ethic. Hiring managers could assess a candidate’s cover letter and interview performance to get a sense of their writing and communication skills. Now those signals have lost much of their value. Rampant grade inflation has rendered GPAs almost meaningless. The widespread use of AI to write cover letters—and even to assist with job-interview performance—has robbed those assessments of their predictive power.
Two decades ago, fewer than a quarter of Harvard undergraduate grades were A’s. Today, 60 percent are. The trend holds across universities…
At the same time, cover letters and writing samples have become less reliable evidence of applicants’ abilities. (As anyone who has ever written or read a cover letter knows, they were never a perfect measure of ability. But they at least helped recruiters distinguish between candidates.) Two recent working papers found that for applicants on Freelancer.com, a job site connecting freelancers with employers, cover-letter quality used to strongly predict who would get a job and how well they would perform. Then ChatGPT became available. “We basically find the collapse of this entire signaling mechanism,” Jesse Silbert, one of the researchers, told me.”
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