Humanities Majors are Beating Computer Science. The World Has Shifted.

Three million students graduated from American colleges this year and walked straight into the worst entry-level job market in two decades. Recent graduate unemployment is running higher than the peak of 2008. Tech internships are pulling 273 applications per posting. And the New York Fed just confirmed that computer science majors now have more trouble finding work than humanities majors. That last one should make heads explode on Reddit. Mike and Neal dig into whether AI is actually the culprit, or whether this is a messier story. Information sector payrolls have collapsed back to March 2021 levels, erasing four years of gains in 16 months. Salesforce is hiring almost nobody except salespeople. But overall unemployment sits near historic lows, which means the pain is concentrated, not widespread. The conversation gets into which part of that is AI doing its job, which part is big companies using AI as a fig leaf to cut payrolls they should have cut years ago, and what it means that the cost to start a company is now essentially zero at exactly the moment those same companies have stopped hiring junior talent. They also work through the question IBM is quietly asking that nobody else seems to be: if you stop hiring junior people today, where do your middle managers come from in ten years? Mike makes the case that the current downturn is a buying opportunity for companies that are serious, that Stanford CS grads available at a discount are rocket fuel if you have the nerve to hire them. Neal's hot take is that the class of 2026 is not the group he is actually worried about. The class of 2034 is. Plus: the Orioles are climbing, Antarctic krill are getting strip-mined to feed America's omega-3 habit, Blue Origin's New Glenn turned Cape Canaveral into something resembling a tactical nuclear detonation, New York City is going car-free on 50 streets for the World Cup, and a CIA officer with a top-secret clearance stashed $40 million in gold bars in his house. Neal also makes a case for prediction markets that Mike does not buy for a second. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.