I asked Claude Sonnet 4.6 Extended Thinking to research the tasks relevant to preparing our new students for the new realities they will face when they begin their planned careers. The urgency is real. Entry-level hiring at the 15 biggest tech firms fell 25 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to a SignalFire report. With AI tools performing more of the work previously reserved for recent graduates, new hires are expected to slot in at a higher level almost from day one. That is not a distant forecast. That is the market your Class of 2027 will enter.
The transition from generative AI to agentic AI is the inflection point that makes this moment different from prior technology shifts. Agentic AI systems plan, reason, act and collaborate independently, shifting from augmentation to widespread displacement and the creation of new roles. In the workplace, full AI implementation jumped from 11 percent to 42 percent year over year, and CIOs report that 30 percent of the AI budget is now reserved for agentic AI.
What does this mean for graduates? Entry-level roles are evolving from task execution to “orchestration” of digital labor and AI agents, demanding that career progression becomes a nonlinear “mosaic” based on project outcomes and continuous skills development rather than tenure. As Salesforce VP of workforce innovation Ruth Hickin put it, “It’s no longer just about execution. It’s also about orchestration as a core skill.”
McKinsey’s “State of AI in 2025” report reveals that 62 percent of organizations are experimenting with AI agents, with 23 percent scaling agentic systems within at least one business function. Many of the tasks that a new hire has historically performed—information gathering, basic data analysis, report writing, presentation development—are what AI now does well. Those basic tasks are a form of training for the new hire. If AI removes that scaffold, programs that have not deliberately replaced it with something else are sending unprepared graduates into the workplace.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is among those who forecast that 50 percent of entry-level jobs may ultimately be displaced by AI as the technology matures. Even short of that figure, the combination of skills-based hiring, AI-driven task displacement and employer pessimism creates a perfect storm for students in academic programs that have not deliberately recalibrated. This further raises the question about what happens to the traditional career ladder that prepares young workers to start at a firm, stay at a firm and rise all the way to the top.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Extended Thinking on April 5, 2026, responded to my prompt with seven important tasks for us to complete prior to the fall term, paraphrased below. Sonnet concluded with a warning for the workplace as a whole.
- Conduct an immediate program audit through an AI lens
Before anything else can happen, chairs need to know what they are working with. Map every course in your degree against the question “Which learning outcomes in this course are now competently performed by a midtier AI agent?” This is not a rhetorical exercise—it is the diagnostic that will drive everything else. Engage your faculty in this audit collaboratively, framing it not as a threat to their courses but as an opportunity to elevate them.
- Make AI fluency a programwide graduation competency
A single “AI tools” elective is insufficient. The emerging consensus in higher education calls for moving beyond academic integrity concerns to AI fluency as a graduation standard, where assessments focus on process rather than product. Deans should work with chairs this summer to identify how AI fluency, not just AI literacy, gets threaded across every program. This means students learn not only to use AI tools but to prompt, evaluate, supervise and critically interrogate their outputs. AI literacy is the No. 1 skill chief human relations officers say workers need as businesses move into the agentic economy.
- Redesign at least one capstone around agentic task supervision (orchestration)
The most valuable thing a program can do in the time remaining is ensure students have supervised, reflected upon and demonstrated the ability to direct AI agents toward meaningful professional outcomes. Salesforce has identified 10 essential enterprise skills for the agentic era, organized into human competencies (adaptability, accountability, collaboration, emotional intelligence), agent competencies (AI literacy, human-agent collaboration) and business competencies (problem-solving, critical thinking, data interpretation, storytelling). Capstone projects redesigned around these skills, with real deliverables and employer-connected review panels, will differentiate graduates in ways that a revised transcript alone cannot.
- Accelerate employer engagement around AI role evolution
Most advisory boards are too slow-moving to provide the intelligence needed right now. Chairs should convene focused listening sessions with several regional or national employers this summer to ask specifically, what does the first 90 days look like for a new hire in your organization today, compared to two years ago? What tasks have AI agents absorbed? What do you now expect humans to handle that you previously would have trained them on? The answers to those questions should drive course-level revisions for fall. Industry experience and demonstrated proficiencies are among the top factors considered by employers in NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 survey.
- Expand and credential experiential learning ASAP
To help students prepare, the education system will likely need to change—particularly by encouraging students to become proficient using AI and to take on more hands-on experiential learning. A new model of “AI apprenticeship” is emerging where juniors use AI to bypass the experience gap and perform at midlevel capacity. Deans should work with their institution’s continuing education and workforce development offices to fast-track partnerships placing students in supervised, AI-augmented project environments before they graduate.
- Audit and revise graduate advising language
This can be done immediately. The language your career advisers use with students, including the skills they highlight, the roles they flag as targets, the industries they emphasize, should be updated to reflect the current landscape. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s recent labor market analysis found philosophy majors outperforming computer science graduates in employment prospects, with the shift tied to the premium placed on human reasoning, adaptability and cross-domain thinking. That is a story worth telling students, and it changes the advising conversation considerably.
- Launch a rapid faculty development initiative focused on AI integration
Faculty cannot redesign courses around competencies they haven’t personally developed. A high-engagement AI workshop series in May and June emphasizing hands-on agentic tool use in discipline-specific contexts is among the most impactful investments a dean can make this summer. Faculty who return to their courses in August having deeply engaged with these tools will redesign their pedagogy.
Finally, Claude Sonnet 4.6 Extended Thinking issued a structural warning.
“There is a cautionary note that academic leaders must hold alongside all of this urgency. If companies stop hiring juniors at scale, they risk eating their own seed corn. By 2030, industries may face a critical shortage of true senior leaders; [sic] those capable of understanding systems below the AI abstraction layer. The risk, as one analyst put it, is creating a generation of ‘architects who have never laid a brick.’”
We in higher education now must ensure that graduates bring the contextual judgment, ethical reasoning and human relationship capacity that agentic systems cannot replicate. UPCEA’s 2026 Predictions for Higher Education foreground workforce and employer alignment as a critical convergence point, emphasizing that labor market volatility is forcing colleges to rethink how learning connects to opportunity.
There is much good work to be done before the fall semester begins. How might you contribute to this important work on your campus?
