Every spring, millions of high school seniors make decisions that will shape the next decade of their lives, usually with too little information and too much noise. Go to college. Skip college. Get a trade. Learn to code. And now, layered over all of it: what about AI?
The adults in their lives, including coaches, parents, counselors, and teachers, are navigating this alongside them, often drawing on advice that was accurate ten years ago but may no longer be. The job market has shifted. The value of credentials has become more nuanced. And AI is not a future threat. It is already reshaping the workplace in ways that demand an honest look at the evidence.
This post draws on data from some of the most credible institutions studying this question: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW), the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Pew Research Center. Not blogs or opinion pieces. The actual research.
Before we talk about what to study, we need to talk about how hiring actually works, because many young people and the adults advising them are still operating on outdated assumptions.
Most people believe that job searching means polishing a resume and applying to open postings online. The research tells a more complicated story. A landmark study published in Science and analyzed in the Harvard Business Review, drawing on data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments involving 20 million people, found that your strongest ties, specifically your immediate coworkers, close friends, and family, are actually the least helpful for finding new jobs (Bojinov et al., 2022). The connections that matter most are what researchers call “weak ties”: acquaintances, former classmates, and professional contacts you do not talk to every day.
This has a direct implication for young people. Building a broad, diverse professional network matters more than deepening the relationships they already have. Internships, informational interviews, professional associations, mentorships, and platforms like LinkedIn are not just resume builders. They are relationship infrastructure that statistically increases the likelihood of getting hired.
The second major shift is that AI is now embedded in the hiring process itself. Pew Research Center (2025) found that workers younger than 50 and workers with at least a bachelor’s degree are among the most likely to use AI in their jobs today. Understanding how to work with AI tools is increasingly a baseline expectation, not a differentiator.
When you are supporting a young person in planning their career, help them think about relationship-building as a skill, not just a personality trait. Who do they know outside their immediate circle? Who do they want to know? What communities, programs, or experiences would put them in proximity to people working in fields they care about? Networking is not schmoozing. It is the evidence-based mechanism by which most jobs are actually filled.
The short answer: it depends, and the data is more nuanced than the cultural debate around this question suggests.
The Long-Run Case for a Bachelor’s Degree Is Real
Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce analyzed over 4,600 colleges in their 2025 return on investment report and found that institutions offering associate’s degrees or certificates often deliver a higher ROI after ten years, largely because they cost less and get students into the workforce faster (Georgetown CEW, 2025a). However, over a 40-year career, the value of a bachelor’s degree outpaces associate’s degrees and certificates in almost all cases (Georgetown CEW, 2025a). Specifically, public bachelor’s degree-granting institutions carry a median 40-year ROI of nearly $1.8 million, compared to $1.43 million for public institutions primarily granting associate’s degrees and certificates (Georgetown CEW, 2025b).
But the Major Matters Enormously
Georgetown CEW’s analysis of earnings and employment outcomes across bachelor’s degrees found that recent graduates with degrees in computer science, statistics, and mathematics earn a median of $79,000, yet face the highest unemployment rate in all of STEM at 6.8 percent (Georgetown CEW, 2025c). Even high-paying fields carry real risk at the entry level. A credential does not guarantee employment. What it earns depends heavily on the field and the institution.
Importantly, Georgetown CEW also found that short-term, sub-baccalaureate credentials in technical fields can yield salaries comparable to or greater than some bachelor’s degrees (Georgetown CEW, 2025a). Skilled trades and focused technical certificates are not the backup plan they were once framed as. For the right student, they can be the smart plan.
The Honest Framework for Advising Young People
The question is not “college or no college.” It is four interconnected questions: the right credential type, from the right institution, in a field with real demand, at a debt load the outcome can actually support. A student taking on $80,000 in debt for a low-demand major at a poorly-performing institution is making a high-risk financial decision with little evidence on their side. A student earning a nursing degree through a community college-to-university pathway is likely making a sound one. The military pathway, apprenticeships, and community college transfer routes also deserve serious consideration, not as lesser alternatives, but as legitimate strategic choices for the right person.
Here is what the two most authoritative sources say, side by side.
Bureau of Labor Statistics: 2024 to 2034 Projections
The BLS projects total U.S. employment to grow from 170 million in 2024 to 175.2 million in 2034, a 3.1 percent increase that is significantly slower than the 13 percent growth recorded over the prior decade (BLS, 2025). Growth is not evenly distributed. Healthcare and social assistance is projected to be the fastest-growing industry sector at 8.4 percent, driven by an aging population and rising rates of chronic illness (BLS, 2025). The fastest-growing occupational groups are healthcare support roles, including nurse practitioners and physician assistants, and computer and mathematical roles, including data scientists and information security analysts (CNBC, 2025,). Wind turbine service technicians are projected to grow 50 percent by 2034, the highest growth rate of any single occupation, reflecting accelerating investment in renewable energy infrastructure (USAFacts, 2025).
World Economic Forum: Future of Jobs Report 2025
The WEF report surveyed over 1,000 global employers representing more than 14 million workers across 22 industries and 55 economies. It found that by 2030, 170 million new roles will be created globally while 92 million will be displaced, yielding a net gain of 78 million jobs (World Economic Forum, 2025). The fastest-growing roles in percentage terms are Big Data Specialists, Fintech Engineers, AI and Machine Learning Specialists, and Software and Application Developers (WEF, 2025). Alongside these technical fields, significant growth is also projected for care roles, educators, and nursing professionals (WEF, 2025b).
The pattern across both the BLS and WEF data is consistent. Jobs being displaced are predominantly those involving routine information processing, data entry, and repetitive administrative tasks. Jobs growing are those requiring either deep technical expertise that builds on AI rather than competing with it, or irreducibly human capacities such as physical care, clinical judgment, relationship-based service, and adaptive reasoning.
Perhaps the most important finding for those of us working with young people is not which jobs are growing. It is which skills are growing.
The WEF found that employers expect 39 percent of key skills required in the job market to change by 2030 (World Economic Forum, 2025c). That is not a small shift. It means that a significant portion of what a young person learns for their first job will need to be updated or replaced within just a few years of graduating. The top skills on the rise include AI and big data, networks and cybersecurity, and technological literacy. But the WEF is equally clear that creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, agility, curiosity, lifelong learning, and leadership and social influence are all growing in importance alongside technical skills (WEF, 2025c). This is not a soft skills versus hard skills debate. The evidence does not support prioritizing one over the other.
Pew Research Center’s nationally representative survey of 5,273 employed U.S. adults found that workers’ use of AI on the job rose from 16 percent in 2024 to 21 percent by late 2025, with younger workers and more educated workers leading that adoption (Pew Research Center, 2025b). Young people who graduate already comfortable working with AI tools will have a genuine advantage. Waiting to learn it later is an increasingly costly choice.
The research does not give us a simple answer to hand to a 17-year-old. What it gives us is a better set of questions to ask, and a clearer picture of what we are actually preparing young people for.
Questions Worth Exploring in Coaching Conversations
At Youth Coaching Institute, we believe that preparing young people for an AI-shaped future is not primarily a career planning problem. It is a human development problem. The young people who will navigate this era most successfully are not necessarily the ones who pick the right major on the first try. They are the ones who know who they are, can build meaningful relationships, can adapt when circumstances change, and have enough self-awareness to keep learning throughout their lives.
Those are exactly the capacities that evidence-based youth coaching is designed to build. The research on the future of work does not make our work less relevant. It makes it more urgent. Learn more about our coach training programs here.
