By: Edward DuCoin
This year, my company posted one opening for a marketing project manager. Within 48 hours, we had 450 resumes.
The volume overwhelmed us. So did the tone. Many of the applicants seemed desperate for an opportunity. And a shocking number of the resumes had typos and grammar errors. My gut reaction was, “Oh boy. This is only 2026. Imagine 2030.”
I see the other side of that pile every week. I am the co-founder of Orpical Technology Solutions, an AI-native software and business operations company named to the Philadelphia Business Journal’s Fast 50 three years in a row. I also teach at Montclair State University in New Jersey, where my students are primarily juniors and seniors on the cusp of graduating.
Many of them are questioning college altogether. Their friends are becoming plumbers, electricians, and construction workers, or training for hands-on medical jobs. Each of these jobs offers a path to a six-figure income in a few years. My students wonder which choice is better. Meanwhile, some of the most powerful people in technology are telling young people to skip college entirely.
I want to be clear: a collegiate education still matters, and students are not the problem; institutions must change.
The promise
For generations, college made a simple promise: earn this degree, learn these skills, and a career in your field will be waiting.
That promise is out of date. Here is the one I believe should replace it: we will tell you honestly how your field is changing, teach you its foundations and its language, and develop the judgment, communication, and adaptability to do the work AI cannot.
Everything that follows is measured against that standard.
What is different this time
Technology has eliminated jobs before. What is different now is where it is hitting: the first rung of the ladder.
Junior employees have always learned by doing basic work. AI now does much of that work. Companies still want experienced professionals, but if they need fewer beginners, where does the next generation get its experience?
The early evidence is real, and it is contested. A Census Bureau working paper published in September found that graduates of the most AI-exposed majors were five percentage points less likely to land an initial job, and their starting earnings fell 13%. The authors compared that to graduating into a large recession.
I am not an economist. I am reporting what I see from both sides of the desk: the same work, fewer people, and a harder first step. I tell my marketing students there will be fewer marketing jobs, and I suspect the best of them will pay more than ever.
A 180° shift in 10 minutes
Early in the most recent semesters, I have asked my students whether companies have a moral obligation to hire people. The answer has been consistent. They say yes.
Then I ask how many of them, or their parents, hold stock through an app like Robinhood or a 401(k). Most hands go up.
Then comes the question. Assume a company can get the same work done with 1,000 people earning $250,000 a year, or with 5,000 people earning $90,000. That is $250 million in payroll against $450 million. Which is better for your portfolio? Every student picks the first.
It is a simplified choice, and I tell them so. Real companies weigh revenue, service, and risk, and a person can believe in both corporate responsibility and efficiency. But the exercise shows where the pressure points. When AI lets a company do the same work with fewer people, shareholders will reward it, and many of those shareholders are us.
That is why the exercise belongs in an article about universities. No college should build its promise on the hope that employers will keep entry-level jobs out of kindness.
Today’s secretarial science
In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, colleges across the country offered degrees in secretarial science. Students studied shorthand, typing, and dictation, and they graduated into solid careers. Then the personal computer arrived, and those programs all but disappeared.
What is today’s version? From where I sit, there are at least three.
- Marketing: drafting routine ad copy and social posts, building a basic media plan, and running standard market research.
- Business and finance: building standard spreadsheets, reports, and financial models.
- Computer science: writing entry-level code.
AI now produces a first draft of each in minutes. The knowledge underneath still matters, because someone must know if the model is right. But a program that still treats the task itself as the career skill is teaching shorthand.
College is not one product at one price. The College Board puts average published tuition at about $12,000 a year at in-state public universities and about $45,000 at private ones, before aid. At any price, students deserve to know what they are buying.
“It would not shock me if, in the next five to ten years, there is a revolt from students who took on tremendous debt and cannot find a position.”
A school that delivers on its promise should not be responsible for the effort a student puts into getting and keeping a job. But the promise has to be current and honest.
Why I still believe in college
“Artificial intelligence makes the human element of business, and frankly of every aspect of life, even more important.”
Part of any profession is learning its vocabulary. You cannot be a lawyer without understanding legal terms, or a CFO without understanding financial terms. AI can supply the definitions. It cannot give you the judgment to know when its answer is wrong. That judgment is built by working through the material with someone who knows it.
I tell my students to use AI as a partner, not a crutch. Everything they submit has to be explainable and defensible.
A classroom is also a safe place to take risks and make mistakes, before the mistakes cost a client or a career. AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio has said, “Education is mostly about how to become a better human being.”
The soft skills are now the hard skills
I graduated from college in 1987. For decades afterward, people viewed listening, communication, and creativity as soft skills, and much of higher education went along with it.
“It is my firm belief that the once-considered soft skills of listening, time management, and creativity are now more important than the hard skills.”
I should be precise. Human skills and the humanities are not the same thing. History and philosophy are disciplines. Listening and time management are skills that any discipline can build, if it sets out to. Students need both, and they still need technical competence. The graduates who do best will combine all three.
Take project management. AI can already handle much of the administration: scheduling, tracking, and documentation. It cannot be accountable for the outcome. Colleges should teach students to lead the project.
What universities should change
Some institutions already do parts of this, through co-op programs, industry-taught courses, and new AI requirements. My criticism is about pace and consistency. I also know that none of it is free. I would start with four changes.
- Teach and assess human skills in every major. A few universities offer dedicated listening courses, but they are rarely required. Teach and grade listening, writing, and collaboration alongside the technical work, with more humanities in the mix.
- Require AI literacy tied to the profession. Every major should show students how AI is changing that specific field. It should teach them to verify AI’s output, catch its errors, and improve on it.
- Formalize the shared classroom. Guest speakers are common, and teaching assistants are usually graduate students who know the vocabulary but have little industry experience. I am proposing a formal partnership. A working professional, hired as an adjunct, teaches about half of a semester’s 12 to 15 weekly sessions, and the tenured professor teaches the rest. A full course can demand 45 classroom hours plus grading. Cutting that in half widens the pool of experts who can say yes, and it lets the professor’s proven theoretical knowledge reach more students.
- Publish the outcomes. Colleges should report employment and earnings by major, the kinds of jobs graduates get, and how often each program is reviewed against its profession. Much of this data exists. It should be current and easy to find.
What students can do now
Students have work to do too. Spend time learning AI every day. Proofread everything. Ask any program how it has changed in the past two years, and who from industry helped change it.
What I hire for
“We are constantly competing against exceptional firms. So we have to be exceptional plus one, all the time.”
That is the standard I hire against. In a candidate, it looks like this:
- Common sense.
- The ability to listen extremely well.
- Tremendous communication skills.
- A commitment to excellence and a commitment to deadlines.
- The ability to take AI output and make it better.
We are a high-tech, fast-growth company, and almost nothing on that list is technical. A resume with typos fails it on the first line.
Those 450 applicants were not short on effort. I keep wondering what they were promised. Every college should be able to answer one question in writing: what are you promising the class of 2030, and how will you know you kept it?
Edward DuCoin is Co-Founder of Orpical Technology Solutions, an AI-native software development and business operations company focused on marketing services. He teaches at Montclair State University and has taught at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and Rowan University’s Rohrer College of Business.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau: Graduating into Disruption: Labor Market Outcomes for AI-Exposed College Majors
- The College Investor: The college wage premium just fell to its mid-1990s level
- Vanguard: What’s behind young workers’ job struggles?
- Axios: Tech’s new pitch for college: skip it
- College Board: Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid
- HyperAI: Yoshua Bengio believes college still matters
