US Students Boo Pro-AI Graduation Speakers - College Grads AI Anxieties, Threat to Career Prospects
- 'US students on why they booed their pro-AI graduation speakers: ‘They’re not reading the room,’ The Guardian, May 26, 2026. - Edit.
- Recent college grads are not very fond of commencement speakers hyping up a technology they see as a threat to their career prospects
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When Jacob Pagel graduated from Middle Tennessee State University this spring, predictions about artificial intelligence already had him questioning the value of his degree. Then a music executive started preaching about AI’s transformative power during a commencement speech. “This industry will change on you in a heartbeat. It has already changed more in the last 10 years than in the 50 years prior … AI is rewriting production as we sit here,” said Scott Borchetta, CEO of the record label Big Machine.
After a few stray boos from graduates, he doubled down: “Deal with it.”
The students’ jeering grew louder, but Borchetta barreled through: “You can hear me now or you can pay me later … then do something about it. It’s a tool. Make it work for you.” He continued: “The things you learned in your first year here may already be obsolete.” Borchetta’s remarks were “a knife to the chest”, says Pagel, who studied political science and human development family sciences. He felt the boos reflected how annoyed students were about what they saw as out-of-touch executives downplaying their anxieties about AI.
A 2025 Harvard poll of young people in the US found that a majority see AI as a threat to their career prospects.
Pagel and his peers are entering a job market where AI’s efficiency is already being used to justify mass layoffs. While it’s unclear which jobs may be entirely replaced by AI – and whether AI could eventually create more career pathways than it destroys – recent graduates are feeling betrayed. “We’ve been pushed our entire lives to get our diplomas. They've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a degree that they don’t know will serve them well.”
Then you pulled the rug out from underneath us, and said: ‘Oh, you know those four years you spent learning how to do very specific things, you don’t need to do it any more,’” Pagel says. “We can get a computer to do it for two-thirds the price.” Borchetta’s speech is one of several at commencement ceremonies this spring that have revealed a disconnect between the executives championing AI and students,
- More,
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/26/students-boo-pro-ai-graduation-speakers