David Deming - What's Happening to Young Workers, and What College Should Do About It

College graduates are now, for the first time in recent memory, more likely to be unemployed than the average worker. How did that happen? And what does it mean for higher education? My guest today is David Deming, professor of economics at Harvard, dean of Harvard College. He also writes a great sub stack called Fork Lightning and hosts a fantastic podcast called The Context Window.

Here's our talk.

Welcome to the Economics of Work. I'm excited to welcome David Deming, professor of economics at Harvard, dean of Harvard College, and author of one of my favorite substacks, Fork Lightning, and host of one of my favorite podcasts, The Context Window.

So David, welcome to the show. What a kind introduction, Ben. Thank you for having me. I'm excited for the conversation.

Yeah, for sure. No, I'm really liking it. I liked Pork Lightning. It's great. It's like very succinct and to the point. Love it.

Thank you. Life is short. You got to get to the point.

Yeah, yeah. They say like, you know, if you're giving a speech, better to be short and good than short and bad than long and good than long and bad.

There you go. Sounds about right to me.

Okay, so we hear a lot about like how on the job training is kind of diminishing due to AI automating entry level tasks. That's like a common take. And I wanted to hear your perspective on like, one, is that happening? And if it's a real thing, then like, how do colleges respond to that?

Yeah. OK, so it's interesting question to start off with, Ben, because the reality is we don't actually measure on the job training or on the job learning very well. And so there's a lot of talk about it happening and it probably is happening for reasons we can get into. But it's surprisingly hard to just say, well, you know, when I worked at this company, I used to get trained. 15 hours a week and now I'm leading train five because a lot of the training is apprenticeship, you know, so you're kind of with people who've been around longer than you soaking the information in by osmosis rather than like I'm in school now. So it's a lot harder to measure the extent of mentorship. I do think one reason to think there's less of it happening is because of the shift to remote work. And so it's a lot harder to mentor the person next to you when they're not actually next to you. They're next to you on a screen. They're not physically next to you. And I know I'm sure you can think of times early in your career. I know I can where like I either strategically or unintentionally popped in to talk to a more senior colleague and get some feedback from them or watch how they behave in a way that's not really captured in a job test taxonomy or anything like that, but is really important to helping the junior people become senior one day. And I think that's probably not happening as much online because you go in a meeting and then when the meeting's over, you hit end meeting and there's no kind of water cooler conversation. There's no learning by osmosis that's happening afterward. It's all in the meeting. And there's no like recap, hey, here's why I did this this way. And so I think there's a lot of common sense reasons to think it's happening less than it