Did AI eat your job? Learn to teach
- Joanne Jacobs
- Jul 2
- 2 min read
New college graduates are having trouble finding work, in part because AI is taking entry-level programming jobs, writes Chad Aldeman. But education majors are in very high demand.
Only 1 percent of graduates in special education, 1.3 percent of early childhood education majors and 1.8 percent of early education majors are unemployed, reports the New York Fed. (Also hot: nutrition, construction services, animal and plant sciences and civil engineering.)

Among the majors with relatively high unemployment rates are physics (7.8 percent) and computer engineering (7.5 percent).
What's bad for young coders could be good for education, writes Fordham's Michael Petrilli. He hopes some of those computer science graduates will become teachers.
Teachers who enter the profession during recessions are "unusually effective at boosting student achievement, especially in math, according to a 2020 paper. The number of excellent teachers is “strongly influenced by how attractive teaching is relative to other jobs,” said co-author Marty West of Harvard.
A larger pool of would-be teachers -- with more "math people" in it -- would be a blessing.
AI won't replace teachers, Petrilli writes. It's a quintessentially human-to-human job. But it might make teachers "more efficient and effective—so much so that schools could do without quite as many teacher aides, administrative staffers and the rest of the army of people who now make up the majority of K-12 employees."
Are we sure AI won't replace teachers? Caroline Fell Kurban, Dan Jones, Juli Ross-Kleinmann and Jon Harper discuss how AI may take over some teaching tasks and change the role of teachers. Among their conclusions: AI can provide faster feedback and personalize learning experiences, as well as helping teachers with administrative tasks. It can't handle human relationships.
AI will replace a lot of teachers. Those who teach material that is just regurgitated. Teachers could learn to teach problem solving, but most of what is taught in school can be "remembered" better by computers than humans.
What might happen if students were actually taught to learn, to study? To take knowledge and solve problems with it.