Higher education
fromThe Atlantic
3 days agoYoung People Are Falling Behind, but Not Because of AI
The rise in unemployment for recent graduates is not primarily due to AI, despite perceptions.
The outbreak of war in the Middle East has already affected energy prices, amid concerns that inflation may rise in the coming months. Despite this difficult market environment, most London-based small businesses remain committed to short-term growth plans.
The TechFirst Women's Programme, backed by £4 million of government funding, aims to create at least 300 paid placements in technology roles across the UK. The programme will work with businesses, including small and medium-sized enterprises, to identify opportunities for women to gain experience in fields such as software development, digital engineering, data science and artificial intelligence.
25% of all new iPhones are now made in India. An estimated 55 million iPhones were manufactured in India last year, up from 36 million in 2024. India's rise as a top iPhone manufacturing hub began back in 2017 with the iPhone SE, with the iPhone 6s joining it a year later.
Apple is now manufacturing 25% of its iPhones in India - hitting a milestone JPMorgan predicted back in 2022 - as part of its long-term plan to reduce its reliance on China. Last year, India accounted for 55 million iPhones of the roughly 220 million to 230 million produced worldwide.
Mid-career women with at least five years' experience are being overlooked for digital roles in the tech and financial and professional services sectors, where they are traditionally underrepresented, according to the report by the City of London Corporation. The governing body that runs the capital's Square Mile found female applicants were discriminated against by rigid, and sometimes automated, screening of their CVs, which did not take into account career gaps related to caring for children or relatives, or only narrowly considered their professional experience.
Blackstone announced on Monday it was leading a $600 million equity investment in Indian AI cloud startup Neysa, while chip giant AMD announced an expanded partnership with Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services to deploy up to 200 megawatts of AI infrastructure capacity in India.Blackstone's multi-million-dollar commitment to Neysa will help deploy more than 20,000 GPUs for AI training in India, while AMD's partnership with TCS aims to support India's sovereign AI initiatives and accelerate enterprise deployments.
Apple currently has five branded stores in India, including Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Bengaluru, and Noida. The most recent one, and the second in Delhi NCR, was inaugurated in December 2025 at the DLF Mall of India in Sector 18, Noida. During the Cupertino-based tech giant's recent quarterly earnings call, Apple announced that it will "soon" open a second store in Mumbai.
India became the world's largest market for generative AI app downloads in 2025, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, widening its lead over the U.S. as installs jumped 207% year-over-year. Companies including OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity rolled out extended free premium offers to accelerate user growth in the price sensitive market.
If employers want to bring workers from overseas, then they must also invest in the skills of workers already in Britain, Starmer said in May. At the same time, we will wean our national economy off its reliance on cheap labour from overseas. The end result will be a reformed immigration system that no longer ignores the millions of people who want the opportunity to train and contribute.
Young people are "experiencing higher education differently, and that is shaping much of what parents are saying," said Lammers. "[Parents] are reacting to the questions their children are asking and trying to find the best way to help them navigate the next steps."
LinkedIn's latest research shows that while 72% of professionals plan to look for a new job this year, 84% feel unprepared as AI rapidly reshapes hiring and career growth. To bring clarity amid this uncertainty, LinkedIn's annual Jobs on the Rise list highlights the fastest-growing roles over the past three years. The data reveals strong demand for both technical and leadership AI roles, such as AI engineers and AI managers,
While many assume formal learning is limited to a bachelor's or master's degree, both the CEO of VC firm General Catalyst, Hemant Taneja, and McKinsey's top executive, Bob Sternfels, say that's not the case anymore. Employees must skill and re-skill constantly to stay afloat, said Taneja, whose VC firm has invested in companies such as Anduril and Anthropic. Taneja discussed this during a live taping of the All-In podcast, hosted by entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis Tuesday at CES 2026,
companies reduce staff through automating routine work while still struggling to hire AI specialists, despite a surge in client demand for AI. "Top five Indian IT firms added only 17 net employees in the first nine months of FY26 versus 17,764 in the same period last year," said Chirag Mehta, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. "That is what AI-era productivity looks like in practice: more output per employee, fewer benches, and tighter utilization."
The soaring valuations of AI companies aren't just a bet on better software. They're a wager on who will control human labor in the future, according to Roman Yampolskiy, a University of Louisville computer science professor who was one of the first academics to warn about AI's risks. As artificial intelligence moves from tools to increasingly autonomous agents, Yampolskiy said markets are pricing in a radical shift: machines providing "free labor" at scale.
When Hyundai acquired the robotics giant Boston Dynamics in 2021, very few observers thought that using mechanical dogs to spot-check welds in car factories would be the endgame. Today, at CES 2026, Hyundai offered a detailed look at what it really wants to do with robots: make them more humanlike, and then put them to work building cars. The goal, Hyundai officials said, is simple: better safety, better quality, more durability and reliability, and at lower production costs.
In a note on Saturday, he recalled economist Robert Solow's quip from the 1980s as PCs were transforming the economy: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." The same thing can be said today about AI, Slok wrote, noting that data on employment, productivity and inflation are still not showing signs of the new technology.