Remote Work, Not AI, Drives Youth Unemployment Among College Grads, NY Fed Study Finds

A study released Monday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the rise in remote work since the pandemic is the primary driver of higher unemployment among recent college graduates, not artificial intelligence. The research shows young workers in jobs that can be done remotely are disproportionately affected as employers hesitate to hire them for distributed teams. The unemployment rate for college graduates aged 28 and younger in “remotable” occupations rose about 1 percentage point from the 2017-2019 period to 2022-2024, while jobless rates for older workers in the same fields declined slightly. In non-remotable jobs like nursing, the gap between older and younger graduates remained negligible. The report, published June 1, 2026, attributes the trend to difficulty in training and mentoring inexperienced hires from afar. The authors calculate that remote work accounts for nearly two-thirds of the rise in young college graduates’ unemployment since the pandemic, saying it “weakens incentives to hire young workers by impeding on-the-job training.”