Two facts that should not sit together. An Ivy League is paying students to take unpaid internships.
At the same time, four in ten college kids are thinking about switching majors. Both come from the same shift.
AI is cutting into the bottom rung of the job ladder. Schools are scrambling to keep up.
Dartmouth's Center for Career Design just raised $30 million for student internships. Each student can pull up to $6,500 in a single term to cover an unpaid or low-paid role.
The pitch from director Joseph Catrino is simple. Higher ed has to do better, or it will lose its case for charging what it charges.
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The CNBC and SurveyMonkey AI and Jobs Survey polled about 800 college kids in April. Two in three said they were down on finding work.
Four in ten said they had thought about changing their major because of AI. About a third were eyeing a new target field.
Almost half were rethinking which skills to build. These are not numbers a college president wants to read.
Many families are already asking if a four-year degree still pencils out. The new spending from Dartmouth is one answer to that.
The damage is not spread evenly. Tech and finance roles are taking the worst hits.
AI can already do much of the early work a junior hire used to do. A 2025 Stanford report found early-career drops in jobs hit by AI.
That list included software work and customer support. The Dallas Fed found the same trend in January, with the biggest drops in AI-exposed roles led by tech.
The Fed noted the broad hit is still small. But small does not mean nothing when you are a freshman picking a major.
CUNY is making a bigger bet than Dartmouth, just at a different price point. Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez is wiring paid internships and career advice into every field across 180,000 undergrads.
His pitch: a degree alone is no longer enough.
The bet is that the way out of an AI-driven jobs squeeze is more real work, not less. Schools that can put students inside firms before they graduate, and pay them to be there, become harder to compete with on price.
If AI keeps thinning the bottom of the funnel, more colleges will start writing checks the way Dartmouth just did. The schools that move first may also pull in donors, parents and students who are watching this issue most closely.
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