{"id":628,"date":"2026-06-17T21:09:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T21:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=628"},"modified":"2026-06-17T21:09:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T21:09:23","slug":"college-grads-are-rejecting-ai-en-masse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=628","title":{"rendered":"College Grads Are Rejecting AI En Masse"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u2018Tis the season<\/span> of college commencement\u2014and this year, it\u2019s also the time for booing commencement speakers, who have made AI their go-to topic in the face of vocal student opposition. At the University of Central Florida in May, real estate exec Gloria Caulfield was virally booed for boosting AI as a happy \u201cnext industrial revolution\u201d for grads. At Marquette University, Adobe\u2019s Chris Duffey was similarly disdained for an AI-happy pep talk. At Middle Tennessee State University, music executive Scott Borchetta was the one mocked for cheering on the rise of AI in the music business. <\/p>

Read more Billionaires Know Just How They Want Supreme Court Justices to Rule\u2014and Are Spending Big to Tell Them<\/a><\/p>\n

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was jeered at for telling the graduating class at the University of Arizona that \u201cthe question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.\u201d And when current Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke Friday at Stanford University\u2019s graduation, he mostly avoided the topic: People had been giving him \u201ca lot of advice,\u201d Pichai admitted, about what not to say.<\/p>\n

And that makes sense. After all, the class of 2026 is part of a generation facing high levels of underemployment and joblessness thanks to AI: about half of Gen Z workers\u00a0believe the technology\u2019s dangers are greater than its value, and some six in ten say they\u2019re anxious about it.<\/p>\n

Silicon Valley bigshots have been fixtures on the graduation circuit for decades, but they\u2019ve traditionally been well received; for most of that time, they represented an exceptionally lucrative, growing sector that drew a massive share of young grads. Steve Jobs\u2019 2005 Stanford commencement speech\u2014\u201cStay hungry. Stay foolish.\u201d\u2014remains an icon of the genre; the guy giving it was part of an elite that the young listener could conceivably join.<\/p>\n

The intense contempt for AI at college graduations is a glaring sign of how many of the young are AI refuseniks\u2014and that tech representatives now look hungry, foolish, and unable to read the room.<\/p>\n

Zeynep Maya Dogancioglu, a University of Tampa student who leads the local chapter of a group called Pause AI US, tells me that she thinks students are \u201ccompletely right\u201d to heckle the \u201chypocrisy\u201d of the pro-AI crowd.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn every single class, they start by telling us we cannot use AI for academic integrity,\u201d Dogancioglu said\u2014but \u201cthe teachers who are grading us are using these same tools by choice, and the administration is pushing AI as this next big thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are putting the wants and needs of billionaires over us,\u201d a displeased University of Arizona student remarked of Schmidt\u2019s pro-AI speech in the Guardian<\/em>. A Duke University student pled in the campus newspaper for Zohran Mamdani to speak instead. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Nickolas Spiliotopoulos told NBC News that students like him \u201cdon\u2019t want AI to trump our academic, maybe our political, maybe our cognitive processes.\u201d<\/p>\n

To these young people, the commencement speakers are representatives of a dumbed-down, even greedier elite\u2014a class that embodies what you could call the banality of venal.<\/p>\n

Seventy years ago,<\/span> the renowned sociologist C. Wright Mills first published The Power Elite<\/em>, now a fundamental text of 20th-century political sociology, mapping the interlocking circles of the American ruling class: corporate barons, the \u201cwar lords\u201d at the Pentagon, and political leaders. The theory was structured on Franz Neumann\u2019s\u00a0Behemoth<\/em>, published in 1942, about the \u201cstructure and practice\u201d of German\u2019s Nazi Party\u2014and yet it\u2019s hard to reread Mills today without concluding that things are now worse.<\/p>\n

Among Mills\u2019 key observations was the rise to power, as historian and Mills specialist John Summers puts it to me, of \u201cmanagers of the bureaucracy\u201d who were \u201ccharged with solving technical problems.\u201d For the most part, Mills found, the elite of the mid-20th century didn\u2019t reach their positions due to great talent, intelligence or skill, but through networks of family wealth and a drive for status. <\/p>

Read more The Iran War Isn\u2019t Ending Any Time Soon<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet they still held a modicum of public trust, particularly the administrators and scholars among them. It was a time of general prosperity, which new technology facilitated; the elite who managed those new tools were getting\u00a0more\u00a0for themselves, sure, but they wanted stability and predictability so\u00a0they<\/em>\u00a0might thrive. (Indeed, they often made power seem relatively boring and procedural.)<\/p>\n

Their successors are marked by being \u201cdisinhibited\u201d, says sociologist Heather Gautney, whose The New Power Elite<\/em> follows on Mills\u2019 original: far less able to recognize the needs of the people whose futures they are supposed to help steward, and less likely to even gesture at sympathy for them, engaging in constant self-dealing with far less fear of exposure.<\/p>\n

They are often more antigovernment than in the past, leaning \u201cdeeper and deeper into corporate authoritarianism,\u201d as Gautney puts it, and preoccupied with dismantling the administrative state their predecessors ran. While Mills wrote that \u201cgreat corporations are the great units of wealth, to which individuals of property are variously attached,\u201d now, the companies are often secondary to people like Musk, who control massive firms in different sectors. The new power elite better resembles a cult structure, in Gautney\u2019s words\u2014as recent revelations in Wired<\/em> about Dialog, Peter Thiel\u2019s secretive elite gathering, drive home.<\/p>\n

The new power elite despise security and continuity: they\u2019re hell-bent on removing the bureaucracy of Mills\u2019 era\u2014which no one exemplifies better than Elon Musk, with the recent Texas outbreak of flesh-eating screwworm potentially linked to DOGE\u2019s elimination of USAID. Their bright ideas include the end of liberal arts university education, as promoted by Thiel or his Palantir minion Alex Karp; it can be replaced by rented time in AI datacenters, where people will \u201cbuy\u201d intelligence \u201cfrom us on a meter,\u201d as OpenAI boss Sam Altman has suggested.<\/p>\n

This inability to absorb the life experience of everyday people\u2014many of us simply want to go to college! Many of us enjoy meaningful work!\u2014stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of the old power elite, who oversaw an epochal expansion of higher education. And as exploitative as corporations were back then, they didn\u2019t advertise quite as cheerfully that they\u2019d be hollowing out your industry sometime in the next quarter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What do they have to fear? David Ellison and his father, Larry, control Paramount and CBS; Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a right-wing slop factory; conservative Sinclair Media owns legacy papers and close to 200 television stations. The worst of the new power elite can now get away with whatever they like.<\/p>\n

But the students\u2019 vocal rejection of AI exemplifies what Mills called \u201cthe sociological imagination\u201d at work. Mills\u2019 meaning was that the public should use our interpretative gifts to connect daily life to broader social structures\u2014and critique those who fail to do so. <\/p>\n

Their public opposition is driving powerful figures like Google\u2019s Pichai away from AI boosterism\u2014and inspiring unexpected older supporters like the fashion designer Jeremy Scott, known for his high-priced ironic menswear and camp appearances on fashion-reality shows. Young people, Scott recently told the Kansas City Art Institute\u2019s graduating class, should reject LLMs and instead embrace what they already have: \u201cactual intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article was produced in collaboration with the\u00a0Economic Hardship Reporting Project,\u00a0which supports independent journalists as they forward fresh narratives about inequality.\u00a0Subscribe\u00a0to follow\u00a0EHRP.<\/em><\/p>

Read more Elon Musk: The World\u2019s Worst Trillionaire<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The wave of booing aimed at AI-pilled commencement speakers signals a sea change in public opinion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nCollege Grads Are Rejecting AI En Masse - Moving and Mortgage Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=628\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"College Grads Are Rejecting AI En Masse - Moving and Mortgage Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The wave of booing aimed at AI-pilled commencement speakers signals a sea change in public opinion.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=628\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Moving and Mortgage Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-17T21:09:23+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/f621039db4338decc77e5202ebd26915-1024x576.webp\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1024\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"576\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/webp\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=628#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=628\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/6b7c79bcfd888d98f34c5413df7e81a2\"},\"headline\":\"College Grads Are Rejecting AI En Masse\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-17T21:09:23+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=628\"},\"wordCount\":1252,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=628#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/0e8e263d315930afb6e12c1bd317cda3.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=628#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=628\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=628\",\"name\":\"College Grads Are Rejecting AI En Masse - 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