Most of the media coverage on the booed commencement speakers this month treats the boos as brave. A generation pushing back at the executives reshaping their futures. A message meant to travel beyond the stadium, made on camera by people with nothing left to lose.
I want to argue the opposite. The boos weren't brave. They were convenient. And the people most likely to be hurt by what AI is doing to the entry-level labor market are the same people who used AI to get through every class that was supposed to prepare them for it.
Give the boos what they're owed
Let me start by giving the boos what they're owed. The job market the Class of 2026 is walking into is, by the numbers, one of the worst entry-level markets in years.
Recent-grad unemployment sits around 5.7%, well above the 4.4% overall workforce rate. The assumption that a degree comes with lower unemployment risk than the general workforce has not held since the early pandemic.
The fear is rational. The anger is rational. None of what comes next is meant to dismiss either.
But.
The questions no one is asking
How many of the students who booed Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State for saying "AI is rewriting production as we sit here" had Claude or ChatGPT open on their laptop the night before, finishing the paper that earned them the right to be on that field at commencement?
How many of the arts and humanities graduates who booed Gloria Caulfield off the stage at UCF used AI to brainstorm thesis topics, draft outlines, write whole sections of essays, or generate the images they later submitted as their own work?
How many of the engineering and computer science seniors at Arizona who booed Eric Schmidt have a GitHub history that quietly reveals Claude Code, Codex, or Copilot in every commit?
These are not gotcha questions. They are the obvious questions, and the fact that no one is asking them tells you something about the state of the discourse.
We have a generation that adopted AI faster and more comfortably than any group that came before them, used it as scaffolding for the credentials they now hold in their hands, and then turned around and booed the people who said out loud what their own behavior had already proved.
This technology is not coming. It arrived. It was already in the room with them when they wrote the senior thesis.
The boos are the sound of a generation that knows something they aren't ready to admit.
Here is what I keep coming back to. If you used AI to help you finish your degree, you have a more accurate picture of what it can actually do than the speakers on stage.
You know it can draft. You know it can summarize. You know it can give you a passable first cut at almost any text-based task.
You also know that what you produced with it would have taken twice as long without it. That insight is not theoretical for you. It's lived.
So the question isn't whether AI is going to reshape the field you just earned a degree in. The question is why, with several years of evidence in front of you, you didn't spend any of that time asking what your field becomes when everyone has the same tool you do.
A senior in marketing in 2026 had every opportunity to ask what the work of marketing becomes when the bottleneck of producing decent copy disappears.
A senior in software engineering had every opportunity to ask what the work of an engineer becomes when the time cost of writing a function approaches zero.
A senior in journalism, in design, in business analysis, in HR...
The questions were all there, and the tool to explore those questions was already being actively used.
What this generation has already proven
Here is what the boos forget. Twenty years ago, parents and academic advisors and exhausted aunts at family dinners told a generation of kids there was no future in playing video games and no future in posting videos and no future in making things on the internet for a living.
The kids who heard all this went out and proved their parents and advisors wrong. They built Twitch into an industry. They turned the word "influencer" from a punchline into a career path.
They figured out how to monetize TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, and a hundred niches that did not exist on the day their parents were giving them that advice. They made a generation of adults look out of touch with reality.
That instinct is already there. They have already proven it.
AI is the next frontier where that instinct gets used or it does not. The boos are the sound of waiting. The kids who built the creator economy did not wait.
Where the system actually failed
I spent nine years teaching graduate and undergraduate technology courses at a state university. I know the system the students are inside of, and I know it is not built for this moment.
Course catalogs that take several months to revise. Faculty who haven't touched the production tools they teach in over a decade. Curriculum committees that move slower than the news cycle, let alone the technology cycle.
None of that is the students' fault.
But the part the system isn't responsible for is the part where you sit in your dorm room with a tool that can simulate any professional in your field and don't think to ask it, even once, what your field looks like in five years. That part is on you.
Some of this is on the people around them, and I want to be honest about how hard that side of it is. I have friends right now trying to figure out how to talk to their own college-aged kids about the field they're walking into, and not one of them feels like they have the right answers.
I don't blame them. A lot of this is being made up as we go, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.
But the absence of a playbook is not a license to say nothing. The graduates were not warned in any serious way by anyone with enough authority to make the warning land. That is a real failure of the institutions and the adults around them.
Warnings are inputs, though. What you do with them is still your output.
The graduates who aren't booing
Change has always been inevitable. The only thing that has changed in this cycle is the speed.
Every generation has had its industrial revolution, its mainframe, its globalization, its dot-com, its mobile, its cloud. Every one of those reshuffled what entry-level work looked like. Every one of those generated the same set of complaints from the people who didn't see it coming, and the same set of opportunities for the people who did.
The graduates who will do best are not the loudest booers. They are the ones who, four years ago, started asking the question the executives on stage were trying to point at, however clumsily.
What is my field for, now that this tool exists? What can I build with it that no one twenty years older than me knows how to build? Where is the work that didn't exist before, and how do I get there first?
Those graduates are not booing this month. They are too busy.
Borchetta got it wrong, by the way. "Deal with it" is not the answer. "Make it work for you" is not the answer either, because most of the room cannot make a tool work for them when the people who will hire them are deciding whether to hire anyone at all.
The answer is closer to this. Stop watching the people who were already going to win. Become one of them.
The graduates booing AI off the stage want a world where the technology arrives more slowly and the gatekeepers ask more permission. They are not going to get that world.
The one answer history will not forgive is the one that pretends this is overblown and that the change is not really coming. Sticking your head in the sand is the only response guaranteed to fail.
The ones who already know that are the ones who weren't booing. They are too busy building.
