College and or Career Readiness in the Age of AI in 2025 – The Coming Workforce Winter and What Education Must Do Before the Job Market Freezes
by Mark Erlenwein, Principal – Staten Island Technical High School
I’ve been in public education long enough to have seen pendulum swings, policy cycles, silver bullets, and reforms that promised the moon but barely scratched the atmosphere to even create a crater. I’ve seen technology arrive in waves: desktops, laptops, smartboards, tablets; each announced as the evolution that would transform the classroom.
But artificial intelligence is different. It is not a wave. It’s a tide change.
And as someone who champions AI integration in schools, who speaks nationally about the opportunities and responsibilities school leaders hold during this unprecedented transition, I feel obligated to sound an alarm that is both urgent and hopeful.
Because the truth is simple: AI, automation, and robotics are accelerating faster than our education systems, our policy frameworks, and our workforce pipelines can adapt and the consequences for young people could be devastating if we don’t pivot immediately.
But naming the challenge isn’t enough. To understand the scope of what’s unfolding, and what must urgently change, we have to look beyond the classroom and examine the broader ecosystem in which our students are preparing to live, learn, and work. The crisis is not isolated to instruction or curriculum; it spans five interconnected layers that are shifting simultaneously, each exerting pressure on schools in ways most leaders have never had to navigate at once.
- The Workforce Acceleration Crisis: The workforce is transforming faster than schools can adjust, with AI reshaping job roles, expectations, and entire industries at a pace education has never had to match before.
- The Promise and Limits of the Portrait of a Graduate: New York State’s Portrait of a Graduate offers a meaningful conceptual shift, but it is not yet a full roadmap for preparing students for an AI-driven future.
- Higher Education’s Adaptation Gap: Colleges are struggling to evolve at the speed required, widening the readiness divide between what students learn and what the world now demands.
- The Human Competencies the Future Will Reward: The next era will elevate skills that transcend technology: communication, adaptability, creativity, collaboration, and the human problem-solving capacities AI cannot replicate.
- A Narrow Window for Strategic Action: Education has two to three years to make a decisive pivot; without urgent, coordinated action, we risk graduating an entire generation prepared for a world that no longer exists.
The Workforce is Changing at a Pace That Requires Unified Action Across All Levels of Education and Governmental Leadership
For decades, we assumed that technological disruption would eliminate some jobs, reshape others, and create new ones. That was the pattern of the Industrial Age, the Information Age, and even the early digital era.
But AI breaks this cycle. This time, the displacement is exponential; the job creation is not keeping pace. Recent analyses indicate that:
- Up to 30% of U.S. jobs could be automated by 2030, according to multiple economic forecasts.
- Nearly 60% of jobs will be significantly altered by AI, even if not fully replaced.
- A quarter of all jobs may eventually be performed entirely by AI systems.
- And most concerning; the jobs most vulnerable are precisely the entry-level, clerical, administrative, and routine-skilled roles that once served as the “first rung” of the ladder for the emerging workforce we are educating currently.
These were the jobs students could step into while pursuing college degrees, supporting their families, or gaining early career experience. Those rungs are disappearing.
We are already seeing businesses reduce hiring for early-career roles because AI tools can process invoices, draft documents, code basic functions, respond to customer inquiries, analyze spreadsheets, schedule logistics, and manage workflows at a fraction of the cost and time.
This is not theoretical. This is happening.
In fact, 2025 is already shaping up as one of the worst years for job cuts in decades. According to tracking by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. companies announced 153,074 job cuts in October alone; the highest single-month total for any October in over 20 years. By the end of October, year-to-date layoffs had topped nearly 1.1 million, a dramatic 65 % increase from the same period last year. Major employers such as Amazon, Target, Starbucks and others have announced significant workforce reductions this year. This wave of layoffs across technology, retail, and manufacturing underscores that AI and automation driven transformation is already disrupting the labor market at scale.
And yet much of secondary and post-secondary education still operates like the job market of the 1950s; prepare, test, sort, and send students on a linear path toward a degree, hopeful that opportunity awaits.
Hope is not a strategy.
New York State’s Portrait of a Graduate: A Strong Step, But Not the Destination
New York State’s NY Inspires “Portrait of a Graduate,” aligned around six core competencies, represents a smart and necessary shift:
- Creativity & Innovation
- Critical Thinking
- Effective Communication
- Academic Preparedness
- Global Citizenship
- Future-Focused & Reflective Learning
These are the skills that transcend job titles, industries, and economic cycles. They are the human competencies automation struggles to replicate and they reflect what employers, economists, and futurists have been urging schools to prioritize for years.
But while the Portrait is promising, it is also incomplete. Students don’t just need to become critical thinkers and communicators. They need pathways that are adaptable, tangible, structured, industry-aligned pathways, that connect skills to opportunity.
In other words:
- Portrait skills without workforce pathways is a vision without legs.
- Workforce pathways without Portrait skills is a ladder missing rungs.
- The two must evolve together, now, or neither will succeed.
The Harsh Reality: Colleges Are Not Adapting Fast Enough Either
As a high school principal who maintains deep relationships with alumni, and as an informed citizen, I hear the same refrain repeatedly from alumni and CEO’s via financial shows and legacy media again and again:
- “My degree didn’t match the workforce.”
- “Employers wanted experience, not just coursework.”
- “My field changed faster than my program.”
- “I graduated with debt and few entry-level opportunities because AI wiped out the jobs I was training for.”
This is not a knock on higher education, it’s a call for alignment. Colleges were built for a different era, one in which a four-year degree was a reliable entrypoint into the middle class. That era is ending.
This generation faces a new decision-making matrix:
- Do I take on debt for a degree that may not guarantee employability?
- Do I enter a workforce where AI is replacing the jobs once designed for 18-25 year-olds?
- Do I pursue micro-credentials, apprenticeships, or industry certifications instead of, or alongside, traditional college pathways?
The answer, increasingly, is “all of the above,” but neither our high schools nor our colleges are built for it. High schools must urgently expand micro-credentialing and work-based learning and internships / apprenticeships for students entering the workforce immediately, while for students whom will continue their education, colleges must redesign long-standing majors into flexible, interdisciplinary fusion concentrations that reflect the economic and technological landscape students are graduating into. A university offering the same Finance or Accounting degree in 2030 that it offered in 2025 is not preparing students for opportunity; it is selling them a promise the labor market will not keep.
The Future Will Reward Students Who Are…
AI-Literate, Human-Centered (Soft Skills), and Pathway-Ready. This is where high schools must lead, and a practice we have been cognizant of and developing for th past decade at Staten Island Technical High School.
We need models that that clearly aligns the following:
- high school and career,
- high school and college,
- learning and earning,
- skills and credentials,
- classrooms and industry.
Today’s students must graduate with:
- industry-aligned micro-credentials,
- experiential learning,
- work-based learning hours,
- digital portfolios,
- professional communication and oracy,
- technical literacy,
- AI fluency, and
- real-world, real-resume, real-skill artifacts that employers recognize and trust.
This isn’t about turning high schools into job factories. It’s about modernizing an outdated system to reflect the actual world students are inheriting.
The New York State Education Department has 2–3 Years to Make a Strategic Pivot, or We Risk Failing an Entire Generation
The first graduating class impacted by the new NYS diploma requirements will be entering high school soon. That gives us a sliver of time, a short runway, to get our systems aligned.
In that time, school leaders must:
1. Rebuild secondary education around pathways, not just subjects.
CTE (Career & Technical Education), WBL (Work Based Learning), Career Development and Occupational Studies (CDOS), and industry micro-credentials must become mainstream, not electives.
2. Treat AI literacy as essential as reading and writing.
Students should learn prompts, ethics, verification, automation, and tool fluency, safely, systematically and responsibly.
3. Forge partnerships with industry at scale.
Businesses, unions, civic institutions, and local employers should shape our programs, not just applaud from the sidelines.
4. Transform assessment.
Move from “regurgitation” to Project / Process based learning and restorative (mastery) assessment, assessing how students learn, iterate, revise, collaborate, and problem-solve.
5. Expand AI training to school system leaders, inclusive of school boards, state school commissioners, school superintendents, union leaders, school administrators, supervisors, teachers, paraprofessionals and undergraduate and graduate program educational leaders and instructors. Corporate leaders must be partners in this endeavor.
Educational decision makers and practitioners alike must understand the AI tools influencing instruction, operations, and workforce readiness and ensure students learn to use them with integrity and purpose.
6. Align college guidance with economic reality.
Students must understand more than college options, they must understand financial literacy, return on investment / individuals (ROI), debt burden, employability, and the rapidly shifting landscape of careers shaped by AI and automation. Yet too often, college guidance still points students toward traditional degrees that no longer map cleanly to the labor market they will enter.
Higher education must move beyond the static major/minor model that has dominated for decades. Colleges need to begin mapping and creating adaptive, future-ready pathways, programs that intentionally combine disciplines, integrate industry-recognized micro-credentials, and embed work-based learning (internships) that provides relevance beyond a single career trajectory.
As stated earlier, a university that offers the same Marketing major in 2030 that it offered in 2025, without incorporating AI-driven consumer analytics, digital content automation, behavioral data modeling, and cross-disciplinary coursework in computer science and psychology, is not preparing students for the workplaces they will actually encounter. It is selling them a credential disconnected from employer demand.
To remain relevant, colleges must rethink what they call Traditional Majors by embracing a Cross-Disciplinary Poly-Tracking methodology; a model in which students blend complementary (and sometimes unconventional) fields that give them maximal adaptability, resilience, and longevity in the workforce. A student studying Environmental Science, for instance, should be able to poly-track across data analytics, public policy, geospatial modeling, and ethical AI decision systems, graduating with a portfolio that spans disciplines and industries.
This poly-tracking approach becomes even more powerful when paired with industry-aligned micro-credentials and internships, ensuring students gain competencies that hold value across multiple sectors, not just the one implied by their major. In an economy where job roles evolve faster than accreditation cycles, breadth, flexibility, and applied skill-building are no longer luxuries; they are prerequisites for employability.
Our college guidance systems must reflect this reality, helping students understand not only the cost of a degree, but the adaptability and career mobility it enables, or fails to enable, in a labor market transformed by AI.
A Final Word — From a Principal Who Believes Deeply in the Promise of Public Education
I am not anti-college. I am not anti-technology. I am not anti-innovation. I am pro-student. Period. I want them to be truly future ready.
Ready for any future, not the one we nostalgically imagine, but the one barreling toward them at full speed.
If we fail to pivot now, if we cling to outdated models, outdated metrics, outdated assumptions, the students of this state, and this country, will pay the price.
But if we act with urgency, coherence, and courage, embracing the Portrait of a Graduate while expanding it into a true Portrait of a Future-Ready Citizen, then New York could lead the nation in crafting the most modernized, equitable, and opportunity-rich educational system in America.
We have the tools. We have the data. We have the vision (Future Ready NYC). Now we need the will.
Because the clock is ticking; and the future will not wait for us to catch up.
MarkErlenwein.com 