Have Universities Kept Their End of the Deal? Youth Employment, AI, and What's Missing

Last week, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt delivered the commencement address at the University of Arizona. He told the Class of 2026 to embrace AI. He compared it to past technological shifts and offered this advice: "When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on." The room booed.

For graduates entering a labor market that is changing faster than their programs could keep up with, the advice landed as pressure to accept disruption on terms they did not set. Their reaction was not rudeness. It was a signal.

The concerns are real, and the numbers confirm it

A 2026 report by Boston Consulting Group found that 50 to 55 percent of jobs in the United States will be substantially reshaped by AI within the next two to three years. Entry-level and junior positions are the most exposed, with routine tasks being automated first. In some sectors, junior tech postings have dropped by as much as 67 percent since 2024.

In Canada, the picture is similar. About 40 percent of graduates are underemployed. Youth unemployment reached 15 percent in late 2025, more than double the adult rate. Between 2022 and 2025, job vacancies requiring a bachelor's degree and fewer than three years of experience fell by more than half. For the first time in decades, bachelor's degree holders aged 15 to 24 now face higher unemployment than peers with non-university credentials.

LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky recently identified what he calls the "five Cs" that AI cannot replace: curiosity, courage, compassion, connection, and creativity. He noted that young people especially cannot afford to overlook these skills. But here is the question. Where exactly are students supposed to develop them?

Have universities kept their end of the deal?

Most undergraduate and graduate programs are still built around lectures, exams, and group projects. A student can complete a four-year degree and graduate with no professional network outside their campus, and no demonstrated ability to produce something real for a real audience.

Research confirms this gap. A study I co-authored with Blane Harvey at McGill University's Faculty of Education found that graduate students face significant barriers in developing knowledge mobilization skills. Knowledge mobilization, or KMb, is the process of connecting research to real-world use by sharing it with communities, practitioners, and policymakers. Our study found that students face inadequate institutional support, lack of recognition for engaged research work, and limited opportunities for collaboration with partners outside the university. Several described how their meaningful engagements went unrecognized and even became more difficult with the extra tuition they had to pay.

The absence of clear institutional guidance increases students' dependence on their supervisors, making the quality of their experience a matter of luck rather than design. Some supervisors actively support community-facing work. Others do not see it as valuable. The result is that students who want to build connections between research and community needs are often left to figure it out alone.

This is not only a problem for students. It is a problem for the communities that never receive the knowledge universities produce. In a separate study, we (with Blane Harvey and Ollivier Prigent) interviewed 11 practitioners from nine community-based organizations in Montreal about their experience working with academic researchers. Community-based organizations, or CBOs, are nonprofits that provide direct services such as healthcare, housing support, or counseling to people in their local communities.

What we found was consistent and concerning. These organizations hold extensive knowledge about local challenges drawn from years of direct practice, but this knowledge is almost never documented or cited. Their contributions to research collaborations frequently go unrecognized. They face resource deficits, limited research skills, and siloed internal practices that make collaboration difficult.

We also found that researchers often engage these organizations only after the project is already designed, reducing their role to data access rather than co-production. This undermines both the organization's intellectual rights and the relevance of the final product.

So we have two sides of the same gap. Students graduate without the skills and connections to work alongside communities. Community organizations hold knowledge that never reaches the public record. The system produces credentials on one side and undocumented expertise on the other, with very little connecting them.

Building the bridge, but not a theoretical bridge this time

This is the problem that ScienceReach was created to address.

Through the Micro-Experiential Internship at ScienceReach, university students produce what we call Community Knowledge Publications, or CKPs. A CKP is a publicly accessible, citable document that evaluates and synthesizes what community organizations know about a local issue: how community groups are affected, what services exist, and what current and past experiences shape those issues. Every CKP is written in plain language so it can be read and used by researchers, policymakers, program developers, and members of the public.

The process works through a structured series of stages. Students begin by writing a concept note, where they identify a community issue of their interest, select candidate organizations, and explain their connection to the topic. They then synthesize publicly available information, draft the publication, and connect with community professionals to get authentic feedback, finally submitting the draft for review. The final product is published on ScienceReach and becomes a permanent, searchable resource.

This process is designed to address the specific gaps identified in the research. It gives students a structured opportunity to develop a deep understanding of community issues, programs, and past experiences. It gives them the opportunity to demonstrate their engagement and knowledge in a publicly accessible publication with their name on it. It builds their skills in research synthesis and community-facing communication. It connects them professionally to the organizations whose knowledge they document. And it produces a public record of community expertise that did not exist before.

Let us inspire you with an example

One of our current students (the May 2026 Cohort has 25 students) is researching mental health barriers among women experiencing homelessness in Montreal. She has previously volunteered at Chez Doris, a women's shelter that provides meals, counseling, healthcare support, and community programs to vulnerable and homeless women. She has also worked in healthcare. She chose this topic because her direct experience showed her that mental health and housing insecurity are deeply connected, but that this connection is often overlooked or underdocumented.

Her concept note identifies two candidate organizations. The first is Chez Doris. The second is the Native Women's Shelter of Montreal, which provides shelter and culturally safe support to Indigenous women and children facing homelessness, violence, and social exclusion. She included this organization because Indigenous women face disproportionate rates of homelessness and mental health inequality in Canada, and she believes it is important to recognize how systemic factors affect access to care.

She is now working through annual reports, program descriptions, public statements, and media coverage from both organizations to identify how each organization understands and responds to the mental health needs of the women they serve. Her task is to bring together what these organizations have learned through years of practice into a single, structured document that makes their knowledge findable and citable for the first time.

When she finishes, she will have a published, citable document under her name before she graduates. Future employers will see demonstrated ability to research a complex social issue and communicate it to a broad audience. Research funders reviewing her profile will see evidence of community-engaged work, a track record that is increasingly valued in SSHRC and other grant applications. She will carry a professional connection to the organizations whose expertise she helped make visible. And she will have developed exactly the skills that Roslansky described as irreplaceable: curiosity about a question that matters, courage to address a topic that is difficult, compassion grounded in direct experience, and the ability to connect research to the people it concerns.

For the community organizations, the CKP means that the patterns they observe every day about how trauma, housing instability, and limited access to care interact become part of the public record. Because the student comes to them with a draft for feedback rather than a request to participate in a lengthy research process, the organization contributes its perspective without bearing the cost of writing, processing, or publishing the document. ScienceReach and the student handle the synthesis, review, and publication. This is a form of knowledge mobilization that works with the resource constraints our research identified rather than against them.

This is the kind of outcome that does not come from a seat on someone else's rocketship. It comes from doing real work on a question you chose, producing something that lasts, and connecting your skills to the people and communities you actually care about.