• I've been searching for my first full-time role since I graduated last May to no luck.
• I've had to rely on my parents to stay in New York City, which has made me feel guilty.
• Despite the countless rejections, I'm not letting it stop me from enjoying life.

Last May, I graduated with my bachelor's degree from The New School, a relatively large private institution in New York City.

I knew competition postgrad would be competitive, but I did not anticipate a grim job market and AI takeovers.

As a Dean's List student with a 3.9 GPA and multiple extracurriculars under my belt, I figured I'd be a top candidate for my first entry-level job.

Boy, was I wrong.

Moving to New York City was my dream for as long as I can remember

I figured graduating would mean freedom from the confines of a classroom. But when I followed my dream to New York City, that freedom was paralyzing. I quickly learned that I still had a ways to go before I could start living my life.

I found myself stuck behind a counter working my part-time job as a barista and questioning everything from why I went to college to why I feel so passionate about staying in one of the most expensive places on earth. Additionally, I felt guilty for relying on my parents to pay my rent and help keep me here away from my home state of North Carolina.

I felt like an idiot for leaving my family, even though I always knew I was meant for more than what my hometown could offer, and yet the city remains financially challenging for someone like me with student loans and only a part-time job. Thankfully, I have a cushion should I need it, but I expected to be financially independent by now.

Navigating a competitive market

Since graduation, I have applied to roughly 200 positions, ranging from internships to entry-level to contract and temp roles. And while that number doesn't seem like much compared to the other grads who've sent out 500+ applications, I like to think I'm playing the market strategically by applying to roles where I'm a decent fit. I'm also attempting to set up informational interviews.

However, regardless of my strategy, I keep getting ghosted and rejected by automated no-reply emails months after applying.

When I discovered that I wasn't the only one struggling, it began to make sense. However, after dealing with COVID interruptions in high school, worker strikes in college, and mental health struggles surrounding personal issues, I was burned out.

As a result, I had forgotten why I went to school in the first place. As I began applying, I found myself flexible to take just about anything and started to lose myself in the process.

Seven months into underemployment, I got laid off from the café, but thankfully found another part-time job with a friend's help.

A month later, in January, I got my first interview for a job in my field. Followed up three weeks later, only to be told they were still in the first round and haven't heard back since.

A month after that, I hired a career coach to help me navigate the market. She rewrote my résumé, reviewed my LinkedIn profile and portfolio, provided industry insights, and redefined my career path.

I then got another interview, this time for an internship. I haven't heard back from that either.

What frustrates me the most is the silence. Anxiously waiting to know whether or not I got the job, or at least an interview, is soul-sucking. It makes me doubt myself and my skills. It makes me feel like a failure.

Learning to overcome what you can't control

New York is already an incredibly lonely place, and lately it's been a lot lonelier when I've been confined to a room applying to jobs away from home.

At only 23, I feel like I failed despite working my ass off in high school and in college, only to get "Unfortunately, we have decided not to proceed with your candidacy at this time, but we appreciate the time and effort you dedicated to the application process."

I have no idea what's next for me or when I'll get a full-time job, but one thing I've learned about being underemployed is you've got to make the most out of it because life is unpredictable, and you shouldn't let it slip away because things are uncertain or stagnant.

And if you need help from your parents, whether it's a roof over your head or an allowance, there's no shame in that. This is an extremely unprecedented and scary time for everyone. Even if you're not job hunting, we could all use a little support.

• I'm a college admissions expert, and I noticed this Ivy Day was the most competitive in history.
• I realized that colleges aren't admitting the top students anymore.
• The earlier a student prepares for college, the better.

This year's Ivy Day was brutal, and the admissions numbers prove it.

Yale admitted a record-low 2.9% of regular decision applicants from a pool of nearly 55,000 students, the second-largest in the school's history.

Columbia received 61,031 applications — the largest pool in its history — and admitted just 4.23%. Brown admitted 5.35% from a record pool of nearly 48,000 applicants. Harvard and Princeton withheld their official data, but estimates place their acceptance rates at approximately 3.7% and 3.9%, respectively.

I teach at Harvard Summer School and have spent years helping students from around the world navigate the college admissions process. Four out of five of my students got into Yale. Four out of five got into Stanford. Yet one of the strongest applications I've ever guided got waitlisted everywhere. That surprised me, and after watching this cycle up close, here's what I learned and some other surprises from a tough year.

Getting to the top of your class matters less than you think

One of my students admitted to Stanford this year was ranked in the 91st percentile at her high school. She was not at the top of her class, and not even close to achieving valedictorian. Yet she got in. Several classmates ranked above her were rejected.

This isn't an anomaly. Admissions officers at the most selective schools aren't ranking applicants from smartest to least smart and admitting the top tier. They're looking to confirm admitted students can handle the academic rigor.

Once you've demonstrated that, they stop looking at your rank. Being in the top 10% of your class with competitive test scores is the threshold. Crossing it further often doesn't help you as much as families think it does.

The personal statement is not a one-draft exercise

Among my students with the strongest outcomes this cycle, we averaged just under 19 drafts of the personal statement. Those are not small revisions, but almost 19 complete drafts.

The goal of a great personal statement isn't to impress. It's to make an admissions officer say, "I want to have lunch with this kid."

The best essays I worked on this year were built around a contradiction, something unexpected about the student that made them genuinely thought-provoking. One student's essay was about busking in Europe. It wasn't impressive in the traditional sense. It was courageous and revealing. She got into Yale, Stanford, and Princeton.

Starting early creates options

Some of my students who get individual coaching start working with me as early as 8th grade. I help students find their core values, instead of trying to check boxes that admissions counselors may or may not want to see.

Even if you didn't start college prep early, getting a jump start on your essays can help. This year, all of my rising seniors began essay work in June, months before applications opened.

Starting early isn't just about having more time. It's about having the space to find the real story, not the first story.

Even exceptionally strong students get rejected

This is the most important thing I learned. One of my students applied to Brown, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. If you had asked me before decisions came out to rank my students by likelihood of admission, I would have placed him near the top. His application was strong by every measure.

But he was waitlisted or rejected at all four.

His family is disappointed. I'm disappointed. And yet, he now has an offer to an honors college with his first-year tuition fully covered. When you watch how he processes this, including his thinking, regrouping, and planning, you can see clearly that he is the kind of person who will be successful no matter where he goes.

That is the point. The students who handled disappointment best this year had something in common: they had genuinely built lives around their core values. No rejection letter could take that away.

This process is not fully within anyone's control. The best thing any student can do is become someone worth admitting, and then trust that the right door will open.

Steve Gardner teaches Leadership and Impact at Harvard Summer School and is the founder of The Ivy League Challenge.

• As a professor at Harvard, I encourage my students to use AI on every assignment.
• My students can use AI as a research tool and editor, but AI cannot do the thinking for them.
• I teach my students how to use AI to make better arguments, and that's where the use should stop.

I still remember the November when ChatGPT came out, and the exam period that followed.

As a professor at Harvard, I had B+ writers submitting essays with em dashes and Oxford commas, as if they had just signed with Penguin. Just as their writing magically improved, their voices began to blur into what we now call "AI slop."

Yet, as one of the earliest victims of the AI slop tsunami, I refuse to give in to the Luddism that led institutions to shut the door on AI entirely.

Instead, I've chosen to invite AI into every corner of my classroom because anything less will soon feel like a dereliction of duty.

I think Gen Z needs to be taught to use AI responsibly

Every generation struggles with entering the workforce, but few have had it as hard as my Gen Z students. Reading the news, you would think their struggles boil down to a mixture between laziness and entitlement, forgetting that we have been blaming the youth for all that ails society since Aristotle.

In reality, they're struggling because we're asking them to excel at two things that are foreign to them at once.

Not only are they stepping into institutions without answer guides or gradebooks, but they're doing so at a time when the tools no one is teaching them are redefining how the work itself gets done.

When AI is taking over the workplace, you don't respond by pretending the tools don't exist. You respond by teaching people how to use them well.

I now ask students to use AI in every assignment

The most important lesson I teach my undergrads is the same one I teach in my executive education classes: Use AI responsibly, with a personal growth mindset, not an output-oriented one.

I begin by asking my students not to lie to themselves about the kind of AI user they are becoming.

Are they centaurs, with half their essays spliced from ChatGPT, or cyborgs, with AI agents writing their emails while they sleep and automatically reviewing their Uber Eats orders?

Perhaps they're artisans, clinging harder and harder to what little humanity is left in us?

Whichever route they choose, the practice of using AI for growth couldn't be simpler.

There are some ground rules they have to follow

We begin by acknowledging one of AI's greatest strengths: its ability to quickly synthesize across large bodies of knowledge and connect ideas across disparate silos. Students get comfortable with ChatGPT's deep research, Perplexity's searches across academic journals, and Gemini's ability to poke holes in their arguments before typing a single word.

Should they find particularly challenging pieces, as they often do in my economics classes, they are allowed to use AI to help them "explain it like I'm five" and apply the insights directly, instead of getting a Ph.D. to understand what they found.

But when it comes to drafting the arguments themselves, my number one rule is that we put AI on pause. The goal is to capture their thinking in its rawest form and to give their thoughts a function before they obtain a form, even if it means leaning on voice notes to move our arguments along.

Only once my students know what they want to say, does AI return to help them, this time as an editor and a critic.

I ask students to submit their argument chains to AI so it can identify gaps, suggest further reading, and help finish concepts that were pulled from the oven a bit too soon.

This way, the argument improves, but the thinking remains theirs.

Where I draw the line

Even in a classroom where AI is as fully integrated as mine, this is where the boundary must lie. AI cannot do the thinking for us, and as teachers, we must help students avoid the temptation.

When students feel pressured to achieve perfection, the temptation to hand over the entire process to AI can become too strong to resist.

As I reflect on the essays I received now and those of December 2022, the lesson couldn't be clearer.

The best students aren't those who avoid using AI. Instead, they're the ones who know when and where to stop using it.

• I wanted to be a writer, but my parents told me I should be a professor or lawyer.
• I resented them for not supporting me, but now my kid is in college studying film.
• I'm worried about my kid's future, especially in the world of AI.

I used to hold a quiet grudge against my parents for the way they handled my creative dreams.

It wasn't the kind of loud, dramatic grudge that shows up at therapy and needs a name. It was more like a low hum in the background of my ambitions. It was a recurring thought that quietly whispered: They didn't believe in me.

They knew of my love of writing. They saw the journals I filled, the essays that came back marked with glowing commentary from my teachers, and the stories that I'd start and never quite finish. Their response was essentially: that's cute, but what's your real plan?

"Go get a master's in early childhood education," they advised. "So you can teach. Or better yet, law school so you can be well-paid and respectable."

My creative writing talent wasn't something they could see me turning into a career, so they looked away from it. I resented that for a long time — until I became a parent.

When my kid went to college, my feelings got complicated

Decades later, I sent my firstborn off to an expensive liberal arts college to major in film studies, and that grudge got a bit more complicated.

I have spent nearly two decades pouring intentionally into my child's development. There were the Mandarin immersion programs, piano lessons, and summer workbooks, a grade level ahead, all carefully cultivating their unique sense of self. I wanted them to know that their interests mattered. I wanted them to feel they were allowed and encouraged to follow what lit them up. I said it explicitly, and I meant every word.

But now I'm sitting with the liberal arts tuition bills next to the economic reports of millions of jobs disappearing, and the daily AI takeover alerts.

I finally understand what my parents were thinking when I went off to college back in 1999.

My parents had done the math

They weren't dream killers, but time travelers. They were standing in my present, looking ahead to my future, and doing the math that I was too young and hopeful to do myself. Now here I am doing the same math except the numbers are scarier, and the variables have multiplied in ways none of us saw coming.

It's not just the job market I'm watching. It's the wholesale dismantling of creative industries by artificial intelligence. I think about my child studying film while screenwriting rooms go dark, entry-level editing jobs evaporate, and graphic designers, photographers, and copywriters quietly lose relevance to tools that work for free and never sleep.

The very field my child is pouring their passion into is being restructured in real time, faster than any syllabus can keep up with. I find myself wondering: Are the professors teaching the industry that exists, or the one that existed? Are film classes in 2026 preparing my kid for the future or elegantly preserving the past?

My father graduated from college before his profession was invented

I think about my father, who got his electrical engineering degree in 1971. The computer systems he would eventually spend his career managing did not exist yet when he was sitting in those lectures. He was studying for a future he couldn't fully see.

I studied English and History, majors that seemed, on paper, equally impractical, right up until social media rewrote the rules, and handed a girl with the gift for language a whole new kind of career. Neither of us could have studied our way directly into what we became.

I don't have a clean answer. What I'm learning in real time is that good parenting in an era of radical uncertainty might just be the refusal to let your fears become hand-me-downs you pass on to your child. That lesson is costing me bandwidth I don't have. It is one more weight on the already heavy bar of midlife, where caregiving, career, and reinvention all compete for the same depleted reserves.

And so I meditate, do my breathwork, enjoy my sound baths, and pray. I pray my child will forge something I can't picture yet, the way my father built systems that didn't exist in his textbooks, and the way I built a business on platforms that launched after my graduation.

I pray the instinct to bet on yourself and answer the deep inner call that tugs at your heart turns out to be the one thing no algorithm can replicate.

• My daughter planned to attend Brown, an Ivy League school, but was rejected.
• She ultimately decided to attend Fordham, a school that had never been on her radar.
• At Fordham, she found her true passion and lower tuition, so I'm glad she never got into Brown.

"I'm glad my daughter was rejected from an Ivy League college," I told a friend recently.

Her daughter is a high school junior, currently in the thick of curating a list of reach schools. My friend was surprised by my words. I know I'm supposed to want the best college for my kid, but it's been years, and I see things differently now.

It's also that time of year when many high school students are hearing decisions from the colleges they applied to, so I thought back to when my daughter received her own news.

My daughter was rejected from Brown

Three years ago, my daughter applied to Brown University with early decision, meaning the commitment was binding. If she had been accepted, she would have gone there.

When she first applied, she knew the odds were slim. But the rejection was still disappointing for both of us. On paper and in person, it looked like a perfect fit.

Besides the allure of an Ivy League school with like-minded students, the college checked every box: It was only an hour from home, offered art classes at the prestigious RISD, and, best of all, had no core requirements.

She has always been a "free spirit" who doesn't like being required to take classes, especially when it comes to learning. Losing out on a school that aligned so well with her personality felt like a setback.

It reminded me of the time when my husband and I wanted to purchase a house, only to lose it to another offer.

Fordham crept to the top of my daughter's list

Fordham wasn't even on her radar during her college search, but now she's a junior there. It made the list because it was her twin brother's first choice.

Since he wanted to go there and she had a free application code, she figured, why not just add it to her Common App?

But even after she got in, she still wasn't interested and didn't want to tour the campus. I had to convince her to tag along since her brother was already planning to enroll.

Once she saw the beautiful grounds and the students in Fordham apparel, the college moved to the top of her list. Despite that intense core curriculum, she decided to join her brother.

My daughter is saving money by not going to an Ivy League school

I'll never know if she would have received financial aid at Brown, but since they don't offer many merit scholarships, she likely would have paid full price.

Because she was a high-achieving student at the top of her class, Fordham offered a large merit scholarship to entice her to enroll. It worked. Paying less in tuition means fewer student loans, and in the long run, that matters more than an Ivy.

She found her true passion at Fordham

Freshman year, she started as a biology major. The intense pre-med vibe wasn't what she had in mind for college. A core requirement English class ended up being a game changer.

She took a placement test before the semester started and qualified for an advanced class. After excelling in it, the department chair wrote her a letter to recruit her to the major. I imagine that kind of personal recognition is harder to come by at an Ivy League.

Switching to English also opened her schedule. Without the heavy lab requirements of a biology major, she had room to double as an art major, which is another subject she has always loved.

Her success in the major led her to apply for the selective creative writing concentration, which required submitting writing samples. When she found out she was accepted, knowing how competitive it was, she was really happy.

It all worked out for the best

Her senior-year schedule is already set. She's most excited about taking classes with two English professors she already knows, including the one who first recommended her to the department chair.

If you ask her, she's still not a fan of the core requirements. But she'll also tell you that the class she was required to take is the reason she's an English major.

That's what I'd tell my friend's daughter, too. The school that feels like a perfect fit on paper isn't always the one that changes your life. Sometimes the rejection is the best thing that can happen. Missing out on purchasing that house also meant we bought one we liked more.

As the saying goes, "When one door closes, another opens." In her case, as the Ivy door slammed shut, she just had to wait for the host to reveal what was behind Door Number Two: a better major, a lower tuition, and her twin brother. That's a win in my book.

• I studied at universities in both the US and China, first in 2015 and again in 2025.
• Experiencing Chinese higher education at two different times showed me how different the system is.
• The differences in cost, campus culture, and career pathways made me rethink American universities.

I've done something quite rare: I'm an American who attended college in both the US and China.

I completed my undergraduate degree in political science at a state university in New York and studied abroad in Wuhan, China, during the summer of 2015. Ten years later, in 2025, I returned to Shijiazhuang, China, while completing my second graduate degree in global health, interning at a medical university.

Experiencing Chinese universities at two distinct points in my life, a decade apart, gave me a rare view of how the system operates and how it has evolved.

I didn't meet any Americans studying in China most recently

During my first trip, I was in a group of about 30 American college students. The second time, I was the only person from my cohort to go.

Since the pandemic, the number of US students in China has dropped, according to NPR. In fact, I didn't meet a single American in the three months I was in the country most recently.

Both times, I met lots of African students, though. They were heavily invested in and integrated into the Chinese learning and working systems.

I've noticed China sets the international students I met up for success

Many of the international students I talked to in the US told me how hard it was to integrate and find a pathway to work after school in New York.

In China, I noticed there's a pathway for international students who want to stay, particularly those who have developed strong Mandarin skills.

The Chinese government and universities are actively trying to entice international students to come to the country, while also investing in ways to retain graduates.

Campus life looks very different from what I experienced in the US

The internet firewall in China can make research difficult, and I've seen doctors smoking in classrooms between lectures.

Student life also reflects a different set of norms. There is low tolerance for drugs and alcohol on many Chinese campuses. After class, I saw friends playing badminton rather than drinking beer.

Technology and security are also visible on campus. Students on the campuses I studied entered by scanning their faces and were tracked by cameras.

Politics also felt more openly present in academic life. Most of the professors and physicians I worked with were active members of the Communist Party and often wore pins on their lapels to signify it.

As one local friend put it, "having one state party means policies don't change every four years," which, in their view, can create a certain level of stability for universities.

Chinese universities are far cheaper and more specialized

The two universities I studied at in China didn't have the fancy sports facilities most American colleges do, but many students I met weren't going into debt to study either.

Tuition in China is subsidized by the government, especially at public universities. That means it's relatively affordable compared with many Western countries.

Housing and food costs are also inexpensive in my experience. I was eating a healthy lunch on campus for $1 a day. My American campus used to sell a single banana for $1.05 in 2015.

I also spent a year taking general courses in America. While I loved taking a class on Bollywood as a political science major, the specialization offered by many Chinese universities helped better prepare me for the real world. I also saved money by not taking general courses while in China.

Studying in both systems changed how I think about education

I didn't just earn my degrees in multiple countries; I learned about the culture of education. I learned how the government impacts who can study what and if they will be successful.

I'll always be partial to the American scholastic mentality of questioning everything and forming opinions, rather than the rote memorization I saw in China, but I'd prefer not to be launched into the working world with so much student loan debt.

I hope more Americans can form their own opinions of China's educational system, which has rapidly evolved and will only continue to grow in its unique way.