> The gap in wages between those with a college degree and those without one grew steadily beginning in 1980, but flattened during the past 15 years, though it remains high.
I suspect there's a lot of factors at play and the expansion of access to college is part of it. The value of secondary education is somewhere diluted. There is the end of the zero interest era. There is massive layoffs of federal workers which skew heavily towards knowledge work. And some of it is was Starbucks cites as "removing layers and duplication and creating smaller, more nimble teams" which is a pretty normal cyclical thing where an era of expansion and promotions makes your org to top-heavy and bureaucratic so you trim aggressively and probably end up rehiring some as needed. Like a controlled burn of an overgrown forest. And if some of those are permanently lost to AI then that's a bonus.
I think a lot of business leaders are just expecting a recession and want to be on good footing before it hits.