Interesting. At least some of this has to be the bullwhip effect modeled with employers as retail, universities as suppliers, and graduating students as further back suppliers. The 4 year lead time in production of employable labour causes a whip crack backwards through the supply chain when there is a sudden shift at the retail end.

It's true that a lot of things which were once junior contributor things are now things I'd rather do, but my scarce resource is attention. And humans have a sufficiently large context window and self-agentic behaviour that they're still superior to a machine.