MIT researcher Andrew McAfee has a warning for companies automating entry-level positions: you're cutting off your own talent pipeline, and it's going to cost you.

McAfee, co-leader of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy, argues that eliminating junior roles doesn't just hurt recent graduates - it destroys the apprenticeship model that creates experienced knowledge workers. "How else are people going to learn to do the job except via on-the-job learning?" he told Fortune.

The data backs him up. Entry-level job postings are down 2% year-over-year and 12% below pre-pandemic levels, according to Handshake. College graduate unemployment for ages 22-27 sits at 5.6%. Companies are automating the roles that used to be training grounds.

Here's the short-term logic: why hire three junior analysts when AI can do the grunt work and one senior analyst can supervise? The cost savings are immediate and quantifiable.

Here's the long-term problem: where do senior analysts come from? They come from junior analysts who spent two years learning the domain, understanding the context, making mistakes, and developing judgment that AI can't replicate.

Companies are optimizing for this quarter's headcount while destroying next decade's leadership pipeline.

McAfee also points out a painful irony: Gen Z has the highest AI adoption rate of any generation - 76% use standalone AI tools, according to Deloitte. By cutting entry-level hiring, companies are "turning off the spigot of the most enthusiastic power users of AI" in their workforce.

You're not just losing junior talent. You're losing the people who could teach your organization how to actually use these tools effectively.

I've seen this movie before. Every automation wave follows the same pattern: companies cut the "redundant" roles, realize too late that those roles were doing critical knowledge transfer, then scramble to recreate institutional memory that's already gone.