Graduates crossing the stage this June will be met with hugs, high-fives and a whole lot of hand-wringing.
Much ink has been spilled over their uncertain future. The caricature looks something like this: a generation hunched over their phones, doom-scrolling past stories of rising global temperatures and falling employment prospects. Their degrees hanging in their parents’ house, because they can’t afford one themselves.
But spend an afternoon with an actual graduating class and the gap between this dominant narrative and the people in front of you is striking. On Friday, I celebrated as 800 young people received their degrees from OCAD University, where I serve as chancellor. On that day, I shook hands with the future.
The path they follow won’t be linear. Because it’ll be better than that. Exciting. Surprising. Rewarding. Guaranteed. But not linear.
No ordinary generation
What the consensus view gets wrong is that this is no ordinary generation. These students were just weeks into their university studies when ChatGPT publicly launched, in November 2022. If anyone has seen things change fast and learned to adapt, it’s them.
Furthermore, they’ve never taken stability for granted. After all, Donald Trump has been the U.S. president for one-quarter of their lives. Piling our own fears and anxieties about the future onto these young people is not only tone-deaf, but actively harmful and tremendously unfair.
A trend that emerged over this spring’s convocation season is illustrative. Across the United States, graduating students booed guest speakers who took the stage and opined about the transformative power of artificial intelligence.
In one viral video, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was jeered when he said, “It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have.”
In another ceremony, students booed the CEO of Big Machine Records, Scott Borchetta, when he told them that what they learned during their first year might already be obsolete. Borchetta doubled down: “Deal with it.”
A room of 22-year-olds refusing to nod along when a corporate leader speaks isn’t a generation that’s checked out. It’s a generation that demands to be taken seriously. It’s a generation that intends to grab the microphone.
The reason I think they’re ready is, in part, because of what I described in my own convocation address as artistic intelligence — to distinguish it from the other kind.
There are three things I want the Class of 2026 to remember about themselves as they begin this next chapter:
- First, they have a viewpoint. A position. That’s different from a machine, which does not have stakes in the world, things it needs to say, problems it needs to solve in its own life.
- Second, they are thoughtful and answerable for their choices in a way no machine ever could be.
- And third, they are growing. They will pursue careers over decades. No machine can match the cumulative wisdom that comes from the successes — and failures — of all those years.
What you’ll find is that today’s hiring managers are looking for something that can’t be machine-generated — the judgment, the process, the four years of learning to think these graduands have been fortunate to acquire.
As a country, when we actively root for our youth, it helps to dull some of the negativity they’re inevitably picking up elsewhere — in headlines about mass layoffs or crippling housing prices or media portrayals of them as lost and alone.
Our new governor general, the Rt. Hon. Louise Arbour, got the tone exactly right at her installation ceremony earlier this month when she described young Canadians as true global citizens, well-educated, climate-aware and digitally fluent.
Surprise us
“Unlike the generations before you, you have at your disposal tools that didn’t exist when your parents were born. Surprise us.”
They almost certainly will.
Importantly, Arbour offered Canadians an unflinching assessment of the current situation; the kind she has built her career on: “[Not all youth] are able to reach their full potential as they face the headwinds of inequality. In that, we are failing them. It is our shared responsibility to correct course.”
The challenges the Class of 2026 face are not imaginary, but they are not insurmountable, either. And I am tremendously bullish on them. That’s why the onus is on us to set them up for success.
Then, we must get out of the way. Enough with the finger-wagging. They’ve got this.
