Written by Yassir Rashid
Illustrated by April Yang
Employment trends are increasingly grim. They have even debilitated what were once considered stable jobs, the career paths many international students counted on to sponsor them. These jobs, even within the Bermuda triangle of law, finance and consulting, are disappearing, leaving both domestic and international students facing uncertain futures. These paths need to be considered even more carefully before students spend most of their time at the LSE applying to spring weeks and internships, walking toward a future that may not be possible for them.
Alyssa Lassman describes in the Guardian how the industry has shifted toward greater reliance on AI, with tasks like “developing your own frameworks, creating work plans and creative ideation” being outsourced. Now, junior recruits’ jobs relate more to handling AI than anything else.
Lassman also describes how the apprenticeship model in consulting is being questioned: work previously assigned to juniors is now outsourced to AI, so they have less opportunity to learn in a work environment. “There’s a question mark over the whole apprenticeship model – it’s unclear how analysts will build skills as we used to, while the skills we did learn are redundant when AI can replace them all anyway.” This is likely to show up in future employer hiring practices as well, meaning the value a graduate job at these firms offers also decreases. While the prestige and brand name might still matter, the job might not be as strong a springboard to other careers.
This is particularly important because that seems to be the Faustian bargain a person strikes with themselves when going into a ‘high prestige’ career. At least that’s been the advice I started hearing from other students and alumni even before I even pre-enrolled at the LSE. The absence of a life in the work-life balance equation for a few years in exchange for an entry into other fields that are less demanding but pay similarly.
The internal shift towards AI is not disputed. Generative AIs have seen adoption across the board, from BCG’s Deckster and Bain’s Sage to McKinsey’s Lilli. In their case study, McKinsey described them as “Gen AI–based applications that completely rewire the way we operate.” Additionally, Alex Singla, senior partner and global leader of quantum Black AI by McKinsey, is quoted in the Lilli case study as saying, “In our work with clients, we’ve observed that the leading companies are the ones focused on reimagining entire workflows with gen AI and designing a tech stack that is robust, cost-efficient, and scalable for years to come”. Both statements show the breadth to which AI has restructured, and will continue to restructure, these firms.
The impact is becoming increasingly visible. This can be seen in Mckinsey plans to cut 10% of its workforces in favour of AI. Layoffs aren’t the whole picture, though. Forbes reports that AI is cutting entry-level job posts up to 9% as part of the invisible AI layoffs, where “Long before a professional reaches the point where their job is restructured, automated, and cut from the headcount, companies are shaping their futures by eliminating job openings for these roles in the first place.”
The future of graduate opportunities within these firms is also reflected in their consistent salary freezes. The Financial Times reported that the “Starting salaries for consultants at the Big Four (Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC) …have stagnated for even longer, showing no increase since 2022. PwC’s UK boss Marco Amitrano said graduate hiring had been cut in 2025”.
Additionally, “Two senior executives at Big Four firms estimated that, across the UK’s largest consulting and accounting firms, graduate recruitment would be down by about a half in the coming year.”
Two LSE students with experience working in consulting firms described the work done as “not very technical” and “prone to being replaced by AI companies”.
The consulting pipeline over the next couple of years is likely to continue the same trend of graduate hiring, making it a less reliable option.
That is not to say that it ever was the most reliable or easiest path. These spring weeks, which are the first steps in the pipeline, have become infamously competitive. Acceptance rates were around 2.6% in 2020 and were already seen as a gamble and a numbers game, prompting students to apply in large numbers.
While the exact timelines for AI adoption seem to be disputed, with Sam Altman in August 2026 saying that the economy was adapting to AI more slowly than he expected, the fact that AI is restructuring job opportunities now seems to be very clear.
As a result, international students have even fewer options for potential career paths, with the pressure made worse by the recent graduate visa policy changes from 2 years to 18 months. For an international student at LSE who is unwillingly thrown into the race to the bottom of applying to spring weeks, holding out on investment banking and consulting, it now becomes vital to understand that these industries are not insulated from the effects of AI. The window to secure work visas, and the certainty of doing so, has significantly shrunk. The opportunity cost of spending time mass-applying to Spring Weeks, buying dozens of assessment prep courses, and painstakingly writing cover letters to enter an industry one might not even want to enter grows larger. An international student in their third year, in conversation about their future prospects, described the situation as “horrifying” and said that “at the core, the experience is terrifying”. The stable path is now, like all the other paths, becoming a gamble.
