Looking to begin a new career? AT&T needs techs.

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From the Dayton, Ohio, suburbs to boardrooms in Dallas, the employees fueling AT&T’
s next wave of growth aren’t fresh-faced college graduates with expensive four-year degrees. They’re skilled, blue-collar workers ready to get their hands dirty — and AT&T can’t find enough of them.

“We need people who know how to actually work with electricity. We need people who understand photonics. We need people who can go into folks’ homes and connect this infrastructure to make it work right,” AT&T CEO John Stankey told CNBC during a recent interview from the company’s Dallas headquarters.

“We find that we’ve got to go out and find them, train them, and incent them to come in,” he said. “It’s not like we’re growing them on trees in the United States.”

AT&T’s dilemma — hunting for blue-collar workers at a time when a record number of college students are projected to graduate this spring — underscores the palpable crisis facing new degree holders as the first wave of the AI revolution hits the U.S. economy.

For much of the postwar era, the American bargain was clear: Go to college, get a degree and claim your place in the middle class. As factories gave way to offices and the U.S. economy increasingly rewarded credentials over physical labor, a four-year diploma became one of the clearest symbols of upward mobility. But as AI spreads across corporate America and begins to absorb the entry-level work that once gave graduates their start, that promise is beginning to fracture.

While the rapid spread of AI has not yet led to broad layoffs and empty offices, many new graduates, especially those in AI-exposed industries, are learning their degrees may no longer guarantee the opportunities they once did.

In March, AT&T announced plans to invest $250 billion over the next five years to expand its fiber network and meet the demands of AI data centers and a surge in network usage, fueled both by AI and a rise in mobile streaming and uploading.

About 15% of that investment will be used for hiring and training employees, but not necessarily for white-collar jobs at its corporate office. Instead, it will primarily be used for blue-collar front-line workers, the majority of whom are skilled technicians, the company said.

“As a society and within the United States, we’ve put a huge premium in value socially on a college degree, maybe for good reason, but in some cases ... we maybe have missed the mark,” said Stankey. “That hasn’t been optimal when you see the cost of education increasing at higher than the rate of inflation and yet we’re short HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] repair people, we’re short electricians, we’re short technicians that can go in and work on fiber.”

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