Young workers face a daunting job market. While the depth, severity, and speed of job loss due to artificial intelligence remain the most dramatic and uncertain economic issues of our time, a range of data shows that we may be entering an entry-level jobs crunch for those just joining the workforce.

Researchers at Stanford were among the first to suggest that some of the challenges facing entry-level and younger workers may be driven by AI adoption. Their hypothesis: With the release of advanced AI models, more senior workers whose experience and judgment can be less easily replaced by AI are holding up better than less experienced workers. Follow-up work by the Stanford economists has since found that the divergence in hiring between senior and junior workers “has widened steadily” over the past year. Further, new research from Census Bureau economists finds that following the release of ChatGPT, “the most AI-exposed decile of college majors saw their likelihood of initial employment decline by five percentage points, while full-quarter initial earnings declined by thirteen percent,” an earnings decline “comparable in magnitude to the earnings losses associated with graduating into a large recession.” Furthermore, while the unemployment rate sits at a low 4.1 percent, the hiring rate is as low as it was after the Great Recession. And the unemployment rate for recent college graduates is both above historical averages and close to twice as high as for college graduates overall. Recent analyses have also shown that for those without college degrees, the back-office jobs that have so often served as stepping stones to better jobs may be at risk.

While some notable economists have challenged this hypothesis or pointed to a lack of hard evidence of AI-induced job loss so far, there is enough evidence of risk for young job seekers to at least jump-start an initial policy response that could be expanded if more dire scenarios materialize.

One targeted, no-regrets solution: expand national service jobs for those in their twenties while creating the infrastructure to scale up quickly if this entry-level job shortage solidifies and accelerates. Today, AmeriCorps and sister programs, which have been around since 1993, offer about 75,000 young people a year a chance to work in disaster relief, tutoring in underfunded schools, conservation, and other pathways in faith-based and nonprofit organizations. But too little funding (and efforts from the Trump Administration to severely cut the program) results in too few of these opportunities and too little pay for national service workers.

Why act now? Three reasons.

First, there is compelling evidence from both the deep 1982 recession and the Great Recession that when young people start their careers in a weak job market, they don’t just suffer for a year or two. It often sets them back for decades. They see lower lifetime earnings, more divorces, and more health and mental health challenges. Economists appropriately call this “scarring.” Many never recover. Economic studies find that “college graduates who start their working lives during a recession earn less for at least 10 to 15 years than those who graduate during periods of prosperity,” as a Stanford research review found in 2019. Economic research showed that graduating into the 1982 recession led such new workers to be less likely to marry or have children and reduced their life expectancy, with “deaths of despair” accounting for two-thirds of increased mortality. And cohorts graduating into the persistently weak labor market after the global financial crisis saw permanently reduced employment probabilities.

A new influx of national service jobs for those entering the workforce could help tighten the job market for entry-level workers and reduce scarring, preventing painful resume gaps and opening opportunities to build new skills and experiences.

Second, expanding national service jobs could address what is quickly becoming entry-level workers’ “employment Catch-22.” The entry-level job dilemma is that young workers lack the key experience and judgment that make them harder to replace with AI, but slow entry-level hiring makes it hard to get that kind of work experience and judgment. A national service expansion would help. Many of the skills that employers may value more in the AI workforce are personal, relational skills involving problem solving, dealing with people, and working on a team. Many national service jobs offer just those types of experience.

Finally, national service jobs can give more young people a sense of purpose and connection with our national challenges as they figure out career paths made more uncertain by AI. For everyone from software engineering grads to those without college degrees seeking back-office jobs, a national service job may be a way to both serve their country and pick up work and leadership experience while they figure out what’s next. During the American Rescue Plan, we saw cities hire non-college-educated young people as COVID-19 trackers, but then they kept adding new health-related tasks that started to turn those temporary jobs into stepping stones to health careers.

National service could also be a chance for young people to bring their AI and tech skills to new areas of pressing concern—from disaster response to public health solutions to the classroom to new infrastructure initiatives. To that end, Anthropic recently launched a pilot seeking to deploy young people with little work experience to nonprofit organizations, where they can use their familiarity with the new technology to scale mission-driven work.

A major national service initiative could be part of the broader plans several leading Democrats have put forward to attempt to ensure full employment if the darker scenarios of AI-induced job loss materialize. But this does not need to be an all-or-nothing policy choice. We can start by more than doubling the number of national service jobs—100,000 more each year for $5 billion a year. That expansion could set the stage for something far more ambitious if the entry-level job shortage deepens. It could also help meet pressing challenges, from helping more students bridge achievement gaps to planning, building, and repairing more homes.

But a critical purpose here is to help young people avoid falling into AI-related economic traps that could hurt their long-term economic outcomes, their health, and their happiness. By giving young workers struggling to get their first jobs a better chance, this plan will reduce scarring, overcome the employment Catch-22, and give Gen Z opportunities to contribute. It is well worth the cost.