We Replaced the Junior Designer With AI. Did We Think About What Comes Next?

Are we silently removing rungs from the career ladder? Image: Adobe Firely.

While writing my book, I realized I had been using Claude as a junior designer. That moment of recognition turned into something much more alarming.

I was deep into a chapter on AI-assisted design workflows when it hit me. Over the previous few months, Scott Fegette, my coauthor, and I had been asking Claude to generate first drafts, iterate on concepts, and rough out visual frameworks.We were directing. Claude was executing. It was efficient, responsive, and always available.

Then it hit me. We were treating AI as a junior designer.

The realization stopped me cold. Not because of what it said about AI. But because of what it said about the 24-year-old who used to sit across the studio and do exactly that work. Where did that person go? And more importantly, what happens when we retire, and there is no one behind us who came up through the craft?

The ladder is being removed

That question is no longer abstract. The institutions that trained the next generation of creative professionals are cutting programs at a pace and scale that should alarm everyone working in this industry.

At my former College, Humber Polytechnic in Toronto, eight programs were cancelled and a ninth suspended in the Faculty of Media, Creative Arts and Design in spring 2026. Acting for stage and screen, advertising, television production, film, technical theatre, and comedy writing are all gone. Radio Broadcasting, a program with over 3,000 graduates and more than 50 years of history, aired its final class in 2026. The Virtual Production program, which trains students for one of the most in-demand skill sets in contemporary film and television, is reportedly next. Colleges across Ontario, including Sheridan, Fanshawe, and Georgian, have collectively cut $1.4 billion in costs and suspended more than 600 programs in recent years.

The official explanation is financial. Federal caps on international students, inflation, and constrained provincial funding. Those pressures are real. They are not the whole story.

This is not a Canadian problem

Looking south from my perch in Toronto, the pattern repeats. In the United States, entire institutions are disappearing. The Delaware College of Art and Design shut down in early 2026 after 27 years. The Modern College of Design in Ohio, which has trained graphic and advertising designers since 1983, permanently closed in June 2026. Harvard cut Ph.D. admissions in its arts and humanities division by roughly 60 percent for two consecutive years. Yale is considering a 12 percent reduction in humanities and social sciences graduate programs over three years.

The Parsons School of Design in New York, one of the most recognized design schools in the world, is consolidating five schools into two colleges, cutting 16 minors, and pausing doctoral programs. It has seen a 20 percent decline in enrollment since 2021 and three consecutive years of structural deficits exceeding $30 million annually.

Cross the Atlantic, and it gets worse. The UK government cut funding for arts and design higher education courses by 50 percent in 2021, redirecting resources toward what it called “high-value subjects”. Between 2024 and 2025 alone, almost 4,000 university courses were eliminated across the UK, many in the creative and humanities sectors. GCSE arts entries have fallen 47 percent since 2010. A-level arts entries are down 31 percent. Teacher recruitment for Art and Design is running at just 58 percent of target. The vice-chancellor of the University of the Arts London, home to Central Saint Martins, warned in January 2026 that specialist creative institutions cannot plan for the medium or long term under current funding conditions.

At the EU level, the Council of the European Union proposed cutting 27.56 million euros from the Creative Europe Programme budget for 2026, prompting 30 European cultural networks to issue a joint letter urging reversal. In the Netherlands, plans to cut 300 million euros from international education budgets and restrict English-taught programs have triggered protests, putting pressure on schools like the Design Academy Eindhoven that have long served as pipelines for global creative talent.

Whether it is Ontario, Ohio, London, or Amsterdam, the mechanism is the same. Funding pressures land hardest on creative programs because they are expensive to run, harder to defend with employment statistics, and less likely to attract the international students who cross-subsidize everything else.

What financial reports do not capture

None of those budget documents accounts for what is happening inside our studios at the same time.

The junior designer role was never just about producing work. It was the entry point to the craft. It was where a young creative learned to read a brief, absorb a critique, recover from a bad idea, and develop the judgment that only comes from doing real work under real pressure. Today’s senior designer or Art Director was, fifteen years ago, the junior whose rough comps you marked up in red. That pipeline did not sustain itself. It required investment, patience, and a willingness to bring people along.

We have now handed that role to a machine. And simultaneously, the institutions training the next generation are cutting the very programs that produced the candidates for those roles in the first place.

The students being squeezed out today are not just missing a first job. They are being locked out of the path to becoming the creative directors, art directors, and UX leads of the next decade. Labour market researchers describe what is coming as a “seniority cliff,” the point roughly five to ten years from now, when the current generation of senior creatives retire and discover there is no one behind them who came up through the craft.

What we owe the next generation

This is not a Humber problem. It is not a funding problem. It is not a UK problem or an EU budget problem. It is a structural failure of the creative industry, globally, to recognize that it is dismantling its own future.

The tools we reach for every morning are extraordinary. No one is arguing otherwise. But the question AI-fluent senior designers need to ask themselves is not “what can this tool do?” It is “who used to do this, and where are they supposed to learn now?” The institutions that fed that pipeline now have to ask themselves, “Are we training students for employment or unemployment?”

The ladder that took generations to build is being dismantled, rung by rung. What is even more tragic is that the professionals with the power to notice are too busy prompting AI to look down.