Going back to graduate school has long been the ultimate Plan B for young professionals looking to jumpstart a stalled career. However, new labor data suggests that getting a master’s degree is no longer the guarantee it used to be.
According to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Burning Glass Institute, the unemployment rate for workers under 35 with a master’s degree has rarely been higher over the last 20 years. Paradoxically, unemployment for those with Ph.Ds, law degrees, or medical degrees sits near historic lows.
“For most of the past two decades, these lines moved together—not anymore,” said Gad Levanon, chief economist of Burning Glass. Levanon attributes this decoupling to a simple imbalance: “More degrees chasing fewer of the positions those degrees were meant to unlock.”
Driven by online programs and specialized, AI-focused reskilling tracks, the number of master's programs grew 69% between 2005 and 2021 alone. But as the degree proliferates, its corporate value dilutes. Unlike specialized medical or law degrees, Levanon notes that a master’s degree acts primarily as a market signal. When everyone has one, the signal loses its efficacy. Today, master ’s-degree holders under 35 sit at the 77th percentile of unemployment, underperforming even associate-degree holders over the past year.
This shifting reality is catching recent graduates off guard. Kevin Vado, who recently finished a full-time MBA at the University of Florida to pivot into brand management, has sent out roughly 200 applications and networked with dozens of alumni, yet interviews remain scarce. "I haven’t gotten the amount of offers that I truly expected," Vado admitted, though he maintains the personal development was worth the investment.
Vado’s struggle aligns with shifting corporate sentiments. A survey by Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business revealed that 40% of employers have no plans to hire MBAs this year, up sharply from 26.8% just a year prior.
According to Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president of SHRM, the rise of artificial intelligence has accelerated a corporate pivot toward "skills-first" hiring. "Every indication is hiring managers now are more receptive than ever to the idea that a person doesn’t need a graduate degree to be competitive," Taylor said. "Employers just want to know, ‘Can you do it?’"
Where master's degrees do still succeed, it is often due to aggressive institutional placement. Amir Zeltzer enrolled in a specialized engineering MBA at Texas A&M University to stand out against laid-off professionals with more experience. By leveraging the school’s intensive, one-on-one interview preparation and career resources, Zeltzer secured a role at Texas Instruments ahead of his fall graduation.
"I definitely don’t regret being part of the program," Zeltzer said. But for the broader market, the era of using a master's degree as an automatic career escalator appears to be coming to a close.
If You're Giving a Commencement Speech in 2026, Maybe Skip the AI Talk
Commencement season is upon us again—and this year, a handful of speakers have learned a hard lesson: it's surprisingly difficult to inspire graduating students by painting a future dominated by artificial intelligence.
Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at Tavistock Development Company, addressed graduates at the University of Central Florida. Acknowledging an era of "profound change," she described the moment as both "exciting" and "daunting." Then came the line that shifted the room: "The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution."
The response was immediate—and audible. Booing rippled through the crowd, growing louder until Caulfield paused, chuckled, and turned to her fellow speakers. "What happened?" she asked. "Okay, I struck a chord."
She pressed on: "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives"—only to be met with another wave of noise, this time cheers and applause.
A similar scene unfolded Friday at the University of Arizona, where former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced persistent booing when he told graduates, "You will help shape artificial intelligence." The skepticism began before he even took the stage: student groups had called for his removal as commencement speaker amid a lawsuit in which a former girlfriend and business partner accused him of sexual assault (allegations he has denied). But the booing intensified when Schmidt doubled down on his AI message, insisting, "You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat; you just get on."
To be clear, AI hasn't become a universal third rail at graduations. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang spoke at Carnegie Mellon's commencement recently and drew no audible pushback when he declared that AI has "reinvented computing."
Still, the backlash isn't entirely surprising. A recent Gallup poll found that only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 believe it's a good time to find a job locally—a steep drop from 75% in 2022. That pessimism isn't driven solely by AI anxieties (even some software engineers are uneasy), but as journalist and tech critic Brian Merchant observed, for many students, AI has become "the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism."
"I too would loudly boo at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I were in my early twenties, unemployed, and had aspirations for my future greater than entering prompts into an LLM," Merchant wrote.
Even when speeches avoided AI explicitly, "resilience" emerged as a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself acknowledged the weight graduates carry: "There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create."
Caulfield, meanwhile, may have misread her audience: arts and humanities graduates. One student noted that even before the AI remark, Caulfield began losing the crowd with "generic" praise of corporate figures like Jeff Bezos.
Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told The New York Times: "It wasn't one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, 'This sucks.'"
The takeaway for future speakers? Inspiration requires empathy. Before celebrating technological disruption, consider who's listening—and what they're worried about losing.
