For Ron Sliter, getting a master's degree seemed like a path to job security. After spending nearly two decades in the military, including eight tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he attended graduate school with the help of the GI Bill and landed a job in IT administration. He looked forward to climbing the corporate ladder and enjoying a long, successful career in the civilian world.
Then, in January 2023, he got laid off. Since then, he's applied to thousands of roles — to no avail. After more than two years, he's still unemployed. The whole experience, he says, feels like "being caught in the middle of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.'"
"It's disheartening," he tells me. "They sell you on the dream, you fight for the dream, and you come back to take advantage of the dream that you fought for. And you realize it doesn't exist."
Sliter is part of a sudden spike in the number of highly educated professionals who are struggling to find a job — any job. According to government data analyzed by the economist Aaron Terrazas, professionals with advanced degrees who are looking for work find themselves stranded on the unemployment line for a median of 18 weeks — a jobless spell that has more than quadrupled over the past two years. And in a strange twist, job searches are now taking more than twice as long for educated elites than they are for workers who never went to college. At the moment, the higher your degree, the longer it will take for you to find a job.
It's not news that we're in the midst of a sharp downturn in tech and finance — one that has hit highly credentialed professionals especially hard. I've been calling it a white-collar recession, assuming that it's temporary. It's normal, after all, to experience dips in the job market. There have been plenty of times over the years when Ph.D. holders faced longer job searches than high school graduates. But whatever the ups and downs, education — particularly an advanced degree — has generally provided a good buffer against financial insecurity.
Lately, though, I've started to wonder if what we're seeing in the job market is a sign of something deeper. What if Sliter's protracted spell of joblessness is an early warning signal — an indication that the economy is undergoing a fundamental shift? What if, going forward, education no longer provides a path to economic security the way it once did?
"For 40 years, we've been talking about how more education leads to better labor market outcomes," says Terrazas, the former chief economist for Glassdoor. "Suddenly, that feels like it's changing." And the shift, he warns, could herald a profound "moment of dislocation" for today's white-collar professionals, just as blue-collar workers faced a seismic reckoning in the wake of globalization.
"What the early 2000s were for manufacturing workers, I worry that the mid-2020s are going to be for knowledge workers," Terrazas says. "American manufacturing workers were told they were highly productive until global trade opened up, and then suddenly that changed. I worry that we're in a comparable moment for knowledge workers. They were told they were the most productive workers in the world. Suddenly that's being undermined."
Education has long served as a ticket to a better, more secure life. But rarely has it mattered more than in recent decades, with the rise of robots and computers and the internet. The more schooling you had, the more likely you were to survive the sudden technological disruption. Between 1980 and 2009, the economists Daron Acemoglu and David Autor found, wages increased modestly for those with a bachelor's degree, soared for those with an advanced degree, and tumbled for high school dropouts. Economists gave the phenomenon an awkward name: skill-biased technological change. In plainspeak: Get more degrees or you're screwed. Education was the one thing that kept you safe in an increasingly cutthroat economy.
To secure their futures, an unprecedented number of young Americans enrolled in graduate schools, taking out big loans that they believed would yield even bigger payoffs down the road. Since 2000, the numbers of Americans with master's degrees and doctorates have more than doubled — while the ranks of those without a high school diploma shrank.
But then, over the past few years, the demand for super-educated professionals suddenly took a deep dive. A variety of factors have combined to alter the white-collar landscape. The first was the pandemic-driven shift to remote work. No longer limited by the constraints of geography, American companies realized they could hire abroad, giving them access to a larger and cheaper pool of highly trained professionals. Suddenly, homegrown computer scientists, product managers, and data scientists — long treated as rare diamonds worthy of their high salaries — seemed more like overpriced commodities compared with their counterparts overseas.
Another factor has been the big push among corporate recruiters to de-emphasize formal credentials in the hiring process, a trend known as "skills-based hiring." Some employers no longer list degree requirements in job postings; others have added the qualifier "or equivalent experience." That's giving people without the extra schooling a chance at landing the most coveted white-collar jobs — while undercutting the advantage long enjoyed by the advanced-degree holders.
And then there's AI. As I've written before, studies show that chatbots and other AI tools are already providing a boost to those with the least skill and experience, while doing little to help high performers — the very people who likely got an advanced degree to hone their skills. What's more, early estimates suggest that in the long run, AI is most likely to displace white-collar professionals, while leaving most blue-collar jobs intact. And besides, getting an MBA or some other advanced degree didn't exactly prepare anyone for the sudden emergence of ChatGPT. The faster technology changes, the faster your fancy degree is likely to feel outdated. Terrazas found that the median age for those experiencing long-term unemployment is now 37 — meaning you don't have to be a boomer to feel like technology has passed you by.
"What we think of as 'old' is a lot younger now," Terrazas says. "With the accelerated technical frontier, what it means to be out of date is creeping downward."
That's what happened to a millennial I'll call Tara. After earning her MBA from Cornell University in 2021, she was confident that all the hard work — and expense — was going to pay off. With a job offer from Amazon in hand, she moved across the country to Seattle, excited to live on her own for the first time and begin a brand-new career as a product manager. Whatever happened with the job, she figured there would always be plenty of companies eager to hire someone with a business degree from a top school.
Then Tara got laid off during the tech downturn in November 2023 — and hasn't been able to land a new role. Unemployed for 14 months and counting, she's applied to something like 650 jobs. "With every passing month, as my stress levels went up, my search criteria expanded," she tells me. "I'm stumped at just how hard it's been."
The prospects for educated elites are so bleak that some have taken to hiding the credentials they worked so hard to earn.Professionals with advanced degrees aren't just mired in longer job searches — they're facing what feels like a vicious circle: The longer they're out of work, the more obsolete their skills become, which in turn makes it even harder to find a job. As they grow increasingly dejected, some opt for lower-paying roles; others give up altogether. Economists refer to this as "scarring," and it's one of the reasons they worry so much about long-term unemployment. It doesn't just hurt the people who can't find work. It also hurts the broader economy.
The prospects for educated elites are so bleak that some have taken to hiding the credentials they worked so hard to earn. Scott Catey, a policy director who has both a JD and a Ph.D., says he sometimes leaves out the doctorate in job applications, to avoid being viewed as overqualified. Michael Borsellino, who has a doctorate in urban studies, started listing his degree as being in "social sciences," to make it sound applicable to a wider range of jobs. The goal, he says, is "not to pigeonhole myself."
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the modern economy has been dividing up the workforce into ever-narrower specializations. A driving force in higher education, in fact, was to cultivate the sort of hyper-niche expertise that the marketplace demanded. But Terrazas says we're now starting to see the darker side of becoming really, really good at one thing. "Specialization can create productivity-enhancing high returns," he says. "But it can also create obsolescence."
Borsellino, who eventually landed a role at LinkedIn after a nine-month search, doesn't think his Ph.D. proved to be an asset. "If it did help, I feel like I wouldn't have been unemployed for as long as I was," he says. "I don't know if it was a drain, but I don't think it was the end-all, be-all that I grew up believing it would be." If he were thinking about getting a doctorate today, he's not sure he'd do it. "I think we're at this point where experience is valued so much more that it's really, really difficult to justify doing the degree."
Advanced-degree holders, of course, continue to be the economy's overwhelming winners. Most of them are gainfully employed, with salaries that are typically far higher than anyone else's. And it's possible that the current hiring obstacles facing educated professionals will prove to be a temporary blip, just one more twist in a deeply strange pandemic-era economy that we've failed to understand time and time again.
But if I'm right, and this turns out to be the beginning of an enduring trend, it will force us to rethink our long-standing assumptions about education and employment. If even a Ph.D. can't keep us safe from economic catastrophe, what will? That's the question that I find deeply unsettling, especially as we face the uncertainty and upheaval of the AI revolution. Yes, it's always been unfair that those who can afford to keep going to school face better prospects than their less-educated peers. But at least there was some kind of road map to financial security, a rule of thumb that told you how to get to higher ground. There was comfort in that predictability.
Catey, the JD-Ph.D., counts himself among the lucky ones. While he continues his search for a full-time job, he's been able to land enough freelance work to get by. And he doesn't have to worry about paying off his student loans, because they were forgiven by the Biden administration. But being without a full-time job for almost a year wasn't exactly the life he envisioned back when he was slogging his way through grad school.
"Credentialing seemed to me a very solid way to make sure I had a reliable future of employment in front of me," he says. "That's not how it turned out."
Andy Kiersz contributed analysis.
Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.
