A Master’s Degree Used to Open Doors. For Workers Under 35, It’s Not Working That Way Anymore.
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The explanation is structural. Master’s degree programs grew 69% to more than 33,500 between 2005 and 2021, according to the Postsecondary Education and Economics Research Center, and even more have launched since, many focused on AI reskilling. The market is oversupplied. A J.D. or M.D. functions as a license to practice a specific profession. A master’s degree functions as a signal, and signals lose value when too many people send them. Associate-degree holders have now outperformed master’s holders on employment levels for more than a year, a reversal that would have been nearly unthinkable a decade ago.
Employers are reflecting this shift in hiring plans. More than 40% of employers surveyed by Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business say they have no plans to hire MBAs this year, up sharply from 26.8% who said the same in 2025. SHRM President Johnny C. Taylor Jr. described what’s driving it: AI is accelerating a shift to skills-first hiring, where employers care less about the credential and more about whether a candidate can do the job. “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,” he told the Journal. As Burning Glass Institute Chief Economist Gad Levanon put it: more degrees are chasing fewer of the positions those degrees were meant to unlock.
For anyone considering graduate school right now, the calculus has changed significantly. A medical or law degree still functions as a career entry point. A master’s degree is an enhancement, not a ticket. The same forces driving the entry-level market’s difficulty are now reaching further up the credential stack. Make sure the skills attached to the degree are ones employers are actually paying for.
The Job Market Is “Stuck” – Here’s What That Word Actually Means
The Washington Post put a word on something a lot of people have been struggling to describe: the job market is stuck. Not collapsing, not recovering, just frozen in place, and grinding people down quietly in a way that doesn’t generate the urgency a sharp downturn would.
The data points behind that word are real. The vacancy-to-unemployment ratio sits at roughly 0.9, meaning there’s now less than one job opening for every unemployed person, a steep drop from the pandemic recovery when there were two openings for every job seeker. The hiring rate has fallen below pre-pandemic 2019 levels. The Federal Reserve has held interest rates unchanged for three consecutive months, keeping borrowing expensive and expansion risky for businesses trying to plan ahead. The result is that nobody is moving. Workers are staying put because they’re afraid to risk a long job search in a tight market. The quit rate has dropped back to 2015 levels. That lack of churn is dragging on wage growth at exactly the moment inflation is rising, a combination that slowly erodes purchasing power without generating headlines.
The low-hire, low-fire dynamic we’ve been covering all year may have stopped being a transitional phase and started being the new normal. Unemployment held at 4.3% in April, but that number looks more stable than it is, partly because the labor force itself is shrinking. Baby Boomers are retiring, fewer young people are entering the workforce, and immigration has slowed sharply; the Washington Post cites Brookings Institute estimates that more immigrants left the U.S. than entered last year, the first time that’s happened in at least 50 years.
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IKEA Is Cutting 850 Jobs; When Affordable Furniture Feels Too Expensive, Something’s Wrong
Inter IKEA, the company that franchises the IKEA brand across 63 countries, announced today it’s cutting 850 jobs, roughly 3% of its 27,500-person global workforce. About 300 of those cuts are in Sweden, at the company’s founding hub in Almhult. Combined with 800 office cuts announced by Ingka Group (IKEA’s biggest franchisee and operator of most IKEA stores) in March, that’s 1,650 IKEA-related job losses in roughly two months. Both Inter IKEA and Ingka replaced their CEOs late last year after the brand reported two consecutive years of declining sales.
CFO Henrik Elm told Reuters that consumer confidence had already been falling for a long time before the Iran war made it worse. “In times when consumer confidence is very much affected, the disposable incomes are really going down for many, especially the consumers we want to reach,” he said. IKEA’s target customer (working and middle-class households looking for affordable, functional furniture) is the segment feeling inflation, energy prices, and tariff impacts most acutely. When a company built around affordable home goods says its customers can no longer afford a new sofa, that’s a meaningful signal about where household budgets actually stand.
The restructuring goes beyond headcount. IKEA is shifting its entire retail model, away from large suburban warehouse stores and toward smaller city-center locations designed to bring the brand closer to where more shoppers live. U.S. tariffs and rising sourcing costs are also squeezing margins. The goal of the cuts, Elm explained, is to lower the cost base so the company can keep reducing prices: “Our ability to lower the prices so they can afford IKEA is more essential than ever before, and of course you can’t achieve that if you have too high a cost base.” For anyone tracking consumer health, retail, and logistics hiring: when a brand this large pulls back, suppliers and logistics partners tend to follow.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on the field. Burning Glass Institute data shows master’s degree unemployment for workers under 35 is near a 20-year high, and 40% of employers say they have no plans to hire MBAs this year. A professional degree still functions as a career entry point. A master’s is increasingly an enhancement, and only worth it if the attached skills are ones employers are actively paying for.
The hiring rate has fallen below pre-2019 levels, there’s roughly one job opening per unemployed worker, and the Fed has kept borrowing rates high. Uncertainty around tariffs, AI, and geopolitics has made employers reluctant to commit to new headcount, creating a market where nobody is really moving in either direction.
Consumer spending on furniture and home goods has been declining as household budgets tighten. CFO Henrik Elm cited the Iran war as accelerating an already-falling decline in consumer confidence. The cuts also support a strategic shift from large suburban stores to smaller city-center locations.
Healthcare and transportation/warehousing are the two sectors consistently growing at strong rates. Most other industries, including tech, finance, and professional services, are hiring below pre-pandemic levels.
