For Ron Slater, a master’s degree has begun to serve as a path to job security. After spent nearly two decades in the army, including eight rounds in Iraq and Afghanistan, he joined the Faculty of Graduate Studies with the help of the draft digestive system and fell a job in IT management. He was looking forward to climbing companies ladder and enjoying a long and successful profession in the civil world.
Then, in January 2023, it was demobilized. Since then, it is applied to thousands of roles – but to no avail. After more than two years, he is still unemployed. He says that the entire experience appears to be “arrested in the middle of the” Texas Charo’s massacre. “
He tells me: “It is frustrating.” “They sell you to the dream, you are fighting for the dream, and you are back to take advantage of the dream you fought for. And you realize that it does not exist.”
Sliter is part of a sudden rise in highly educated professionals who struggle to find a job – any job. According to government data analyzed by Economist Aaron Terrazas, professionals who hold advanced certificates looking for work find themselves cut off on the unemployment line for 18 weeks – more emotional talisman than the past two years. In a strange development, job searches for jobs now take more than twice the length of learners more than workers who have never gone to college. Currently, the higher your testimony, the more it takes a long time to find a job.
It is not news that we are in the midst of a sharp contraction in technology and financing – which has made professionals with special credits in particular. I described it as white collar stagnation, assuming that it is temporary. Naturally, after all, the experience of declines in the labor market. There were several times over the years when a doctorate faced searches for work longer than high school graduates. But regardless of ascending and landing, education – especially an advanced degree – has generally provided a good insulation against financial insecurity.
Recently, though, I started wondering whether what we see in the labor market is a sign of something deeper. What if the prolonged Sliter talisman of unemployment is an early warning sign – an indication that the economy is subject to a basic transformation? What if education is no longer, to move forward, provides a way to economic security the way it happened once?
“For 40 years, we have been talking about how more education has done better results in the labor market,” says Teerrazas, the former chief economist in Glassedor. “Suddenly, this seems to be changing.” It warns of this transformation, it can highlight a deep “moment of dislocation” for white -collars professionals today, just as the blue -collar workers faced a seismic account in the wake of globalization.
“What it was in the early first decade of the twentieth century of manufacturing workers, I am concerned that the mid -twenties of the last century will be for knowledge workers,” says Terazas. “American manufacturing workers were told that they were very productive until world trade was opened, then suddenly changed. I am concerned that we are in a moment similar to knowledge workers. They were said to be the most productive workers in the world. Suddenly. This is undermined.”
Education has long been a ticket for a better and safer life. But it is rarely more important than recent decades, with the appearance of robots, computers and the Internet. The higher your education, the more likely to survive the sudden technological disorder. Between 1980 and 2009, Economists Darwoglu and David Autor found that wages have increased modestly for those with a bachelor’s degree, rose to those who have an advanced degree, and retracted the leaks in high schools. Economists gave this phenomenon an embarrassing name: Technological change is biased skill. In Plainspeak: Get more grades or you are tight. Education was the only thing that kept safe in an increasing economy.
To secure their future, an unprecedented number of American youth registered in graduate schools, and taking large loans they believe will achieve greater returns on the road. Since 2000, the numbers of Americans with master’s and Mandali have multiplied more than weakness – while those who have no high school diploma have doubled.
But after that, over the past few years, the demand for highly educated professionals suddenly has taken deep diving. A variety of factors have been combined to change white collar landscape. The first was the transformation that the epidemic was to work away. It is no longer limited due to geography restrictions, American companies realized that they could be employed abroad, allowing them to reach a largest and cheapest group of highly trained professionals. Suddenly, local computer scientists, product managers, and data scientists – who have long been treated as a rare diamond deserved their high salaries – are like exaggerated commodities compared to their counterparts abroad.
Another factor was the big batch between corporate recruits to cancel the confirmation of official accreditation data in the recruitment process, a trend known as “skills -based employment”. Some employers no longer include certificate requirements in job publications; Others added the qualifiers or equivalent experience. This gives people without an additional education an opportunity to drop the most white-collars functions-with undermining the advantage of advanced class holders.
Then there is Amnesty International. As written before, studies show that Chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools already provide a batch for those who have the least skill and experience, with a little doing to help high performance – people who are likely to get an advanced degree to refine their skills. Moreover, early estimates indicate that in the long run, artificial intelligence is likely to replace specialists with white collars, while leaving most of the functions of blue collar intact. Besides, obtaining a master’s management that changes the fastest technology, the faster your understanding degree, you will likely feel the foot. Terrazas found that the average age of those with long-term unemployment is now 37-which means that it should not be a mutation to feel that technology has gone through you.
“What we think is” old “younger now,” says Terazas. “With the rapid technical boundaries, what it means to be old is crawling down.”
This is what happened to thousands of millennium I will invite Tara. After I got a master’s degree with a business offer from Amazon on hand, she moved all over the country to Seattle, excited to live alone for the first time and starts a new new profession as director of products. Whatever happens with the job, I thought there will always be many companies that yearn for employing a person who gets a working degree from a high school.
Tara was then accelerated during the decline in technology in November 2023 – and he was unable to get a new role. Unemployed for 14 months and count, apply to approximately 650 jobs. “With every passing month, with my high levels of stress, my search standards have expanded,” I told me. “I am stuck in how difficult it is.”
The horizons of the educated elites are so dark that some have taken them to hide the credentials they worked hard to gain.
Advanced graders are not just drowning in searching for a longer job – they seem to face as if it is a vicious circle: the longer their work period, their skills become more darker, making it difficult to find in turn a job. When they grow increasingly, some choose low -wage roles; Others are completely abandoned. Economists indicate that it is “scars”, which is one of the reasons that make them worry a lot about long -term unemployment. Not only does people who cannot find work. It also hurts the broader economy.
The horizons of the educated elites are so dark that some have taken them to hide the credentials they worked hard to gain. Scott Kitty, a policy manager who has both JD and PhD, says he sometimes leaves his doctorate in work requests, to avoid being seen as qualified. Michael Porsilino, who obtained a doctorate in urban studies, began to include his degree as “social sciences”, to make it appear applicable to a wide range of jobs. The goal, as he says, is “not a dove myself.”
Since the Industrial Revolution, the modern economy has divided the workforce into integral disciplines ever. In fact, the driving force in higher education was the cultivation of a kind of excessive experience that the market demanded. But Terrazas says we are now seeing the darker side to become really good in one thing. “Specialization can create high returns promoting productivity,” he says. “But it can also create limitations.”
Borsellino, which eventually got a role in LinkedIn after searching for nine months, does not believe a doctorate. It is proven to be a balance. “If I help, I feel that I will not be unemployed as long as I am,” he says. “I don’t know if this was a depletion, but I don’t think it was everything, everything arose, believing it would be.” If he is thinking about getting a PhD today, he is not sure that he will do so. “I think we are at this point where the experiment is so much estimated so much that it is really difficult to justify obtaining a degree.”
Of course, those with a developed class are still the overwhelming winners of the economy. Most of them work with wages, with much higher salaries than anyone else. It is possible that the current employment obstacles facing educated professionals will prove that they are a temporary group, but rather another development in a strange economy in the era of the epidemic that we failed to understand over and over again.
But if you are right, this is the beginning of the permanent direction, then it will compel us to rethink our long assumptions about education and employment. Even if the doctorate cannot keep us safe from the economic catastrophe, what will you do? This is the question that I find is very disturbing, especially as we face uncertainty and turmoil of the revolution of artificial intelligence. Yes, it was always unfair to face those who could continue to go to school better than their less educated peers. But at least there was a kind of road map to financial security, a base of the thumb that told you how to reach a higher land. There was a comfort in that ability to predict.
Catey, JD-PH.D. He calculates himself between the lucky ones. While he continues to search for a full -time job, he can get enough independent work to get. There is no need to worry about paying his student loans, because they were forgiven by the Biden administration. But being without a full -time job for a year is nearly a year, it was not exactly the life he visited again when he was abandoned through the graduate school.
“I seemed to be considered a very strong way to make sure I got a reliable future in front of me,” he says. “This is not how it turns out.”
Andy Kerus contributed to the analysis.
Aki Eto’o He is the main correspondent in Business Insider.
