Reevaluating the Value of a Master's Degree in Today's Job Market

Getting a master's degree may not guarantee job success or higher income due to oversupply and changing job market demands.

### Reevaluating the Value of a Master's Degree in Today's Job Market
* 💼  The traditional narrative that a master's degree leads to **higher salaries and more job opportunities** is being challenged by changing job market dynamics.
* 📉  Data shows that the salary gap between bachelor's and master's degree holders is decreasing, with **52% of college graduates working in jobs that don't require a degree**.
* 🎓  A recent Robert Half study found that **79% of workers and hiring managers prioritize skills, experience, and accomplishments** over credentials and education.
* 💰  The average cost of a master's degree is around **$60,000**, not including living expenses, with some programs costing **over $100,000**.
* 🏫  The push for higher education for all dates back to the 1980s, but the **oversupply of college graduates** has led to **challenges in finding suitable employment**.
* 🧠  A framework is proposed for evaluating the value of a master's degree, including **calculating the cost, expected salary increase, and potential career outcomes**.
* 📊  Alternative paths to career advancement are suggested, such as **upskilling**, joining **professional development communities**, or exploring opportunities in the **gig economy**.
* 👩‍🎓👨‍🎓  It's recommended that individuals carefully assess their **career goals, skills, and financial situation** before pursuing a master's degree, considering both **traditional and non-traditional paths to success**.

maybe you shouldn't get a master's degree. Let me explain. Meet Frank. Frank just graduated from college with his undergraduate with a double major in chemistry and economics. Overall, Frank is a good student. He has a 3.7 GPA, was the president of his photography class, and even has some research experience at an informatics lab. Now he's super excited to get started on the next chapter of his life. But you see, he's just had no luck trying to find a job. He's been applying to hundreds of jobs, and he's not being picky. He's applying to full-time jobs, part-time jobs, big companies, small companies, pretty much anything that is even tangentially related to his degree, but just no luck. So now Frank is kind of just thinking to himself like, maybe I should just get a master's degree. Then I would be able to find a job. Okay, okay. So this is when I will say to Frank, Frank, hold on, my friend. Calm down. Please think this thoroughly, because if you don't, you

could potentially end up in this position. I will either be overqualified for the entry-level positions or underqualified for the midlevel positions, and no matter what jobs I apply for, I'll get rejected from all of them because nobody wants me, and it's so soul-crushing. In this video, we're going to talk about the actual value of a master's degree as opposed to the narrative that you've been told by schools, the government, and society, and finally how to actually evaluate if a master's degree is worth it or not, as well as some other alternatives because there are actually lots of different ways that you can advance your career if you're interested in learning, and especially self-learning STEM subjects. I really recommend you check out Brilliant. Brilliant is the sponsor of this portion of the video, is a STEM learning platform that specializes in interactive, hands-on learning. In fact, their courses are so good that top companies like recruiters themselves recommend their candidates use Brilliant in order to learn and brush up on subjects like math.

and stats coding and data science. Brilliant makes learning these tough subjects easy to understand and fun by incorporating little quizzes, analogies, and basically little dopamine hits that helps a lot if you're ever getting bored or discouraged. I especially love their LLM course if you're interested in Genai. It's such a fun overview, and you don't even need to know how to code. Although, if you want to do that, they also have courses for those too. They have timeless course offerings like math and stats, programming with Python, as well as new course offerings to explore topics like AI, neuron networks, and Quantum Computing. You can join millions of people who are already learning on Brilliant and head over to this link to get started for free. Also linked in description. If you go through my link, you'll get 20% off their annual subscription. Now back to the video. If you're considering a master's degree and you're doing some research and looking at some school websites, you'll likely come across some iteration of this chart: a master's degree is worth

$20,000 more annual salary, and probably accompanied by some line saying that a master's degree is going to make you more valuable, therefore you have more job opportunities. So, while that is not necessarily false, what they probably wouldn't show you is this graph. As you can see, since the period of 2017 to 2021, the gap of average salary between a master's and a bachelor's degree is decreasing substantially. In other words, getting a master's degree doesn't give you as much average salary increase anymore. This makes sense, simple supply and demand. Since the 2000s, there's been a two times increase in the percentage of adults with master's degrees. More people with master's degrees, the value of a master's degree decreases. We also know that 52% of college graduates are working jobs that don't require a college degree, so they're underemployed up to one year past graduation. I couldn't find exact numbers for a master's degree, but it seems like this is a trend that passes on to master's degrees too. These

people, people, if they have a job, are mostly working jobs that do not require a master's degree. Going to UNI and getting a master's only to work for minimum wage and switch countries every year. Whoops, getting to the end of a hiring process and they offer you basically minimum wage when you have a master's degree. And remember, with a little rust e and an insane amount of luck, you too can look like me. And that is, of course, only if they have a job because the difference in unemployment rate between someone who has a bachelor's degree versus a master's degree is only 0.2%, which is by far the smallest differential between any other jump in degree. Oh yes, Andy kicker, a recent Robertab study in 2023 shows that 79% of workers and hiring managers said skills, experience, and past accomplishments are far more valuable than credentials in education. So yeah, not only do the numbers show that there is a decrease in the value of a master's degree, at least in relation to the chances of being

hired and increased earning potential. The recruiters, the people hiring other people, are clearly saying that they don't value credentials and education as much as things like skills, experience, and past accomplishments, which, by the way, most master's degrees do not give you. I have a master's degree in network engineering, and I am really having a hard time getting a job with little to no experience. This doesn't surprise me at all, to be honest. You're just overqualified but still don't have any actual experience. Now, given that the average cost of a master's degree is $60,000, which of course is not covering living expenses, your rent, campus fees, books, and health insurance, all of that together over 2 years at the very minimum would be above $100,000, if not $120, $150,000. So, with that said, I hope you're starting to question the value of that master's degree. So, of course, there are master's degrees that are worth getting, and later in the video, I'll actually go through the framework that I use in

order to calculate whether a master's degree is worth it or not. But I think it's kind of crazy that a lot of people just assume that in most cases getting a master's degree is worth it, while it's actually the other way around. So I dug into this a little bit more, and I realized that this is a narrative that has actually been like carefully crafted and explicitly fed to the public over the past few decades. In fact, it's a belief that is so deeply ingrained in your brain that there's a strong emotional component now, which we need to talk about because even if I tell you all the numbers and you agree with everything I say, unless we address this, you wouldn't be able to rationally, not emotionally, like rationally assess really why it is that you want to get a master's degree and whether you actually should or not. In the 1960s, about one in 10 adults in the United States had a college degree, and it was very rare to see someone with a master's degree.

higher outside of Academia, there had been some education reforms getting more people to graduate high school, but generally speaking, education, and especially higher education, was not on people's radar at that time. People were more preoccupied with the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and oil issues. But in May of 1980, there was a small Department that was put together called the US Department of Education, whose goal was to get more people educated. In the few years, in 1983, they published a report called a nation at risk, and from this, I quote, our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in Commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. If an unfriendly foreign power, the Soviets, if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might as well have viewed it as an act of War. As it stands, we haven't allowed this to happen to ourselves. It was an instant hit. Over 6 million copies were published.

regardless of political ideology, everybody was fired up. It seems that American Americans hate losing. Education Act after act started coming into effect: a bunch of school dropout prevention acts, funding for ready to learn television programs, the No Child Left Behind Act, which by the way is the reason why there is so much standardized testing in the United States. Anyways, over time, increasing the quality of Education started becoming synonymous with going to college, and it all sort of culminated in the college for all act, which is a very aggressive push to get young people to attend college. Students were told that their goal should be to attend college. Parents were told that if they are a good parent and they cared about their children's future, then they should be saving up money to send their kids to college. Even parents running their family business, working in Blue Collar trades, and making really good money, they were brainwashed into thinking that they should go to college instead, that will give them a better life. College wasn't just about getting a job afterwards. It's an experience where you go there to make lifelong friends.

find your future spouse and grow up and become independent adults. Of course, this is always true for the upper class, but this college for all act also brainwashed middle-class and lower-class families into thinking that they need to send their kids to college if they cared about their children's future. And what kind of parent doesn't care about their kids' future? Parents save up their money for a college fund, for tutoring, for volunteering experiences, all the other extracurriculars that you need in order to help your child get into a good college. And kids, as well as well-meaning counselors, were always told that they should be aiming to go to college. And it worked. Between the 1960s and today, the percentage of adults who have bachelor's degrees more than quadrupled. The Department of Education and colleges around the country celebrated, and truly, there were many, many people that were able to fulfill their rags-to-riches story, achieve the American dream through education and hard work. The children of immigrant parents, children from

low-income families changing their computer science degrees into a ticket for generational wealth. But after the fanfare died down, a problem started to reveal itself. Oops. You see those inspiring, amazing stories of upward mobility. Truth be told, they were in a minority, those were like creme de la creme. But if we look at society as a whole, we start looking at the averages, not the exceptions. We start to realize that maybe not everybody should have attended college. There are so many new grads each year who can't find a job after graduating college. 12% of people flat out can't find a job and 52% are underemployed. There's clearly an oversupply of educated people. So it really doesn't make sense to get even more educated by getting a master's degree. To make matters worse, as there are more and more people who have degrees, the number of jobs that require these advanced degrees is diminishing. Of the 3 million jobs that were created last year, only a fraction required a degree. Most of them

are classified as what is called middle-scale jobs. Jobs that required a high school degree and some level of training and certification, but does not require a 4-year degree. Many of these are what are considered the trades: your carpenters, plumbers, electricians, crane operators, and the fastest-growing one is solar panel installers. What is ironic is that kids were pushed towards getting a college degree so that they can have a higher average salary coming out of school, but because there's that oversupply, it's pushed down these white-collar job salaries substantially. While on the other hand, there's less and less people going to the trades since there's that decreased demand, the wages of people in the trade, these middle-skill jobs, has rocketed past the salaries of these white-collar jobs. So logically speaking, these kids that graduate from college and cannot find a job, they should be thinking like, Oh, maybe I can consider these middle-skill jobs, these trade jobs, but they don't. Why? Well, bluntly put, it's because their ego can't

handle it, and it's not their fault. As we talked about earlier, that really aggressive push towards getting people to go into college. They're painting that picture for both the kid and the parents that this is what you want to do. You want to go to college, you want that experience, and you want to secure a better future for yourself. And of course, the flip side to this, perhaps not as, you know, spoken about, is the fact that if you don't go to college, you're not going to have the opportunity of a better life, and even that you're a failure. Of course, this is not a matter of logic because clearly if you're into trades, it doesn't mean any of these things, and you're actually doing better than people who did go to college. This is a matter of self-identity. College, white-collar job equals success, not to mention the countless hours, the money that your parents spend on your tutoring, your extracurriculars, your AP classes, SATs, ACTs, applications, your actual college tuitions. It's very difficult to

reconcile just throwing all of that away and going into a trade job. That's why most of these unemployed college graduates would rather move back with their parents, take on a part-time job at a coffee shop, do things like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, while considering doing a master's degree and to hope that that will help them finally land a job. Okay, so just to be clear, I'm not going to sit here and just tell you that you should not get a master's degree and just go into the trades instead because I understand that it is not as easy as that. And on top of that, if I said that, it would just be as bad as that blanket statement of everybody should go to college. Then everybody will just go into the trades and they will have the same problem again. It's just supply and demand. What I'm hoping to do here is simply ask you to re-evaluate some of your beliefs that you may have thought to be the absolute truth, like the fact that more degrees equals more opportunities, and then I'd like you to

try your best to be objective and reassess your situation to make the correct choice for yourself. In your specific situation, if you can get over the emotional barrier, you'll find that there are a lot more doors that are open to you. Okay, so now going back to our friend Frank, I want to show you a framework that I would use if I were Frank to evaluate what I should do in the next step of my career. Actually, the first thing let's evaluate is a master's degree for Frank. So, quick reminder, Frank has a double major in Biochemistry and Economics. He's a decent student, has extracurriculars, but just no luck with jobs. He's working part-time now at a coffee shop, and let's say that if he were to get a master's degree, he would have to fund it himself. Let's also say he has $30,000 in debt because that is the average amount of debt that a US graduate has. All right, so given his demographics, he may be thinking, Oh, maybe I should get a master's degree in

computer science. Okay, so let's say we choose this program the University of Chicago's master's program in computer science. So there are four different options: there's a nine-course Masters, a 12-course joint MBA, and the pre-doctoral. We're probably going to go with this one because we don't have any previous experience. I probably need to take these introduction to computer science courses as well. So first let's calculate the price of this degree. Let's see, let's see, let's see, where's the price? All right, so per course is $6,852. And then you have these quarterly fees as well. I'm just going to use a calculator. Okay, so one course is $6,856. We're going to take 12, so that's going to be $82,000. And then we also have these quarterly fees, so it's going to be 2 years. So it's going to be 8, it's going to be 484 plus 1,639 plus 78. Holy, that's expensive per quarter. So it's around $2,200 per

quarter, and we're going to have 8 quarters, so that's 1768. Together, that is 9,880. Okay, so this is not actually calculating living expenses. Let's just quickly look to average cost of living in Chicago. So average cost Chicago single estimated is this much, so 1,286 and 3, and average rent was $1,833. Okay, so that's around $3,100 per month. Um, and we multiply that by 24 months, so that's going to be around $75,000 for living cost. So add that together, so that's going to be $175,000, uh, for your master's degree. Okay, let's keep that number in mind. And next, let's calculate how much money we expect to make career outcomes. Okay, so this is from 2022 until 2023. Okay, so I don't really like this report because it doesn't actually tell you what percentage of people get employed. It only tells you what the average salaries are and what positions they are and where it is that they're employed. So I don't really like that.

it kind of makes me feel pretty suspicious because if the numbers were good why would they not put it here anyway though um let's just do this part okay. So it looks like people who graduate generally become software Engineers. 64% of people do so okay so assuming we become a software engineer making $140,000 uh we can go to this tax calculator. I'm going to be conservative because California is the place that has the highest amount of tax so we're just going to go with that. Uh we put $140,000 and then our take home amount is $96,000 orth. So so going back to our total the price of those two years which is $175,000 so $175,000 divided by let I say $96,000 so it's 1.8 years of your salary and this is obviously not including like living cost and just like life and stuff and I'm just going to say like making $96,000 in any major city you don't have.

get that much money left. Um, so realistically, even if we account for the fact that you don't get unemployed, you don't get laid off, which is happening all over the place right now, and the fact that um, you would get some promotion, I would realistically say it's going to take you at least like four to 5 years to pay off the amount of that master's degree. And speaking of layoffs and just going back to the fact that they don't even write what their employment rate is for their graduates, um, that's pretty sus. I would probably call and ask them for these specific numbers. Um, in this case, I did cheat a little bit because, uh, I do know some people who went through this program because it's very similar to the mat's program that I went to, and I know for a fact that in the past couple of years, especially, um, the unemployment rate of graduates has been pretty significant. So with all these factors combined, if I were Frank, I would not go for this computer science degree. I hope that was a helpful exercise, and I hope that

you're able to use a similar framework to assess the degrees that you may be looking into. Of course, not all degrees are created equal, so you could look at some other degrees as well. And depending on what your profession is, there are master's degrees that are in fact very worth it. This video is already ridiculously long, so I'm not going to go through the exact calculations. Basically, if you're in certain careers like education, teaching, law, or healthcare, it does make financial sense a lot of times to go do a master's degree or even a higher degree. What I would say is that just please, please, please actually do these calculations and don't just go with that narrative that since you were a child and just go do a master's degree simply because you can't find a job. So finally, if I were in Frank's position, I would go through some of these master's degrees, and then I would also consider some alternatives to progress my career. For example, you can consider upskilling and be more specialized in your domain.

research shows that 83% of Chief Human Resource officers said they more often would hire Talent with specialized skills. We are really lucky to be living in an age when there's so much free and low-cost education options like KH Academy, Coursera certificates, and honestly my all-time favorite is just YouTube because seriously you can get your entire master's degree on YouTube these days. You can also consider professional development communities. For example, I run a program called Lonely Octopus in which we specialize in helping people learn Ai and data skills that they can apply to working on real company projects and gaining work experience through that. There are many other communities like this for different domains. There's even programs like Course Careers that literally take the place of traditional college and master's degrees to help you get a job at a fraction of a price. And hey, throughout this process, you may also find that there are other opportunities outside of your 9-to-5 traditional job. We are currently in what is called the gig economy where there are so many

opportunities for freelancing and starting your own business. You may find that it's even more fulfilling than getting a full-time job. All right, this is a very long video. If you stayed until the end, thank you so much for staying. I really hope that this helps you make an objective choice towards where you want to be headed in your career. And let me know in the comments what you're thinking about, what your next career move is going to be. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next video or live stream.

Why You Should Not Get A Masters Degree (probably)

Hi! My name is Tina and I'm a ex-Meta data scientist. Now I create content and other internet things! 

This channel is about coding, tech, career, and self-study. I love learning new things and my goal is to always minimize effort and maximize outcome! 

I strive to do things in the most efficient way possible and with the highest reward. I basically refuse to do extra work to achieve my goals c: 




Tina Huang

Frank, a recent graduate with a strong academic record, is struggling to find a job and is considering a master's degree to improve his prospects.

However, the value of a master's degree is changing, with a decreasing salary gap compared to a bachelor's degree due to oversupply.

Many college graduates, including master's degree holders, are also working in jobs that don't require a degree, indicating potential challenges in the job market.

Alternative career advancement paths and the impact of self-learning, especially in STEM fields, are worth considering before committing to a master's degree.

The Devalued Master's Degree: Is It Worth It?

Having a master's degree may not significantly increase job prospects or earning potential, as indicated by the minimal 0.

2% difference in unemployment rates between those with a bachelor's and a master's degree.

The rising cost of a master's degree, averaging $60,000 without covering living expenses, raises questions about its value, especially when considering the current job market's emphasis on skills and experience.

The public perception of the importance of a master's degree has been carefully shaped over the years, despite the shifting focus of education reform and global competition.

The College for All Act aggressively promoted college attendance as the pathway to success, leading to a significant increase in the number of adults with bachelor's degrees.

However, this push for universal higher education has resulted in an oversupply of college graduates, leading to high levels of unemployment and underemployment.

As a result, middle-skill jobs in the trades are in high demand and offer competitive salaries, but many college graduates are reluctant to pursue these opportunities due to societal pressure and ego.

Reevaluating the Decision to Pursue a Master's Degree

The societal pressure to attend college and obtain more degrees is causing many to overlook alternative career paths.

The high cost of a master's degree, coupled with existing undergraduate debt, can create a significant financial burden for graduates.

It's important for individuals to reassess their options objectively and overcome the emotional barriers associated with deviating from the traditional college path.

The Cost and Feasibility of a Master's Degree in Computer Science

The total cost of a master's degree in Computer Science in Chicago is estimated to be around $175,000.

With the expected salary of $96,000 for a software engineer, it would take approximately 1.

8 years to pay off the degree, not accounting for living expenses and taxes.

Realistically, including potential unemployment and the lack of specific employment rate data, it could take 4 to 5 years to repay the investment, making the degree seem financially unfeasible.

The Value of Master's Degrees and Alternative Career Paths

Master's degrees can be financially beneficial for careers in education, teaching, law, and healthcare, but it's important to make a well-calculated decision rather than pursuing a higher degree out of desperation.

Upskilling and gaining specialized skills through free or low-cost education options, professional development communities, and alternative programs like Course Careers can offer valuable career progression.

The current gig economy also provides opportunities for freelancing and entrepreneurship, which may be more fulfilling for some individuals than traditional full-time employment.