This year’s job market has been bleak, to say the least. Layoffs hit the highest level in 14 years; job openings are barely budging; and quits figures are plummeting. It’s no wonder people feel stuck and discouraged—especially as many candidates have been on the job hunt for a year.
But some mid-career professionals are working with the cards they’ve been dealt by going back to school. Many are turning to data analytics, cybersecurity, AI-focused courses, health care, MBA programs, or trade certifications for an “immediate impact on their careers,” Metaintro CEO Lacey Kaelani told Fortune.
But while grad school can certainly offer the opportunity to level-up your career once you’ve completed a program, it comes with financial and personal sacrifices, like time. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, one year of grad school, on average, costs about $43,000 in tuition. That’s nearly 70% of the average salary in the U.S.
when facing unemployment, the LAST thing I want to do is burn a shitload of money on the absolute fucking racket that is higher education in the USA.
Unless it’s for something like HVAC or plumbing or nursing where there’s never not a constant need, anyways
I wish we could just go back to schools being for people who want to learn about things, and putting employers back in charge of training their work force. Subsidizing a fucking intermediary to provide the basic ticket into the work force…who the fuck came up with that idea?
It’s a stop gap, hoping for better times in the future. I did it when I had a physical disability no one could explain, so I couldn’t get disability coverage much less any treatment. I ate some loans instead of living on the street or with abusive family. It sucked, but that’s the US for you - if you’re not making someone money, you’re welcome to just go die.
Who can afford that?!
We don’t need any more MBAs.
We actively need fewer, a lot fewer
This article seems to be exclusively about masters degrees or people going back to school for a second degree in a new field, but what I’m curious about is if there’s been a similar spike in people going for their first degree. I’m trying to figure out how much of this is people trying to land a job in a recession and how much of it is people trying to make themselves appealing from an immigration perspective. There’s definitely a lot of people who feel like getting out of the country is a nonstarter simply because countries only want the kind of labor that comes from obtaining a degree in a field.
I’m in that boat. Joined the IT world before the first .com crash, dropped out of school for it and never got a degree. I’m very stuck right now and I hate the career I’m stuck in. Trying to find a way to go back to get a degree, maybe open a door or two…
Where’s the leisure society? We have all the resources we need, all the energy we need, and simply put, there just isn’t all that much that needs doing that can keep everyone busy.
There are huge shortages in skilled experienced trades. I’ve seen it all over the US in steel mills. Operators, electricians, welders, etc.
Emphasis on experienced. There’s a fuckton of green apprentices who recently switched careers.
Been doin this work for like 10 years as an electrician so I literally applied to 12 jobs when I finally quit my job of 7 years, got 3 interviews, 2 offers.
Still love my job but I see the labor shortages that can’t be replaced by AI and even automated robotics for production lines
Just look at the multiple fires at the Oswego plant in upstate New York for why the mills are still the wild west sometimes.
This isn’t a news story, it’s an advertorial.
Discovering new paths and education is good. We should not look down at this, but encourage reschooling at 30, 40, 50 or any age. Most skills are out of date within 5 years of leaving school. Having said that, you can reup or relearn stuff in a year or two, or even six months.
unless one is in the USA, where higher education is mostly a giant scam and massive ripoff.
most skills are out of date within 5 years of leaving school
What kind of “skills” are you talking about and what kind of job are you doing if you require re-education after five years?? I honestly can’t imagine an education/job where you can’t remain up to date throughout your career, not to mention grow in your role.
Most skills are out of date within 5 years of leaving school.
Then they weren’t skills, they were trivia.
I did that in 2008… things must be going great
I did it early in the pandemic in anticipation of the current recession. Honestly I got pretty dang lucky with the timing but not for the reasons I thought going in. Graduated at the tale end of the hiring craze in 2023, snagged a pretty sweet role that honestly puts me in a good spot resume-wise
I do think if I lose my current role I’m probably going to go back to college and work on my bachelor’s. I’ve been job hunting for most of 2025. I’ve applied to about a hundred jobs, had 5 interviews and no job offers. Two years ago I applied to 5 jobs got 3 interviews and 2 job offers within 3 weeks.
I know someone who couldn’t land a job for 6 months while hunting for shitty retail work, y’know the kind of job where the only requirement is a semi-warm body. That’s how utterly fucked the current labor market is
I was in the midst of a career change that I instigated myself with the blessing and support of my wife. I was substitute teaching while trying to break into the tech field and found that I actually loved subbing! So much so that I am more than halfway done with a Master’s program for Elementary Education.
There is a teacher shortage and I’m male, which is an underrepresented statistic in Elementary Ed, so I’m pretty confident I’ll land something. I’m taking a pay cut, but I enjoy the teaching and the positives it brings to children’s lives to have a good role model and someone that cares about them while being excited to explore new information.
resorting to going to school instead of looking for work
I think they looked for work before considering more debt.
I like wondering and I just had the idea that I might enjoy welding because it seems like big soldering.
Would I like welding?
In my experience the biggest problem with physical labor is that it’s boring. If you’re used to finding creative solutions for complex engineering issues for work then you will not enjoy doing the same task 8 hours a day, day after day.
This depends a lot on the labor job. I worked construction/landscaping for a couple years, and pretty much no two days were the same. You were basically always trying to solve some small or large practical problem.
Having an education as an engineer, and working as a researcher now, I have to say that I really enjoyed my time doing manual labour.
Yes, I think if you can be the person making decisions it can be more interesting. Lots of entry level jobs and even fairly skilled labor is not creative at all though.
Lot’s of corporate drone positions are way more boring. At least your getting some exercise.
Being in blue collar, while this can be true, especially of line welders, there are a lot of physical labor job that is not boring. Where every day is different. A lot like IT.
Oh.
Yeah solid point. That would drive me fucking insane.
One possible pro of working a labor job that I found is that you can pretty easily zone out for long stretches of time and think through complex things you’re doing outside of work. Depends on your interests and hobbies at home if you’re able to take advantage of it. Worked a boring factory job for a few years and would spend entire days daydreaming about whatever piece of media I was consuming at the time or prepping DnD in my head.
A lot of blue collar isn’t 8 hours of doing the same thing unless you’re in a factory or doing production.
As somebody in that age class, having worked for about 20 years, I might go study if I got fired even if the job market was awesome. It’s just an attractive pivot.
Works if you have the money, got to go back to work if you don’t.
Exactly. Many 40+ year olds do have the money.
but currently degrees, have very poor job prospects, outside of things like health and not an Med school or vet school. so they are in a lose lose situation. bio not biotech, only bio with health is feasible.
Late 40s, highly skilled, trans, unemployed for 2+ years.
I’ve been down to the final candidate selection a few times now and still haven’t been selected yet.
I’ve hired plenty of people. In general, final candidates are usually all fully capable of doing the job they’re applying for. In the end, the hiring manager just gets to pick the one they want to work with most.
I feel like when hiring managers look at me, all they see are problems and risks. Time consuming HR meetings, extra effort making sure people use the right pronouns, judgements from executive leaders who might see a middle manager not doing a good job at leaning into where the winds are headed.
I wonder, even if I spend 3 more years on a secondary degree, whether I’ll find myself right back in same situation (talented and surrounded by cowards unwilling to hire me), but now with $200k in new student loan debt.
$200k in new student loan debt.
Jesus. I’m looking at getting some additional masters degree in Spain and it’s 10-14 months and 1.5-4k Euros.
That’s like the cost of a college meal plan for a 4 year degree in the US. Not including housing in the dorms, just the food.
Oi! Not trans, but queer, also unemployed for over 2 years now.
I used to be an econometrician, so I can tell you:
You, me?
We’re not unemployed.
We are ‘Not in the Labor Force’.
… we do not count towards the offical unemployment numbers.
… we do not count towards the offical unemployment numbers.
Wait…
unemployed for over 2 years now.
If you’re still actively seeking jobs you’d still be counted in the official unemployment category of U-3 unemployment. Even if you weren’t applying to jobs but still wanted to work you’d be counted in the (potentially more accurate) U-6 unemployment, right?
Normally, in a more sane and functioning world, you’d simply be correct.
I was a bit overzealous, I myself have given up looking because of the massive shadow jobs problem, the interview processes are ridiculous, etc etc, I erroneously transposed that onto them as well.
However, because Trump fired the head of the BLS, and Elon/DOGE cut back their workforce a good deal…
https://www.nisa.com/perspectives/heavily-distorted-cpi-print-reveals-little-useful-information/
https://www.markets.com/analysis/cpi-estimation-methodology-concerns-us-1010-en
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/imputation.htm
For most of this year, they haven’t even had enough staff to actually directly measure about a third of what goes into CPI… they just take the old data, run a model on it, predict it forward, and pretend thats real data.
They call this ‘carry forward price imputation’ or something like that.
So they’re just using some esoteric price model(s) to estimate, instead of actually gather, a bunch of data that is then treated as if it is real data, for the next stages of actually calculating the various cpi segments.
If they’re that fucked at doing cpi, they’re almost certainly also fucked at actually doing the Household Survey properly.
Granted, I can’t strictly prove this, because I do not have a team of forensic accountants auditing their data…
… But, having worked as varying kinds of data analyst, I can say with high confidence that the BLS methodology itself is flawed, and their ability to actually undertake that methodology is severely hamstrung for this whole year.
You don’t end up realizing that you overcounted job growth by a fucking million jobs… if you have a sound methodology.
… So thats a very long way of saying ‘well technically, if you wanna get technical, actually, this is all horseshit at this point, thus the person I’m replying to probably isn’t actually being counted, via problems that go outside/beyond the simple stated BLS methodology.’
You make a very good point. I’ve stopped using CDC for any realistic data or health guidance and instead defer to Health Canada or the NHS.
I should have also assumed economic data from the trump administration was equally suspect now.
what kind of work are you looking for?
managers that do the hiing like to play games and gauge response, to see if you play ball with the company, being outside the standard applicant, does have risk.
i also have considering going back as a post-bacc but because my previous degree had some setback academic wise, makes me somewhat inelgible for partial grad school.(for a niche ceritification), unsure if taking postbacc will offsett the setback. also because post-bacc is more expensive than regular undergrad class as well.
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I think the best evidence of this, and an accurate predictor of economic recession, is the number of people taking the LSAT.
According to LSAC, the number of test takers is up 19% this year, and applications are up 44.5% over the 4-year average.
The number of legal jobs only increases by ~1% each year.
That post law school glut ain’t getting any better is it
