The Homa Files

Punch line: “Colleges are turning out more graduates than the market can bear, and a master’s is essential for job seekers to stand out”

Excerpted from NYT “The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s“

Browse professional job listings and it’s “bachelor’s required, master’s preferred.”

Call it credentials inflation.

Colleges are turning out more graduates than the market can bear, and a master’s is essential for job seekers to stand out

Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master’s is now the fastest-growing degree.

The number awarded, about 657,000 in 2009, has more than doubled since the 1980s, and the rate of increase has quickened substantially in the last couple of years.

Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960.

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The degree of the moment is the professional science master’s, or P.S.M., combining job-specific training with business skills.

Many new master’s are in so-called STEM areas — science, technology, engineering and math …  recognizing that not everyone is ivory tower-bound and are drafting credentials for résumé boosting.

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So what’s going on here?

Have jobs, “skilled up”?

Or perhaps all this amped-up degree-getting just represents job market “signaling” — the notion that degrees are less valuable for what you learn than for broadcasting your go-get-’em qualities. “Credentialing gone amok.”

“There is definitely some devaluing of the college degree going on. We are going deeper into the pool of high school graduates for college attendance” making a bachelor’s no longer an adequate screening measure of achievement for employers.

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This entry was posted on July 27, 2011 at 6:15 am and is filed under Education - Academics, MBA Degree, MBAs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.