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THE ROI VERDICT

Is a master's degree worth it for getting a job?

A master's is worth it only in a narrow set of licensed and specialized fields where the degree literally is the license. For most roles it's an expensive way to delay the real problem: no employer has seen you do the work. Two more years and tens of thousands in debt rarely buy proof. They buy a better-looking resume.

When is a master's actually worth it?

Start with the honest yes, because there is one. Some jobs are gated by law, not by preference. You cannot practice as a nurse practitioner, a licensed clinical therapist, a librarian at most institutions, or a professional engineer in many tracks without the specific graduate credential, and in those fields the degree is not a signal of competence, it is the competence the licensing board requires. If your target role has a regulatory wall in front of it, the master's is the door, and the ROI question is settled before you even ask it. Go.

There's a second, narrower yes: a deeply technical specialization where the work genuinely needs two more years of depth you can't get on the job, like a research role that assumes graduate-level methods. Even here, check the field. NACE found business is the one major where the master's starting-salary premium actually grew, to 39% in 2025, so an MBA into a field that pays for it can pencil out. The mistake is assuming your field is one of these. Most aren't. The default answer to "should I get a master's to be more hireable" is no, and the burden of proof is on the yes.

What does the earnings math really say?

Here's the number the brochures love. Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce puts median lifetime earnings at $2.8 million for a bachelor's and $3.2 million for a master's. Roughly $400,000 more for the advanced degree, which sounds like a slam dunk until you read the next line from the same research: one quarter of workers with a bachelor's degree earn more than half of workers with a master's or a doctoral degree. The credential letter is not steering the bus. What you do and which field you're in is.

Now layer on the trend, because an average from a lifetime of careers hides what's happening to your cohort right now. NACE tracked the starting-salary premium a master's buys over a bachelor's and watched it erode across most majors. In math and statistics it cratered from more than 50% in 2016 to just 2.4% in 2025. Computer science and engineering premiums slipped too. You'd be betting two years of your earning life on a premium that's shrinking under you, and you'd be financing the bet.

What does the degree cost you, really?

Not just tuition. The real price is tuition plus two years of the salary you didn't earn while studying, plus interest on whatever you borrowed. NCES data show master's completers carry an average cumulative student loan balance of $66,000 among those who borrow, and the share of master's completers taking loans climbed to 60%, up from 47% a generation earlier. More students borrowing, larger balances, against a salary premium that's flattening in most fields. That's a worse trade every year it continues.

This is the part worth sitting with. A degree is sold like a mortgage: you borrow money to buy an asset, then spend years paying it off, and the whole arrangement only works if the asset holds its value. For a lot of master's degrees, the thing employers will actually pay for quietly moved from the credential to the demonstrated skill, while the credential kept charging full price. A university isn't priced on whether you get hired, it's priced on scarcity and status. So the incentive is to keep selling you the next level, not to ask whether you needed it. Before you sign, make the institution prove the degree pays for itself in your specific field, and treat a vague "graduates do well" as a no.

Will a master's protect you from underemployment?

This is the assumption that breaks most quietly, so look straight at it. The New York Fed's recent-graduate underemployment rate sits at 41.5%, and the Fed is explicit that this figure is calculated for everyone holding a bachelor's degree or higher, which means it already includes people who went back for the master's. The advanced degree does not automatically lift you out of a job that never needed a degree at all. Plenty of people with a master's are working roles their bachelor's would have qualified them for, now with extra debt.

So what does move that number? Doing the work before you needed the job. Strada's Talent Disrupted analysis found that graduates who completed at least one internship are 48.5% less likely to be underemployed than those who didn't, and that your first job out of school strongly predicts where you land a decade later. The protective ingredient isn't the extra credential. It's the proof an internship leaves behind: you did real work, somebody judged it, and there's now something concrete to point at. A master's gives you more schooling. It rarely gives you that.

If not a master's, then what gets you hired?

Evidence that you can do the job, produced before anyone hands you the job. Employers already voted on this with their hiring processes: 85% now use skills-based hiring and 53% have dropped degree requirements, up from 30% the year before. They're not waiting to see your transcript. They want to know whether you can do the thing, and the fastest way to answer that is to show them the thing, done and judged against the standard a strong professional is held to.

That doesn't mean course platforms and accelerators are worthless. Coursera, Udemy, Skillshare, and LinkedIn Learning teach you the material. A job simulation on Forage shows you what the work looks like. Pathrise and other accelerators coach you through applications. Bootcamps compress a skill into months. Each of those is a real, useful step, and each one stops at a certificate, a completion badge, or coaching notes that the recruiter never actually opens. The gap none of them closes is putting proof of your real, scored work in front of the person doing the hiring. That gap is what zero is built to fill: you do company-shaped tasks, your work gets scored against a professional bar, and that scored proof of work is what a recruiter sees, before they ever ask where you went to school. It's free for students because recruiters pay for access to the proof.

FAQ

Is a master's degree worth it for getting a job?
Sometimes. If the role legally requires it, like a nurse practitioner or a licensed therapist, the degree is the job and it's worth it. For most other roles it's an expensive bet on a fading signal. Median lifetime earnings rise from $2.8 million for a bachelor's to $3.2 million for a master's, but one quarter of bachelor's holders already out-earn half of all master's holders, so the degree letter isn't what decides your pay.
Does a master's degree actually get you a higher salary?
Less than it used to, and it depends heavily on the field. NACE found the starting-salary premium for a master's over a bachelor's in math and statistics collapsed from more than 50% in 2016 to just 2.4% in 2025. Business is the rare field where it grew, to 39%. For most majors the master's pay bump is shrinking, which is a bad trend to borrow $66,000 against.
Will a master's protect me from underemployment?
No. The 41.5% recent-graduate underemployment rate from the New York Fed already includes people with graduate and professional degrees, so a master's doesn't automatically lift you out of a non-degree job. What moves that number is doing real work: Strada found an internship cuts the odds of underemployment by 48.5%, because of the proof it leaves behind.
When is a master's degree NOT worth it?
When you're using it to feel more hireable rather than because the role legally requires it. 85% of employers now hire on demonstrated skills and 53% have dropped degree requirements, up from 30% a year earlier. Two more years and tens of thousands in debt to make your resume look better is the slow, expensive version of the thing you actually need, which is evidence you can do the work.

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Published by zero, founded by Navid Nathoo and Nadeem Nathoo, the team behind The Knowledge Society (TKS), whose alumni work at SpaceX, Tesla, and NVIDIA.
Last updated: 2026-05-30.