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A millennial with a Ph.D. and more than $250,000 in student debt says she can’t find a job.
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She is looking for corporate positions while working as a nurse to help pay the bills.
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She says she wishes she would put work experience above herself graduate degrees.
Over the past ten years, A. Rasberry has attached great importance to higher education. She regrets it now.
Rasberry holds a bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degree in business operations from Saint Leo University in Florida. However, she says yes had difficulty finding a job in her field over the past four years. She also has more than $250,000 in student debt, according to a document obtained by Business Insider.
“I graduated in 2020 and can’t find a job to save my life,” the 38-year-old, who lives in Virginia, told Business Insider via email. She requested partial anonymity and used only the first letter of her first name and last name due to privacy concerns.
Since earning her doctorate, Rasberry has applied for several positions in business management, but had little success. She said she was forced to expand her job search and explore a new career nursing to help her make ends meet.
“I thought education was the path to financial freedom,” she said. “But I was wrong.”
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Rasberry is among the Americans who are having a hard time find work. In part, this is because companies in the US have done this significantly cut back on recruitment in the past two years. The ratio of vacancies of unemployed people – an indicator of job availability – has fallen significantly.
While the unemployment rate And dismissal rate remain low compared to historical levels, the slowdown in hiring means that many job seekers are having a significantly harder time than just a few years ago.
Rasberry shared why she thinks her job search has been so challenging, how she turned her career around and her top advice for those pursuing higher education.
‘Most organizations prefer experience over education’
After completing her PhD, Rasberry’s original goal was to become a… adjunct professor position. However, after conversations with people from the educational field, she decided to change course.
“I learned how hard it is to get started in the field,” she said. “Essentially, after earning a doctorate, I would have to go back to school to take more courses to support a teaching career.” She said she was told she specifically needed more education-related credits.
As a result, Rasberry said, she decided to give up teaching and focus on finding other roles in her field: business management.
But her job search was a challenge. Rasberry said she hasn’t gotten many interviews, and when she has — and been rejected — she’s struggled to figure out what went wrong. She said she has expanded her job search to positions in non-managerial accounting, bookkeeping, tutoring and human resources, but hasn’t had much luck with that either.
Rasberry thinks the biggest obstacle in her job search is her lack of work experience.
While obtaining her degree, she gained some work experience in banking, human resources and accounting positions. However, she said this experience may be insufficient in the eyes of employers.
“I am overqualified for most entry-level positions, but I am underqualified for management or leadership positions,” she said. “In the end, my degree has been both a blessing and a curse.”
Rasberry’s most important advice for those pursuing higher education is to do your homework. She said she wishes she had spent more time evaluating the job placement programs, internship partnerships and employment rates of recent graduates in various fields before continuing her studies.
She also recommended taking time to think about the value of a college degree and the best ways to use it to find a job.
“I learned that most organizations prioritize experience over education,” she said. “If I had known that, I wouldn’t have spent so many years in college.”
Nursing helps pay the bills during her job search
Rasberry said she has worked several part-time jobs over the years to pay the bills.
“It feels virtually impossible to work one job and make enough money to cover essentials like rent, gas, electricity, etc. in the state of Virginia,” she said. One analysis found that Virginia the 13th most expensive when it comes to the total cost of living.
She says she is training to work remotely as a tax expert for TurboTax. At the same time, she is also exploring a new career: nursing. Rasberry said she had worked about 80 hours a week as a nurse for the past year.
“I’m new to nursing, but I find it rewarding, and I like the flexibility in the shifts,” she said.
Rasberry found a nursing role that provided free training and certification. But she said the downside was that this certification would not transfer to other employers, limiting her opportunities in the industry. This is one of the reasons why she hasn’t stopped applying for business-related jobs.
Another reason is that she feels she is not paid particularly well; she said she made $21.50 an hour. In 2023, the average wage for a registered nurse in the US was approx $41 per hour. Despite the long hours, she says the low pay is the reason she doesn’t consider nursing a full-time job.
“It doesn’t come with a full-time wage,” she said.
Rasberry said that in recent months she began to focus more on seeking out remote features, such as the TurboTax capability. She said working remotely would make it easier to keep her job as a nurse, reduce her commuting costs and care for her dog.
Last month, Rasberry finally had some luck on the job market. She said she landed a job as a remote nursing consultant, which pays about $70,000 a year — which equates to an hourly rate of more than $30 an hour.
While she sees this as a positive development, she said she would “absolutely” continue to look for higher-paying positions in her field.
“When I’m not working, I’m online and applying for jobs,” she said.
Read the original article Business insider