{"id":42912,"date":"2025-09-04T11:03:16","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T11:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/42912\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T11:03:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T11:03:16","slug":"grads-are-flocking-to-this-business-degree-with-little-or-no-work-experience-amid-a-tough-job-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/42912\/","title":{"rendered":"Grads are flocking to this business degree with little or no work experience amid a tough job market"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a tough time to<\/a> be graduating from college\u2014fresh-faced Gen Zers are stepping into an uncertain market riddled with \u201cghost\u201d jobs<\/a>, AI automation<\/a>, and dwindling entry-level opportunities<\/a>. With little to no work experience, they\u2019re turning to one business degree to try to grease the wheels of their career.\u00a0<\/p>\n

About 69% of universities globally reported an increase in applications to their master\u2019s in management programs in the 2024\u201325 academic year, according to a report<\/a> from the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC).\u00a0<\/p>\n

The degree\u2014teaching pupils how to develop core management and leadership skills\u2014has become one of the most popular \u201cpre-experience\u201d (requiring no work experience) master\u2019s pathways. It is second only to a master\u2019s in accounting, which saw a 71% increase last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, MBA (master\u2018s in business analytics) programs, which often require a few years of work experience, only saw a 34% increase in applications last year; perhaps because Gen Zers have been locked out<\/a> of entry-level jobs, making it extremely difficult to pursue these more demanding degrees in the first place.<\/p>\n

By pursuing master\u2019s in management degrees, Gen Zers struggling to find a steady job can make themselves more employable without that barrier to entry. And it\u2019s desperately needed, as more than 4 million young Americans are currently NEETS<\/a>: not in education, employment, or training.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How to get a master\u2019s in management\u2014no business bachelor\u2019s required\u00a0<\/p>\n

These pre-experience degrees are surging in popularity around the world, and some countries are accepting a larger percentage of young hopefuls.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The typical U.S. master\u2019s in management program has a median acceptance rate of 71%, reporting that 47% of their applicants are women, according to the GMAC data<\/a>. Meanwhile, Europe is a bit more competitive; the median acceptance rate stands at just 53%, and 46% of candidates identified as women.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While the master\u2019s in management programs are somewhat selective, applicants have a stronger chance of getting their foot in the door than for an MBA, which has a starkly lower acceptance rate. U.S. schools with full-time, two-year MBA degrees reported a median acceptance rate of 35% in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And lucky for newly graduated Gen Zers, they don\u2019t need to have a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 chock-full of business internships to make the cut.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Application requirements vary depending on the schools and their competitiveness, but typically candidates only need a bachelor\u2019s degree and a decent GPA to qualify.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Interested applicants don\u2019t always need to have business courses under their belt, either; schools are willing to take applicants with science, engineering, humanities, and social sciences backgrounds. In some cases, universities require that candidates have a competitive score on higher-education standardized tests such as the GMAT or GRE.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The depressing job market for newly graduated Gen Zers<\/p>\n

Businesses are striving to do more with less, cutting entry-level roles<\/a> and striving for AI automation to save on headcount costs. Mass firings have wiped whole corporate departments<\/a> across the U.S., as companies announced more than 806,000 job cuts from January through the end of July this year, according to a report from<\/a> Challenger, Gray & Christmas. It\u2019s a 75% spike from the approximately 460,000 reductions announced through the first seven months of last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This severe decline in new jobs\u2014especially entry-level opportunities\u2014has frozen a majority of recent graduates out of the workforce. Around 58% of students who finished college within the past year are still looking<\/a> for their first job, according to a June report<\/a> from Kickresume. Meanwhile, just 25% of graduates in previous years, such as their millennial and Gen X<\/a> predecessors, struggled to land work after college. A huge part of that disconnect is thanks to AI; the younger generation is now pitted against AI agents that can do the work of hundreds<\/a> of employees at once. And typically these LLMs take over the lower-level grunt work first, naturally automating entry-level jobs at a lower cost.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of entry-level work when you\u2019re fresh out of college is knowledge-intensive jobs where you\u2019re collecting data, transcribing data, and putting together basic visualizations, and learning the organization from the ground up,\u201d Tristan L. Botelho, associate professor of organizational behavior at Yale School of Management, previously told Fortune<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI can do that quite well, and I\u2019ve heard many managers say things like: \u2018We can reduce our entry-level headcount.\u2019 \u2026 The biggest disruption is likely among these low-level employees, particularly where work is predictable, tech-savvy, or more general.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fortune Global Forum<\/strong> returns Oct. 26\u201327, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of business. Apply for an invitation.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a tough time to be graduating from college\u2014fresh-faced Gen Zers are stepping into an uncertain market riddled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[176],"tags":[289,79,2788,298,2597,18,233,5581,1015,32485,5582,300,301,5583,19,17,227,3582,723,32486,5584,19436,2297,2797],"class_list":{"0":"post-42912","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-careers","11":"tag-colleges-and-universities","12":"tag-education","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-employment","15":"tag-entry-level","16":"tag-europe","17":"tag-firing","18":"tag-gen-x","19":"tag-gen-z","20":"tag-graduate-school","21":"tag-graduation","22":"tag-ie","23":"tag-ireland","24":"tag-jobs","25":"tag-layoffs","26":"tag-management","27":"tag-mba","28":"tag-millennials","29":"tag-u-s-workers","30":"tag-unemployment","31":"tag-young-workers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}