“should i apply?” asked a curious product designer one year out of undergrad exploring 1-2 year masters programs in 2025’s application cycle.
ten years ago, i would have said yes. after undergrad, i went to harvard to be part of the first masters in design engineering cohort because it was the best decision i could make at the time.
i joined because it was a program focused on building and exploring with a studio at its core. the main selling point included being able to explore every part of the university to build different projects. as someone who wanted to learn new skills and explore unconventional problem spaces, like microbiome therapeutics, agrimetrics, and telehealth, it was a good sandbox at the time.
but in 2025, i would say no.
the world is quickly changing with new emerging tools, like claude 3.5 as a super personal tutor, as well as expectations for hiring are shifting in the market.
in this week’s all in podcast, they highlighted the increased rise in unemployment for mba grads from leading schools like harvard, mit, and stanford to above 20%. marcus, the former ceo of zynga, mentioned that all of his major product and startup learnings were after his mba at harvard not during. his main piece of advice for those interested is go work for an early y combinator startup. the hands on experience and network is more valuable.
one way to understand why masters degrees, like mbas, derisked career paths in the 20th century is to understand the context for why the degree was helpful in the first place. the initial mba was designed at a time where companies were growing extremely fast. u.s. steel had 168,000 employees in 1901, growing to 268,000 employees by 1917 (3x larger than at&t). other large corporations included the railroad companies employing 1.8M people and oil companies. where traditional degrees still make sense is where career pathways are baked into traditional degrees: doctors, lawyers, and some other traditional pathways.
where the degrees do not quite make as much sense is where there’s dynamic opportunity in new tools and projects to learn skills.
in 2025, the market is not trending towards the homogenous, megacorporation teams for winners take all, it’s actually trending towards smaller and smaller teams that can do more and build differently.
for example, google’s latest experimental products like notebookLM are ran by small teams of 4-5 for a year or more before bringing in other people to scale. investors are also trending towards small teams that can outbuild competitors, like chamath’s 8090 bet on building “80% feature ready software as a service platforms for 90% cheaper” than incumbents.
ie. it’s never been a better time to start a startup or run a consultancy.
major institutions are exploring what future of professional degrees could look like in the 21st century beyond the mba:
the biggest challenges with these new degrees is they promise exposure to where the future is going. but for the most part, institutions don’t build the future, small teams do. and while some large institutions have interesting visiting faculty or leading labs for research, there’s a faster velocity of development in startups and across industry as a whole than across campuses.
so there’s career opportunity cost to committing 1-2 years and $100k+ be on a campus isolated away from what’s actually happening on the leading edge.