It’s a tough time to be graduating from college—fresh-faced Gen Zers are stepping into an uncertain market riddled with “ghost” jobs, AI automation, and dwindling entry-level opportunities. With little to no work experience, they’re turning to one business degree to try and grease the wheels of their careers.
About 69% of colleges reported an influx in applications to their masters in management programs globally last year, according to a report from the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC).
The degree—teaching pupils how to develop core management and leadership skills—has become one of the most popular “pre-experience” (requiring no work experience) masters pathways. It is second only to masters of accounting, which saw a 71% increase last year.
Meanwhile, MBAs (masters of business analytics) which often require a few years of work experience, only saw a 34% increase in applications last year. Perhaps because Gen Z have been locked out of entry-level jobs, making it extremely difficult to pursue these more demanding degrees in the first place.
By pursuing masters in management degrees, Gen Z struggling to find a steady job can make themselves more employable without that barrier to entry. And it’s desperately needed, as more than four million young Americans are currently NEETS: not in education, employment, or training.
How to get a masters in management—no business bachelors required
These pre-experience degrees are surging in popularity all across the world, and some countries are accepting more young hopefuls hoping to break into the industry.
The typical U.S. masters in management program has a median acceptance rate of 71%, reporting that 47% of their applicants are women, according to the GMAC data. Meanwhile, Europe is a bit more competitive; the median acceptance rate stands at just 53%, and 46% of candidates identified as women.
While it’s not guaranteed that everyone will make it into the program, they have a stronger chance of getting their foot in the door than 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.
And lucky for newly graduated Gen Zers, they don’t need to have a resume chock-full of business internships to make the cut.
Application requirements vary depending on the colleges and their competitiveness, but typically candidates only need a bachelor’s degree and a decent GPA to qualify.
Interested applicants don’t even always need to have business courses under their belt—schools are willing to take applicants with science, engineering, humanities, and social sciences backgrounds too. In some cases, universities also require that candidates have a competitive score on higher-education standardized tests including the GMAT or GRE.
The depressing job market for newly-graduated Gen Z
Businesses are striving to do more with less, cutting entry-level roles and striving for AI automation to save on headcount costs. Mass firings have wiped whole departments 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 Challenger, Gray, & Christmas. It’s a 75% spike from the around 460,000 reductions announced through the first seven months of last year.
This severe decline in new jobs—especially entry-level opportunities—has frozen a majority of recent graduates out of the workforce. Around 58% of students who finished college within the last year are still looking for their first job, according to a June report from Kickresume. Meanwhile, just 25% of graduates in previous years, such as their millennial and Gen X predecessors, struggled to land work after college. A huge part of that disconnect is thanks to AI; the young generation is now pitted against AI agents that can do the work of hundreds of employees at once. And typically these LLMs take over the lower-level grunt work first, naturally automating entry-level jobs at lower costs.
“A lot of entry-level work when you’re fresh out of college is knowledge-intensive jobs where you’re collecting data, transcribing data, and putting together basic visualizations, and learning the organization from the ground-up,” Tristan L. Botelho, associate professor of organizational behavior at Yale School of Management, previously told Fortune.
“AI can do that quite well, and I’ve heard many managers say things like: ‘We can reduce our entry-level headcount.’…The biggest disruption is likely among these low-level employees, particularly where work is predictable, tech-savvy, or more general.”
