A millennial with a Ph.D. and over $250k in student loan debt says she’s been looking for a job for 4 years. She wishes she prioritized work experience over education.

• A millennial with a Ph.D. and over $250,000 in student loan debt said she can’t find a job.
• She’s looking for business roles while working as a nurse to help pay the bills.
• She said she wishes she prioritized work experience over her graduate degrees.

Over the last decade, A. Rasberry has placed a great deal of value on higher education. She’s now come to regret it.

Rasberry earned a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degree in business management from Saint Leo University in Florida. However, she said she’s struggled to find a job in her field of study over the last four years. Additionally, she has over $250,000 in student loan debt, according to a document viewed by Business Insider.

“I graduated with my Ph.D. in 2020 and can’t find a job to save my life,” the Virginia-based 38-year-old told Business Insider via email. She asked for partial anonymity, only using the first initial of her first name and her last name, due to privacy concerns.

Since earning her Ph.D., Rasberry has applied for various business management roles but had little success. She said she’s been forced to expand her job search and explore a new career in nursing to help her make ends meet.

“I thought education was the road to financial freedom,” she said. “But I was wrong.”

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Rasberry is among the Americans who are having a tough time finding work. In part, it’s because businesses across the US have significantly scaled back on hiring over the past two years. The ratio of job openings to unemployed people — an indicator of job availability — has declined considerably.

While the unemployment rate and layoff rate remain low compared to historical levels, the hiring slowdown means that many job seekers are having a considerably harder time than they were a few years ago.

Rasberry shared why she thinks her job search has been so challenging, how she made her career pivot, and her top piece of advice for people pursuing higher education.

“Most organizations prefer experience over education”

After receiving her doctorate degree, Rasberry’s initial goal was to land an adjunct professor position. However, after speaking with people in the education field, she decided to change course.

“I’ve learned how difficult it is to get started in the field,” she said. “Essentially, after earning a Ph.D., I would have to go back to school to take more courses to support a teaching career.” She said she was told she’d specifically need more education-related credits.

As a result, Rasberry said she decided to give up on teaching and focus on finding other roles in her area of study: business management.

But her job search has been challenging. Rasberry said she hasn’t landed many interviews, and that when she does — and gets turned down — she’s had a hard time figuring out what went wrong. She said she’s expanded her job search to non-managerial bookkeeping, accounting, tutoring, and human resources roles, but that she hasn’t had much luck with these either.

Rasberry said she thinks the biggest obstacle in her job search is her lack of work experience.

While pursuing her degrees, she said she gained some entry-level work experience in banking, human resources, and bookkeeping roles. However, she thinks this experience might be insufficient in the eyes of employers.

“I am over qualified for most entry-level positions but I am under qualified for management or leadership positions,” she said. “Ultimately, my degree has been both a blessing and a curse.”

Rasberry said her top piece of advice for people who pursue higher education is to do your homework. Before she pursued her degrees, she said she wished she had spent more time evaluating her school’s job placement programs, internship partnerships, and the employment rates of recent graduates across different fields.

Additionally, she recommended taking time to think about the value of a college degree and the best ways to use it to land a job.

“I learned most organizations prefer experience over education,” she said. “Had I known that I would not have spent so many years in college.”

Nursing is helping to pay the bills during her job search

In recent years, Rasberry said she’s worked various part-time jobs to pay the bills.

“It feels next to impossible to work a single job and earn enough money to cover essentials like rent, fuel, electricity, etc. in the state of Virginia,” she said. One analysis found Virginia was the 13th-most expensive state when it comes to overall cost-of-living.

She said she’s completing a training program to work remotely for TurboTax as a tax expert. At the same time, she’s also exploring a new career: nursing. For roughly the past year, Rasberry said she’s been working as much as 80 hours a week as a nurse.

“I am new to nursing, but I find it rewarding and I like the shift flexibility,” she said.

Rasberry said she found a nursing role that provided free training and certification. However, she said the downside was that this certification wouldn’t carry over to any other employers — limiting her opportunities in the industry. This is among the reasons she hasn’t stopped applying for business-related jobs.

Another reason is that, according to Rasberry, she wasn’t paid particularly well — she said she earns $21.50 an hour. In 2023, the median pay for a registered nurse in the US was about $41 an hour. Despite the long hours, she said the low pay is why she doesn’t view nursing as a full-time job.

“It doesn’t come with full time pay,” she said.

In recent months, Rasberry said she began focusing more on looking for remote roles like the TurboTax opportunity. She said working remotely would make it easier to keep her nursing job, reduce her commuting costs, and care for her dog.

Over the last month, Rasberry finally had some luck in the job market. She said she landed a remote plan consultant position in the nursing field that pays about $70,000 a year — equivalent to an hourly rate of over $30 an hour.

While she views this as a positive development, she said she will “absolutely” continue searching for higher-paying roles in her field of study.

“When I’m not working, I’m online, putting in applications for employment,” she said.