First Jobs

It’s Harder to Hide From a Bad Job Market in Grad School

Rules taking effect in July will limit federal lending for most advanced degrees to $100,000 over a lifetime.

Illustration: Daniel Zender for Bloomberg Businessweek

After a demoralizing year on the hunt for her first job out of college, Destiny Stone decided to go back to school.

A December 2024 graduate of Strayer University in Georgia, Stone had accepted customer-service positions paying minimum wage to support herself while she tailored different versions of her résumé for the kinds of roles that fit her degree in business administration. But like a growing number of her peers, she wasn’t having any luck.