The Masters Trap

[tb81]

There's many factors that cause such situations but a lot of it hinges on 2 aspects. Universities market Masters programs as "opening doors" for potential grad students; that somehow an advanced degree will put you ahead of the pack, allow you to do anything, & fulfill your wildest dreams. Also, potential students believe that with the right degree from the right college, they'll beat the odds and land the career and salary they've always wanted. These expectations are unrealistic as they're divorced from the realities of the job market in both the public & private sector. 
 
There's not much demand for PhDs in the private sector, sans a handful of STEM jobs. Most doctoral programs that have application in the private sector are professional doctorates in medicine, pharmacy, veterinary, or other such sciences. So many times a PhD student's best bet at employment using their degree is getting a position in higher education. (More on that below.) For Master's degree holders, there's a higher chance of securing employment but it's usually in a managerial position, whether public or private sector. If you don't enjoy supervising people and picking up the slack for absentees and empty positions, as well as screening, hiring, and training new hires for those positions (along with all your other normal job duties)...management is going to be a miserable place for you. But again, depending on the employer, a Master's may not even be required.
 
For those who want to remain in academia the landscape is even worse, whether you have a Master's or PhD. Around 75% of university faculty in the US are adjuncts, meaning you're a part-time, temporary instructor who's working on a semester-to-semester basis while being paid $1,500 (community college) to 4,500+ (major private university) per section you teach. (These are the averages for my area of the country, YMMV.) You probably will only get a maximum of 2-3 sections per semester if you're lucky, and you most likely won't be teaching summers. So if you luck out & get 6 sections for the year, you'll bring in anywhere from $9,000 - $27,000....before taxes. Let's split the difference and say you're paid $3,000 per section (Which is good for the US Southeast region). You'll probably have 30+ students in each section, as the schools cram them as full as they can. 
 
So the math on this is: $3,000/30 students = $100 per student   $100/16 weeks = $6.25 per student per week
 
Keep in mind that this is before taxes and you get no benefits/insurance of any kind. Your employer will likely charge you for parking. The average income will also be lower if you have more students in your section as you're not paid per student. If you want to stay in academia using your degree, this is the most probable scenario in which you'll find yourself.
 
Tenure track positions are few and far between while the competition is fierce. Usually the applicant pool is so broad that it exponentially reduces your chance of being noticed for consideration. Non-tenure positions are just as bad, competition-wise. I'm employed by a large (20,000+ student) regional university in the Southeast. My university posted 5 full-time, non-tenured, instructor positions late last year in a broad range of subjects from English to Communication to Biology. There were 250 applicants for those 5 positions. Applicants were not evenly distributed over the vacancies and the STEM positions had fewer candidates. Still, an average of at best a 2% chance at securing a job isn't that great; keep in mind the average was lower for some positions.

Even within academia, you'll now find a large number of people with graduate degrees in staff positions that don't require an advanced degree, and all those people are waiting for some faculty member to leave, die, or retire so they can have a shot at applying for a faculty position. For each position that comes available, there will be dozens, if not hundreds, of applicants both internal & external and the chances of you scoring a job are almost in the same league with lottery odds. 

This is the math that most people applying to graduate school don't consider. Colleges and universities are selling a dream that doesn't exist. There are more graduate degree holders than there is a market for those degrees and skills. But everyone thinks they're the exception & they'll borrow their way into oblivion trying to buy that dream.