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How much of what you see is people who had pursued master degrees during the economic downturn?

I heard that there was an enormous amount of people exiting the workforce to pursue education when there were few jobs available. Instead they likely got a pile of debt with no real furtherance of career goals as the economy recovered.

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This is a great question. There may be some variability by role type, but for the last two hires where I started noticing this trend usually the masters was acquired 17-18 or 18-19 on the resume (2 year masters programs). These are also for mid-level roles as opposed to entry level or senior. Probably a lot of factors but I'd wonder if the readily available access to student loans was the biggest enabler. Just off the cuff I'd be curious if these decisions involved the perception of necessity for masters degrees or in how many cases they simply wanted to prolong the experience of undergrad (college is often a good time, I get it), and with the barrier being no more frictive than the student loan process they navigated for under grad, the decision just being the path of least resistance more than a calculated risk/reward decision.

The relationship between the business cycle and demand for graduate school is complicated. Some programs have a very strong countercyclical component to their demand, and others don't. See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.648... (and section 5 in particular).

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